Drama is essentially an examination of what people want and what they will do to get it. This seems to be the basic mechanics of the good scene or script.
Ask what your characters want and how they go about getting it. This is the fundamental tool to make weak scenes better.
Always.
Say it out loud: Always.
Now repeat it, while hitting yourself in the head, lest you should forget it.
Your best friend, the actor.
Because writers often forget it (and don’t even get me started on the directors, whom so easily get lost in their ‘visuals’). The scenes are then weak. You end up writing something else than drama, pure expo, narration or even poetry. Maybe we get lucky and the director and/or especially the actors have plenty of dramatic instinct to infuse the scene with drama. Despite the weak scene, the actors will somehow play their characters with lots of intention. This is the hallmark of the natural actor, not being able to play without clear and present intention, no matter what ‘method’ or technique they think they are applying as actors, this is fundamentally their craft, as it is ours. So learn from them. Speak your own lines. Find the intention. Feel it. Its in the body. Not the mind. That’s why you need actors. They have bodies. Physical bodies. Authors of novels don’t need them, so in their writing they can be lyrical, reflective and even acadmic. We can’t. The actor is our siamese twin and we can’t live without them. Hell, we shouldn’t even want to.
Our profession: Existential paradise
This examination of want and will demands a certain portion of cynicism from us as creators. By ‘a certain cynicism’, I’m not thinking of a bleak outlook on life, but rather a questioning, not-taking-anything-at-face-value-attitude. Peel off the illusions to better create the illusion of a drama.
Nothing is ever ‘just because’; just because he is a good man, just because that’s how the story is, just because that’s how reality is.
No, the young man is helping the woman because he wants something. What does he want? To be considered a hero? To make her fall in love with him? To forget about his own problems?
No, a story never just is. Its always a choice. At the outset, you might be making a lot of unconscious choices, just to get going, but at some point, you need to examine your choices. Are there better choices to make? More interesting? Daring? Never accept your story at face value, just because.
OK, reality is, just because it is. But you are not constructing reality. It might remind us of reality or it might be an altogether different reality from mine. So, yes, we are back at the choices. How is the world and reality of your drama?
That’s your decisions, and you have to make them. That’s how you construct drama. Satré would be in paradise (and btw, he wrote a few decent plays himself).
This is one of the most important 'tricks' in our tool-box: Never stop being the child who asks “Why?” and the child who observes the emperor and exclaims: “But he’s not wearing any clothes!”
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