About The Interesting Knob

Post 435:

            Any scene or scenario needs to hold the interest of the person that was kind enough to read your story. Making everything that happens matter is a good rule of thumb.

            You hear this a lot from writers. Lose extra words, extra scenes, extra adjectives, etc.

            This is obvious and true, but what about the stuff you leave in? The simple mentality I work from is that there are infinite ways to make any scene or action or character more interesting. You can do it with the right word or style or trick, but whatever’s happening needs to be more than it is. Layers.

            Every occurrence in the world is more than it is. Say you ran into a guy on the street and dropped your bag. This is the thing that happened, but an infinite number of decisions and thoughts and conditions made that thing possible.

            It’s the same with your scene. If it’s two guys talking, you need to get the story across, but whatever they do and the things they say should be specific and broad in the context of entire narrative. Something happens in your story, for instance, and it’s connected to another thing that happened that was similar. Or completely different. Everything is relational to everything else in your scene. Everything is something a little or a lot more than just the straight ahead conveyance.

I’ll reference a classic movie. One of my favorite intros is in Lawrence of Arabia. The beginning is this overhead shot of him being very particular with his motorbike. He checks the thing out from head to toe. He’s not doing this because we give a crap about his bike. It tells us that he’s adventurous enough to like motorbikes but also very fastidious. Even if the viewer doesn’t realize it, he or she is learning something about the character before a single line of dialogue. Just after, he crashes and dies, and there’s a bunch of people walking out of the funeral. One man that didn’t know him says he was great, another that knew him said he was a blowhard, another is full of praise but is really doing it for self-aggrandizing reasons. All these pieces of dialogue help us understand right off that we’re dealing with a complex, puzzlement of a character. It’s a really brilliant opening. Layers, people. Layers. For a complete lesson on layering, watch an episode of The Leftovers and write down everything that happens. It takes about two hours, but it’s instructive and will make you a better writer or at least remind you how good you can be.

A couple tricks. When a character says something, it’s cool when everyone around him knows he’s wrong except him—why? Because we’ve gotten to know that he’s an overconfident moron and it totally makes sense in the story. Symbols are always good, but they’re also delicate. They have to be interesting in their own right, and this takes a deft touch. Play with it, but always ask yourself if you’re making the piece more captivating to read and not just artsy. Artsy is not that cool in itself. It’s the syrup. First, the pancakes.

            Sometimes, the well is dry. Sometimes, just telling the story is good enough.

            Good enough, I suppose. But we all want better than good enough, if we can help it. Turn up the interesting knob to 11, and see if the thing explodes. It might, but testing the boundaries of drama and tension are key to getting better at this frigging nightmare mess of confusion and sadness that we call writing.

            Cheers! See you after.