Writing with Indigestion

If you don't feel the emotion, the laughter or the conflict WHILE you're writing it, then it's unlikely the reader or viewer will experience it either.

Sometimes when you finish a scene, you feel good because you've been... productive. You even enter that final full stop with a triumphant strike of the keyboard. As you walk away from your desk however, a feeling starts to resonate in your chest like heartburn... it's a feeling you don't wish to acknowledge, not yet anyway... it's a feeling that deep down, you know the scene isn't quite working.

It's good... but not great.

That tasty sandwich you promised yourself as a reward for finishing those six pages just doesn't taste quite as succulent. Every bite is a chewy lie, a mouthful of denial.

This morning, I re-worked a scene from the screenplay and was reminded about how exhilirating the screenwriting process can be when you experience the tension as you're typing it. The scene in question? The pivotal South Auckland scene, where the lead character journeys home for what may be the last time he sees his father - for us, the highlight scene.

For those unfamiliar, the highlight scene is a screenwriting device which helps prevent Act Two from lagging. It's usually smackbang in the middle of the movie, or thereabouts.

The highlight scene is like a little movie within the larger movie, with it's own beginning, middle and end, complete with it's own plot twists, a dark moment and a clear point of departure. An example of a highlight scene in The Shawshank Redemption is the sequence where the old convict Brooks makes parole and fails to re-integrate with society as a senior citizen, culminating in his suicide.

Brooks (James Whitmore), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Screenplay: Frank Darabont. 

As I was writing my own scene, there it was, I felt it.. a lump in my throat.. wait, is that a tear forming? No! What are you? A pansy?! It's only words on a page for heaven's sake.

Hang on a second!

This scene IS working!

So, in the aftermath of sombreness, my sandwich was one of the best sandwiches I'd ever tasted! In fact, I wolfed it down in record time so I could get back to my laptop, eager to find out what would happen next.

That's when you know you're onto something.

A successful film has the audience on the edge of their seats constantly asking the question: "What happens next?!" So, if the writer is excitably asking themselves that question AS they're writing then it stands to reason the audience will too.

Isn't it odd to think that you, yourself could get emotionally tied up over the fortunes of characters who live and die at the release of your fingertips... with every beat of punctuation, every word of dialogue, every descriptive action.

But these aren't imaginary friends, they ARE real people. They have to be. They have ambitions, burdens, and... body odour. If the writer doesn't see them as living and breathing, then there's little chance anyone else will buy into their existence.

(Hiccup!)

Whoops... I guess I did eat my sandwich too fast.

(Hiccup!)
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