The Storyteller’s Mission with Zena Dell Lowe

What Writers Need to Do at the Start of Each Scene to Keep Their Reader Hooked

June 02, 2022 Zena Dell Lowe Season 2 Episode 40
The Storyteller’s Mission with Zena Dell Lowe
What Writers Need to Do at the Start of Each Scene to Keep Their Reader Hooked
Show Notes Transcript

EPISODE DESCRIPTION -Today we are diving into #7 in our series of “Aha Moments,” that I’ve had both as a writer, and as a story coach. One mistake that I see happen with a lot of writers, is that they wait too long to get into the action of their story. The story lags on and on without the reader or viewer knowing what the story is actually about.

That’s why today’s episode is about setting your scene sparingly. You must get to the pertinent details quickly so that your reader knows what is going on, and then you can reveal more things as you go. 

The second key to this is making sure you introduce your main character quickly. By page 5 the reader should already know who the main character is and what they are about. There are exceptions to this of course that have been done well, as in the film Witness

Listen now for a more detailed understanding of how to keep your reader hooked and engaged from the very beginning. 

DOWNLOAD FULL TRANSCRIPTS FOR FREE on the podcast page of our website.

UP NEXT - Next week, I'll give you every trick you need on how to write clearly and avoid the ultimate kiss of death in story, confusion.

HELPFUL LINKS AND RESOURCES - The Storyteller’s Mission online platform offers one-on-one COACHING, SCRIPT and MANUSCRIPT CRITIQUES, and ADVANCED CLASSES ON WRITING. Send us an email at info@thestorytellersmission.com, or if you have a question or a specific writing related topic that you would like Zena to consider addressing on a future episode, LEAVE US A VOICEMAIL!



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THE STORYTELLER’S MISSION WITH ZENA DELL LOWE 

S2_E40: What Writers Need to Do at the Start of Each Scene to Keep Their Reader Hooked PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Thursday June 2, 2022

00:00
INTRO: Hello, and welcome to The Storyteller's Mission with Zena Dell Lowe, a podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story. 

00:10
TOPIC INTRODUCTION: What I'm talking about to you today, are “Aha Moments,” that I've had as a writer or as a story coach and teacher. Because a lot of the things that I've picked up over the years have been because I've been reading the material of other people, and I've seen these common patterns, and these common mistakes that writers tend to make. And when that happens enough, you go, "Huh, interesting, this is something that writers haven't quite grasped yet." And I want to help you to be able to do that. So we've been talking about what these things are.

00:46
PRESENTATION: Now, today, I'm going to talk to you about number seven. Which is, that when you're starting a scene description, when you are setting up a particular scene, you want to set the scene sparingly. Now, I know I know, this could be kind of controversial. If you're a novelist, you're thinking, "Well, yes, we're supposed to take the time to do all of our senses and make sure that we have the smell, the taste the sounds, what we're seeing, of course, all those things, what it feels like." Yeah, okay, that's true, and the same is true in a screenplay, you want to give an indication of all those things. However, if you take too long to do it, it bogs the story down, it slows the story down. 

01:36
KEY PRINCIPLE #1: So there's a way to do it, where you are able to do it more quickly. Get into the action of the story, and then allow more stuff to be revealed as you go. 

01:48
Let's say you're trying to set some sort of spooky tone, right, it's eerie, something's mystical, maybe there's something going on. So, you have about three things that you can sort of describe, you have to pick your details very specifically. You have to pick the very best of the best that's going to indicate the kind of tone you're going for, and then you have to get into the action of the story, you just can't take too much time. So then, as you get into the action of the story, you can continue to weave in those details. 

02:26
EXAMPLE: For example, let's say this is a supernatural thriller, and you're trying to describe something creepy that's happening out of doors. Maybe a creature of some kind, is watching a human who has wrecked on the side of the road, and they're trying to change their tire, or what have you, and it's night. So the first thing that might happen is you start the scene with the human looking around, right? And it's eerie, and it's creepy, and there's no lights anywhere to be had, right? So, they get out their flashlight in their glove compartment, or they get out their phone, because they have a flashlight on their phone, right? And they keep their headlights on, and maybe they turn down the music to listen, right? To listen, they roll down their windows, and they listen, and it's creepy. It's creepy. Or maybe they're oblivious to any sort of danger, what so have you in which case, they're in the car going, "Gosh, darn it." Right? But we cut to outside of the car, and you have a POV shot, where there's something watching through some leaves, and we hear heavy breathing, and we hear animal sounds. You know? Twittering, something like that. I don't know, maybe we hear something else in the distance some, "thump thump thump." But it's too quiet for our character to hear those things. Nevertheless, you've picked a couple of things. 

