Sunday, May 2, 2010

Detective Story Week Eight: Restructuring and Short Scenes

The week started out well. I started in on writing the script. Monday I got six scenes written. My current outline has 59 scenes planned. Tuesday I got three scenes done and Wednesday I got four more done.

Thursday I ran into a snag though. I realized that I needed to move one of the scenes I had written to earlier in the script, and add another scene in its place. The move wasn’t too hard, but I haven’t worked out what I want to happen in the new scene.

Right now, the new scene is there to put some space between two other scenes that can’t go back to back. It needs to be more than that. It is the next scene I was going to write, so that is stopping me from going ahead. I think I may skip over that scene and come back to it later.


The scenes are coming out shorter than I thought they would. Most books I’ve read on script writing suggest about 3 pages per scene. The average length of the first 14 scenes I wrote is 1.1 pages. If that average holds, the whole script will be about 66 pages, which is too short to be a feature. The average scene length in The Anger Trap was 1.4 pages.

I haven’t decided what to do about the scene length. One possibility is to add more flourishes to the character’s behaviour to make the scenes longer. It may be better to add some more twists to the main plot so that I have more scenes. I could also add more scenes by adding a subplot or two.

I plan to continue writing the script, then deal with the problems in the second draft.

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