The biggest mistake novices make when writing scenes is thinking the sole purpose of a scene is to give information about the story to the audience.
Wrong.
Giving information to the audience is never the purpose of any part of a screenplay. The real purpose of every scene (and every part of a screenplay) is to grab and hold someone’s attention. If your screenplay can’t grab and hold someone’s attention, nothing else matters.
Pick up a novel you’ve never read before and flip to a random page. If what you read doesn’t grab and hold your attention, chances are good you won’t find any other part of that novel interesting either.
Screenplays work like that as well. Imagine someone flipping to a random page of your screenplay. If the text on that random page doesn’t grab and hold their attention, they’ll likely toss your script aside because they’ll know the rest of your screenplay probably won’t be worth reading.
Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so is a screenplay only as strong as its weakest scene. When you think the purpose of a scene is to give information about your story to the audience, you’ll likely write a dull scene.
Instead, if you focus on writing a scene that grabs and holds someone’s attention, you’ll write a far more dynamic scene. Then you can slip information about your story in that far more compelling scene and people will remember that information.
Once a scene grabs and holds someone’s attention, the second purpose is to give that reader/viewer an emotional experience. The more unique that emotional experience, the stronger the scene.
Watch this scene from “Terminator 2” where we first see the liquid metal Terminator take several shotgun blasts to the chest and heal. Not only was this something audiences had never seen before, but it created a sense of dread as we start wondering how the hero can possibly defeat such an unstoppable villain? Even today, no other Terminator villain has proven as memorable and terrifying as this liquid metal Terminator.
Showing us something we’ve never seen before doesn’t mean something as exotic as a liquid metal Terminator. In most cases, scenes just need to show us something we’ve never seen in one of the major characters.
Watch this scene from “Green Book” where the hero, a white man hired to drive a black musician to play concerts in the Deep South, argue. The white man claims he’s more black than the black musician because the black musician doesn’t know black culture. That’s when the black musician gets mad and reveals his true problem.
As a cultured black man, he doesn’t fit in with white society that sees him as a second-class citizen. At the same time, he doesn’t fit in with typical black culture because he’s too refined. Therefore he’s isolated and lonely all the time. This revelation makes the white man (and us as the audience) suddenly realize everything the black musician has been struggling against his whole life.
Ultimately, the purpose of every scene is to entertain the audience. How you do that depends on your particular story whether you want to evoke laughter, fear, anticipation, or excitement. The only wrong way to write a scene is to be boring.
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