03:55
Maybe you decide to show the sky, and at that exact time. You know, the clouds are sort of heavy and they conceal the stars and there's a layer of fog that goes across the land and we see rolling fog or something like that. Maybe there's a cabin in the nearby distance and we hear the, "Creek... creek," of shutters or something but we don't maybe even know what that is yet. Or maybe, when the character gets out of the car, it's fall and we hear the, "crunch, crunch crunch," of the leaves and it's almost jarring. Like it sounds like somebody's walking on bones. I'm not sure. But the point is, you choose your best three details that can convey that, and then you get into the action. And then as that character gets creeped out, you do other things. 

03:56
You don't do it all at once. You can't do it all at once you have to let the scene unfold, which means you have to slow down. That's another thing that just seems to be happening as people rush these moments. They have these gems, but they're too afraid to milk it for everything it's worth, slow down. 

05:13
Let the scene unfold in a natural organic pace, let the suspense build, let the creepy factor build, and let the character be spooked out when they see a shadow, or they think they see something and they spin around. And now they're creeped out... "Ooooh!" They get the goosebumps, and they just want to hurry and they want to hurry... Then they're trying to turn the crank or whatever and they, of course, drop the bolt. And now they hear something and they look around. 

05:44
Take your time, build these things. But the real point is that at the top of the scene, you want to set the scene sparingly. Meaning, you want to choose about three details that you can focus on no more than that. You can't take all day to set up a scene. Then instead of doing it, cramming it all in at the top, you allow it to keep coming out into the scene, you allow it to keep coming out.

06:14
For example, you don't have to, and I see this all the time, especially in screenplays, but even in novels. I see this all the time where the writer describes everything in the room, all at once, every single thing. Like we do a pan shot. We pan the room, and we see the pictures of the family, and we see her notebook that she carries with her, and her design notebook and her college pamphlets. We see the kind of bed cover she has, and we see that there's a bathroom on the right and her closet on the left with a full length mirror leaned against the wall. 

06:50
We see it all at once, but we don't have to see it all at once. In fact, we shouldn't see it all at once. Some of those details should be revealed in the action of the scene. So if you start the scene where the character is asleep in bed... maybe we're panning the room and we see a couple of things, and then we land on the character snoring logs in the bed. Then as the character jars awake, she can get up from the bed and go to her dresser and reach for that locket, and now you show the locket. 

07:29
She drops it on the floor, and so now she gets down on the floor, and as she's getting down on the floor to find a locket, we pause on the clock. "Click, click, click," that is an old fashioned clock set up on her desk, and it rings right then... and she bumps her head as she comes up with the locket. Now she's late and she fumbles with it, she puts it on and then she's looking for her notebook, and she goes to the closet and opens up the closet and she's looking for her backpack, and that's when we see the umbrella for the first time. 

08:03
I mean, I'm making this up as I go along, obviously, but the point is, as the scene unfolds, you're revealing more about what's in that room. Now these might be as essential things to the story. These might be very important things either thematically, or actually because they're going to play a role in the story. But you shouldn't reveal them all at once you can't reveal them all at once it will bore us. 

08:28
You reveal them selectively, and as the scene unfolds, you have a few that you can do at the beginning, but then you find a way to weave the rest of it into the story. And here's the best part. When you do that, it becomes less like a setup. 

08:48
Because what happens is, if you do it right, if you do it in the action of the character going about pursuing a goal, they're taking action. They're trying to get ready, they're fumbling, whatever, and you reveal those things at that time. Now you can make it play a part, a role in that, and we don't know we've been set up. 

09:11
So if you remember the discussion we had about setups and payoffs, the best way to have a setup and payoff is to make it invisible to us because it accomplishes something at the time. So in the example I gave of the clock that goes off, maybe that's an important clock, maybe that clock is something she inherited from her grandma, and inside the clock she's going to eventually find that there is some sort of treasure map. And so the clock is important, but we show it in the context of her fumbling to get ready for work. 

09:48
She drops her locket and now the clock that makes these weird ticking sounds. We don't know that that has anything to do with the treasure map later. We just think, "Oh that clock is ticking to remind her, like she's running late or something." So we're not expecting as an audience for that to come back into play. And that is delightful for us. Now, not only do you want to take the time to allow the scene to unfold, and you want to try to select the details that you will reveal at the top, and then slowly reveal more as the scene unfolds. 

