Every Scene Should Force a Decision or Show Motivation

Every scene should tell a mini-story that moves the story forward. Two ways a scene can move a story forward is to force characters into making a decision or to show the motivation before they make a decision.

Choices move a story forward. Look at all the choices that keep the story moving in the beginning of “Star Wars”:

• After Luke sees the hologram of Princess Leia, he’s motivated to learn more
• When R2D2 runs away, Luke chooses to go after him without telling his uncle
• When Luke gets attacked by the Sand People and rescued by Obi-wan, Luke chooses to go into Obi-wan’s home for safety
• When Obi-wan decides to deliver R2D2 to Princess Leia’s planet, Luke decides not to go with him
• When Luke sees the biased sand crawler of the Jawas and realizes storm troopers killed them, Luke decides to rush back to his uncle’s farm
• When Luke finds the charred bodies of his aunt and uncle, Luke decides to go with Obi-wan

By showing us either the motivation or the decisions made by the main characters, each scene keeps the story moving forward. If we see what motivates the characters, then we’ll understand their decisions in a later scene.

Watch the following scene from “The Martian” and notice how the scene mood changes from happy to intense by the end. That’s because the crew is on their way back to Earth when they receive a message that the crew member they left behind on Mars is actually still alive. Suddenly their happiness is gone when they realize they abandoned a crew member and they all feel horrible at the thought of doing so.

This scene lets us see the crew’s motivation but not their decision just yet. Once we see the crew’s horrified reaction that they left a crew member behind, we can fully understand their choice in a later scene when they decide to turn around and go back for him.

Reaching a decision should never be easy. In “Miss Congeniality,” the hero is an FBI agent and is given an assignment to go undercover at a beauty pageant. When her friend tells her about her new assignment, she fights him and they wrestle and beat each other up in a comical way (since the movie is a comedy). The physical struggle mirrors the hero’s internal struggle into accepting the assignment.

On the one hand, she wants the assignment because she’s an FBI agent, but on the other hand, she’s totally unfamiliar about beauty pageants and acting like a woman. By the end of the scene, she reluctantly decides to take the assignment.

Choices move the story forward because when a character makes a decision, we want to know what happens next. If a scene fails to show a character making a choice (or letting us see what motivates a character to make a choice later on), there’s nowhere for the story to go from there.

Watch this pointless scene from “The Room,” regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. Notice how this scene ends without the main character making a choice of any kind.

Surprisingly, this is how most people write scenes in a screenplay. Their scenes introduce situations and characters, but fail to end with any decision made by the main character so there’s nowhere for the story to go except to another aimless and pointless scene.

So make sure every scene you write forces the hero into making a choice. Each time the hero is forced into a decision, that will keep the story moving forward until the end.

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