by Will Dunne
In Sam Shepard's True West, for example, two brothers each want to be best. Since only one can by definition be "best," however, each brother's objective becomes an obstacle that the other must try to overcome. This begins a competitive series of challenges that escalates into a deadly faceoff because each brother has high stakes at risk-survival-and cannot give up the fight.
To heat up a scene, start with the basic step of joining your characters through a conflict that neither can ignore. If you have already attempted this and it didn't work, try changing something about the binding disagreement. For example:
I. Give the characters irreconcilable needs so that one character's objective cannot succeed unless the other character's objective fails. Think about what your characters want now. If their needs are not irreconcilable, how can you change them so that they are?
2. Make sure that strong obstacles are in place. If you have created truly opposing needs, you have automatically given each character the most common conflict in drama: the other character. Review the objectives you just chose. How does each pose an obstacle to the other character? What other conflicts might add to each character's struggle here and now?
3. Motivate a fight to the finish. When the going gets tough, even the tough don't get going-unless they have a reason to do so. Think about what's at stake in your scene. In a binding disagreement, the stakes must be high enough to make compromise or surrender seem impossible to both characters. What is at stake for each of your characters now? How might you raise these stakes even higher?
A number of scenic elements-such as setting, time, circumstances, character traits, and character actions-offer other opportunities to heighten conflict. Consider using any of the following techniques in combination with a binding disagreement.
THE LOCKED CAGE: NO ONE CAN LEAVE NOW
It's hard for characters to avoid each other's needs when they are physically confined in the same space. This "locked cage" may come in many forms, such as a prison cell (Kiss of the Spider Woman), concentration camp (Bent), sinking ocean liner (Titanic), spaceship (Alien), deserted island (Swept Away), the afterlife (No Exit), phone booth (Phone Booth), or even just an old house in the country (Night of the Living Dead). Whether the confinement is due to iron bars, endless sea, or hungry zombies wandering around outside, a cage can be dramatically helpful because it prevents the characters from fleeing when conflict begins.
To heat things up in your scene, imagine putting your characters into a locked cage:
i. Look at the current setting. If your characters are not physically confined, how might this place be changed-at least temporarily-so they cannot escape? Remember that, with a few creative alterations, just about anywhere can become a cage. In It Had to Be You, for example, a man suddenly finds himself trapped in his date's apartment because of a blizzard outside.
2. Think about the unique world of your story. If you wanted to cage your characters for this scene, is there a better setting available? If so, what is it and how would this change of setting affect the dramatic action?
A TICKING CLOCK: TIME IS RUNNING OUT
Sometimes what heats up conflict is not the confinement of a cage but the ticking of a clock. The looming deadline works wonders in such films as Run, Lola, Run! where a woman must beat the clock to save the day, and Waiting for Guffman, where the director of a small-town pageant must get the show ready by performance time.
Imagine using a "ticking clock" to heat things up in your scene:
i. If your characters face a deadline, how might you increase the urgency or importance of it? For example, can you make the deadline closer or the consequences more dire if the characters fail to meet it?
2. If the characters do not face a looming deadline, how might you change the story so they do? What would be the consequences of not beating the clock?
THE VISE: THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN
Pressing situations can cause confrontations between characters who might otherwise try to avoid their differences. Circumstances close in like a vise and build pressure that becomes unbearable. In Waiting for Lefty, a Depression-era taxi driver returns home to find himself in a vise: his furniture has been repossessed, his kids have gone to bed without supper, and there isn't even enough cash to resole his daughter's shoes. These pressures pit him against his wife, who wants him to stop making excuses for years of hardship and start demanding a decent wage from the taxi owners and union racketeers. The vise has closed in: he must organize a labor strike or lose his family.
Imagine heating up your scene by putting your characters into a vise:
I. Think about the given circumstances for the scene. What facts might you add or change to make this situation more urgent for each character?
2. Brainstorm one new thing that each character might do, say, or reveal during the scene to put even greater pressure on the other character.
3. What is the breaking point that will make confrontation unavoidable?
A PROVOKING QUALITY: YOU SHOULDN'T BE THIS WAY
A character may have a personal trait, quality, state, or condition that is perceived by another character-correctly or not-as an unavoidable reason for confrontation. In Angels in America, a deadly lesion appears on a young man's arm. This physical condition provokes a showdown with his lover, who cannot handle the demands of being a caretaker or the horror of becoming a witness to death.
In Long Day's Journey into Night, a father is so cheap that he would rather send his ill son to a third-rate doctor than pay the cost for a good one. This psychological trait-his obsession with saving money-provokes a showdown with the oldest son, who fears for his brother's life.
In the film Monster, a woman suddenly finds herself in a deadly battle with a stranger because of her profession: she is a prostitute. This sociological trait is perceived by the man-a psychopath-as a license for violence and murder.