10:25
You also want to remember that you have to get into your story, rather soon as well. So what do I mean by this? See, this can also happen if you take too long to get to your main character at the very top of whatever story you're telling. 

10:41
KEY PRINCIPLE #2: Again, another mistake that I see a lot of writers making. Where they have a character that is the main character, but we don't actually introduce them until page five. Or you know, later because the writer wants to really set up all this other stuff. 

11:00
EXAMPLE: Now, this happened recently in a session that I reviewed of one of my clients that I'm coaching, and he had rewritten the beginning of a screenplay. Now, the way it used to be, which was tricky, but we had it kind of working, was it started out where the character was wearing VR goggles, and really, we meet our main character as his avatar self. And he's inside a video game, he's playing a video game, and then we meet the other character in the video game that, you know, is actually part of the video game. But then we cut out to him in his real world in his attire, and he's doing whatever the avatar him is doing, and we cut back in. And so we're still kind of getting to know the character, but not very well, because we're mostly with the avatar. 

11:54
So it was a little tricky, and we had to speed that up so that we could get to him sooner. Otherwise, it was going to be confusing. However, in the rewrite that he submitted to me, he actually added a really brilliant sequence at the beginning where these drones were searching and scanning the cityscape. And so all these images are flickering up and all these images, and then they would freeze every once in a while. And we would see some sort of criminal activity going on sometimes through walls. So we just see the outline of people like with guns or whatever holding people down, robberies taking place. 

12:32
And even though these are supposed to be like police or law enforcement type drones, they wouldn't do anything about those. They would keep then scanning to the next one, and you know, searching for the information, whatever it is. "Flicker, flicker, flicker." "Oh, there's another crime," but they don't do anything and then all of a sudden, the screen kind of gets red and then the drone takes off in that direction towards this high rise place. 

12:59
And then there's this wonderful thing where as that drone approaches, and we you know, follow the drone through the city, which is a great way to have like the credits and all this. But as the drone pulls up, then there's all these other drones that have also zeroed in on the same target. And so it's like, bees, rows and rows of bees hovering outside of this building, waiting for orders to attack or do whatever they're going to do. 

13:09
But then he kept the original type of story or the type of intro that he had before, which meant that by the time he had done all of that, and written all of that now we didn't meet his main character until really page five. And I told him, Well, that's not going to work. Because now it takes too long to get to the main character. 

13:48
So this happens a lot where the writer just takes too long to meet the main character. The only way that works is if you're really taking time to introduce supporting characters. So the only way that works is if you take the time to let us meet supporting characters. But that means you're really, really, taking the time and you're really focusing on them a great deal. 

14:16
Now I've given this example from the film Witness before. This is what happens in Witness. We meet most of the major characters in the Amish community. Certainly we meet Rachel and Samuel, who are major supporting characters, but we don't actually meet John book, the Philadelphia cop, until about page 15. Why? Well, it's because we need time to get to know the Amish community. That fits for that particular story, but we're really taking the time to introduce them.

14:47
We kind of already know what John book is like. He's a tough Philadelphia cop. We know that type, but we don't really know the Amish community. So the writer switched the order of how we sort of introduce the characters and that's fine, as long as we're really learning who those characters are. Otherwise, you need to get to your main character much more quickly. 

15:09
Certainly, if we're not getting to them right away, then we better be diving deep into a supporting character, a major supporting character. And it better have a reason. It better makes sense why we did that and why we delayed meeting our main character. 

15:25
CONCLUSION: So this is just something that I have found to be a consistent problem that I'm hoping my suggestions here will help you with.

15:35
KEY POINT RECAP: A - make sure you don't spend too much time setting up the scene, you've got to get into the action. And then you keep revealing things and setting tone as you go with the action. And B - you got to get to the main character pretty quick, unless you're going to dive deep into the supporting characters, in which case you can delay your main character, but only for so long. 

15:59
CALL TO ACTION: If you're a screenwriter, I want to encourage you to check out my class, "Formatting as an Art Form," which is now available on The Storyteller's Mission website and in my personal opinion, it is the best class on screenwriting that exists. If you're a novelist and you need help on anything with your story. Then check out my manuscript critique services, or of course, my coaching services I'd love to be of service. 

16:28
OUTRO: Thank you for listening to The Storyteller's Mission, with Zena Dell Lowe. May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better through story.