A screenplay should be like a roller coaster. Right from the start it should promise an exciting ride and then give people exactly what they expect. In screenwriting, your script must never have dull, slow, boring parts. Every scene must be lean and tight.
The best way to make sure every scene moves the story along is to make sure the hero changes somehow. That change can be good or bad, but something in that scene must challenge and threaten the hero to force them to react. When the hero is backed in a corner and forced to respond, we get to see what kind of person they really are.
Watch this scene from “The Shining”:
At this point in the story, Jack and Wendy have been living in an isolated hotel and Jack has been acting increasingly erratic. Jack has been working on a novel so Wendy finally decides to see what Jack has accomplished all this time.
So far, describing this scene is fairly dull, so what drastically changes Wendy in this scene? When she looks at the manuscript Jack has been working on all this time and finds that it consists of nothing but the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again.
Where before Wendy wasn’t sure if Jack was acting erratically or if it was her imagination. For the first time, she has actual proof – and it definitely changes her world and how she thinks about Jack.
Now watch this meaningless scene from “A Wrinkle in Time”:
The hero and her brothers find themselves on a crowded beach where a strange man approaches them, then somehow possesses the younger boy and takes him away. This scene fails because it lacks any sudden change to how the hero sees the world.
In “The Shining” scene, there is little physical action beyond Wendy looking at papers on a desk, but what those papers show create an emotional punch that completely changes how Wendy sees Jack at that moment (she now knows he’s crazy).
In the “A Wrinkle in Time” scene, there’s lots of physical action (and special effects) but there’s no emotional shock or threat that forces the hero to totally rethink their situation. As a result, the “A Wrinkle in Time” scene utterly fails as a scene and helps drag the rest of the movie down with it.
In your own screenplay, always write scenes that shock your hero. Sometimes that shock is dramatic but sometimes it’s small, but it’s always there. The more your hero is forced to re-evaluate what they think they know, the more off balance they’ll be and the more exciting your story will become.
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