Imagine using a character attribute to heat things up in your scene:
i. From personal appearance to health to sobriety or lack of it, your characters have physical qualities that affect how they look, act, and feel. These attributes may be inherited or acquired, permanent or temporary. For any character in the scene, what physical trait, quality, state, or condition could trigger an unavoidable confrontation here and now?
2. Your characters each have psychological traits that affect their attitudes, temperament, interests, ambitions, morality, sex life, and emotions. For any character in the scene, what psychological trait-positive or negative-could trigger an unavoidable confrontation?
3. The sociology of your characters includes their home life, work life, social life, economics, politics, religion, and role or lack of role in society. For any character in the scene, what sociological trait could trigger an unavoidable confrontation?
4. Whether physical, psychological, or social, what new personal attribute could you give to any character to make confrontation unavoidable here and now?
THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN: YOU SHOULD NEVER DO THAT
Sometimes it is not who characters are but what they do that causes trouble. They break a moral, legal, or personal law that has been defined as sacred. In some cases, this law is widely recognized and honored in the world of the story, and any violation of it makes confrontation legally or morally necessary. In Hamlet, for example, a man who wants to rule a country secretly murders the king and marries his wife. This crime is an "unforgivable sin" that raises the king's ghost from the dead and ultimately leads to an unavoidable and deadly showdown with the king's son.
Alternatively, the law in question may be a personal one that most people would not honor or perhaps even recognize as a serious limit. In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a plain, lonely woman attempts to leave home and get married. This breaks a personal law that has been defined by her manipulative mother and which makes it wrong for the daughter to be anywhere other than at her mother's side. The result of this unforgivable sin is an inescapable and frightening power struggle between them.
&n
bsp; In some stories, it is not an unforgivable sin but only the perception of one that causes problems. Either through error, deception, or self-delusion, one character wrongly believes that another character has crossed a legal, moral, or personal boundary and must be confronted. In Othello, a man bent on revenge misleads another man to believe that his wife has been unfaithful. This perceived transgression forces the husband to confront and kill the blameless wife.
Imagine using an unforgivable sin to heat things up in your scene:
i. What is a legal or moral law that could be broken by one of your characters just before the scene or during it? How and why would this unforgivable sin make confrontation unavoidable now?
2. What is a personal law that could be defined by one character as important and broken by the other just before the scene or during it? How and why would this unforgivable sin make confrontation unavoidable now?
3. What is a perceived unforgivable sin that could force your characters into a showdown? Would this misconception be the result of error, deceit, or self-delusion and how would it make confrontation unavoidable now?
WRAP-UP
When conflict arises, characters need reasons to deal with each other and fight for what they want, especially if they find themselves in trying circumstances that may push them to emotional extremes. As you develop your script, keep the "binding disagreement" in mind and consider other conflict techniques-such as the locked cage, ticking clock, vise, provoking quality, or unforgivable sin-to heat up the dramatic action when tension has begun to falter.
THE QUICK VERSION
Use the emotional life of your characters to flesh out a dramatic event
BEST TIME FOR THIS
During scene planning
CHARACTER EMOTIONS: INTEGRAL THREADS OF DRAMATIC STORY The emotions of the character are integral to story structure because they ground the character in the present, and tie it to the past and future-all at once and at a gut level. By exploring character emotion, therefore, you can learn a lot about not only the character but also the story. Use simple questions like these to guide you:
• How does the character feel now? This critical and often overlooked question focuses on the ever-changing present moment of the character. Whatever the character says or does at this moment is being influenced, to some degree, by the character's emotional life-or lack of it.
• Why does the character feel that way? This question reflects the character's past. The stimulus for the emotion may have been recent (something that just happened in this scene) or distant (something that happened before the scene or even long ago in the backstory). The stimulus may have been internal (a character perception or memory) or external (something that someone else said or did). To know your character is to know what triggered the character's emotion, and why.
• What will character do as a result of this feeling? This question shifts the focus to the future: what will happen in this scene or later in the story as a result of the character's feelings now? If the emotion is strong enough, it can produce physical and psychological responses that affect the character's needs, speech, and behavior. From a dramatic viewpoint, character emotion is of little use until it leads to observable character action of some kind.
If a scene is of any length, and if it has more than one beat, and if it rises above the level of monotony, the character will experience different emotions during the course of the scene. Some of these feelings will be more important than others.
Suppose that a scene has three parts-beginning, middle, and endand that the character's primary emotion in the scene is hate. For begin ning, middle, and end, you could show hate, hate, and hate. That sounds pretty dramatic. However, the emotional redundancy may make the scene stale and predictable. Imagine how much more dynamic the scene might be if it showed emotional variety, perhaps an escalation of feeling, such as irritation, anger, and hate, or a dramatic change, such as hate, surprise, and sympathy, or-in less happy circumstances-tenderness, surprise, and hate.
Emotions are complex phenomena that can be interpreted different ways. You may learn more about the character and the scene if you look beyond the surface of each emotion for deeper meaning. Some say that all human emotions can be viewed ultimately as a form of anger, fear, or love. Whether or not you agree with this theory psychologically, it provides a useful tool for exploring emotions dramatically.
For example, your character's primary emotion in a scene might be hate. If you were writing Mississippi Burning, you might see this hate as a form of anger. If you were writing The Laramie Project, however, you might add a different depth to the gay bashers' hate by seeing it as a form of fear. Or, if you were writing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? you might even see hate as a form of love.
ABOUT THE EXERCISE
This exercise can help you explore the emotional lives of your characters and use these feelings to create a simple storyboard for a scene. The storyboard in this case will not be a sequence of images, but rather a sequence of emotions that suggest the scenic movement.
While characters may experience any number of feelings in a scene, this exercise asks you to focus on the most important emotion that the character feels during each of three scene parts: beginning, middle, and end. These parts may not be of equal length or importance, but each differs from the other two: the end is different from the beginning because of what happens in the middle. This simple breakdown can help you find the broad strokes of a dramatic event and how it happens. Before you begin, you need to know who will be in the scene, what their relationship is, and what the main event of the scene will be. Your concept of the main event may change as you work through the exercise.
Examples are based on an interpretation of the opening scene of act 2 of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh. The play takes place in an unnamed totalitarian state where a writer is being interrogated by police about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a series of local child murders. The second act begins in the police holding cell.
Character i is Katurian, who is, by day, a cleaner in a slaughterhouse and, by night, a passionate writer of children's stories about torture, murder, and other abuse. He has written over four hundred of these twisted tales and, so far, published one of them. Character 2 is Michal, his mentally impaired brother whom Katurian has cared for since they were teenagers. The main event of the scene: Katurian discovers that three of the fictional murders in his stories have inspired the childlike Michal to commit three real-life copycat murders.
EMOTIONAL STORYBOARD OF CHARACTER I
Focus first on the main character of the scene-for example, Katurian-and answer these questions to help you explore his or her emotional life in the scene:
I. Primary emotion. Characters experience different emotions at different times, and these feelings vary in intensity, impact, and importance. In the McDonagh scene, the primary emotion that Katurian feels is horror, which, for him, is a form of fear. He is in danger of losing everything he values. Interpret "primary" any way you wish and identify your character's primary emotion in the scene. Then interpret the emotion by imagining it as a form of anger, fear, or love. Which would it be? What would this tell you about the character?
• Storyboard. Katurian's horror occurs mostly in the middle of the scene. Where in your scene-beginning, middle, or end-does your character's primary feeling mostly occur? By making a choice now, you will begin to define a focus for the scene and how it unfolds.
• Stimulus. A key cause of Katurian's horror is Michal's revelation that he has reenacted three murders from Katurian's stories. The stimulus for Katurian's horror is thus immense: not only has his brother killed innocent children, but the deaths were inspired by Katurian's own writing. Identify the stimulus for your character's primary emotion.
• Behavioral impact. One of the most immediate results of Katurian's horror is the need to know what exactly happened and why. The emotion thus triggers a new beat action: to find out from Michal the full an
d horrible truth. Think about your character's primary emotion. Identify at least one important effect of this emotion on your character's behavior later in this scene or, if appropriate, later in the story.
2. Second emotion. Katurian's second most important emotion in the scene is protectiveness, which, for him, might be a form of love-and a big shift from the horror he feels elsewhere in the scene. What is the second most important emotion that your character experiences in your scene? If you were to view this as a form of anger, fear, or love, which would it be? What would this suggest?
• Storyboard. Katurian's protectiveness is aroused near the scene's end when he is able to forgive his brother for his crimes. Where in your scene does the character's second emotion occur? Choose one of the two remaining blanks in the character's emotional storyboard.
• Stimulus. One cause of Katurian's protectiveness is his relationship with Michal: Katurian has always been his brother's keeper. This responsibility stems from Katurian's understanding that Michal has a diminished mental capacity and is not fully responsible for his actions. Briefly identify an important cause of your character's second emotion.
• Behavioral impact. One effect of Katurian's protectiveness is the need to save Michal from the sadistic police who will soon return, and, in a gesture that echoes Of Mice and Men, to protect him by smothering him to death with a pillow. The scene ends with Katurian tenderly kissing his dead brother. The feeling of protectiveness will also lead into the next scene, when Katurian will sacrifice his own life-he will confess to murders he did not commit-in order to bargain with the police and protect his stories from being destroyed. Briefly identify at least one way that your character's second emotion will affect his or her behavior.