What Makes a Scene Great?

Thinking About Stories Can Help You Enjoy Them More

A good movie is three good scenes and no bad ones.

Howard Hawks

I’m starting a series in which I take a great scene from film, television, fiction or video games and analyze what makes it great. I’m doing this for a few reasons. Chief among them is to be a better writer, but I’m also doing it to deepen my enjoyment of stories. So even if you have no ambitions or compulsions to write anything more substantial than a grocery list, I think you’ll get something out of this series. Because, while we might not all love the same kind of stories, we are all wired to understand the world through stories.

I think writing great scenes is the hardest part of writing. It’s also the most overlooked. There’s plenty of advice about plot, but not much about scenecraft. And while a working plot is necessary, it certainly isn’t sufficient to make a story great.

The Inadequacy of Plot

Vonnegut’s Eight Shapes of Stories - Right but Not Enough.

None of your favorite stories have original plots. They give time-honored plots with sympathetic characters in great scenes. Plot is secondary. The only reason people talk about plot so much is it’s so easy to talk about. But read a couple of books on plot and analyze 20 or so films and you’ll realize plot is like plumbing. If it’s broken, there’s a problem. But nobody ever fell in love with a house because it had great plumbing. 

If you observe your behavior, you know this already. Your favorite film isn’t ruined by repeat viewing. Only not great films diminish on repeat viewings.  And for every ‘perfect’ movie, beloved by millions, you give me, I can show you a plot hole big enough to drive a truck through. It’s not that one shouldn’t try to have a solid plot, it’s that having a great plot just isn’t enough.  

Why Video Games

If the inclusion of video games surprises you, I have good reasons. First on the list is that the video game industry generates 3x more revenue than the film industry. For example, GTA V had earned over $6 billion. Avatar has only earned $2.93 billion.

Also, the market for video games is expected to grow at a compound rate above 13%. That means the video game market is on track to double every 5.5 years. Now, it’s absurd to think video games can double at that rate forever,  but it’s hard for me to see how the market for film and television could double at all. 

More important than than money, games are winning the battle for attention. A movie is 3 hours tops. A season of television is 10-15 hours? The average AAA gaming title is 30 hours of main story gameplay. My 12-year-old son saw a family guy clip of Peter Griffin and exclaimed, “That’s the guy from Fortnight!” Like it or not, games are the future. I think the general level of writing in video games isn’t very good. But at its best it’s fantastic. Here’s what Rolling Stone said about GTA IV when it came out in 2008. 

GTA IV has it all over the pablum currently passing for ingenuity at the multiplex. (Note to the moral hand-wringers: Yes, GTA IV is brutal, bloody, debased, debauched and likely to corrupt the innocent after, say, 400 hours of play. But let’s keep the innocent out of this.)

And let’s keep my game skills out of this as well. This is a review of Grand Theft Auto IV the M-O-V-I-E. And I have to say, it’s better than anything I’ve seen at the multiplex so far this summer, except maybe Iron Man. There’s plot development, character depth and moral ambiguity, stuff you don’t find in Speed Racer.

And video games are capable of creating effects that cannot be repeated in any other medium. But more on all of this later.

To Capture Greatness 

Greatness in any field is elusive. If greatness could be reduced to a checklist, then it would be easy. But that’s not the way it works. So I’m not going to offer a checklist, but rather a way of thinking about scenes, that will able to get more out of them.

The goal of any element of a story is to make the reader, viewer or player feel something. When done well, scenes are the most powerful tool for creating emotions in your audience. But before we get into that, here are the:

Elements of Story

• Images

• Beats

• Scenes

• Sequences

• Stories

The Image is the Fundamental, Irreducible Atom of Story. 

I used to think that we told stories in words, but now I know that all great stories are told in images and some mediums use words to convey those images. Pick any great novel and images will spring to mind. From Don Quixote, we have the image of a a withered old madman jousting windmills, wearing a shaving basin as a helmet and treating his broken down old nag as a mighty warhorse. 

Pick any fable or myth and you will find images galore. The Fox and the Grapes works so well because we can see the Fox salivating over the grapes, leaping and missing, getting discouraged and walking away bitter and discouraged.

Sometimes a great image is all it takes to push a scene over into greatness.

Beats

Beat are my catch-all for anything shorter than a scene. It can be a look. It can be a line. It can be a music cue or a sound effect. Anything that conveys meaning to the audience.

Scenes

A scene is the shortest unit of story in which something important changes for a character we care about. This definition has problems, but fear not, I will tighten it up below.

Sequences 

A collection of beats or scenes. An act is a sequence. To analyze a story, I think it often helps to break acts down into smaller sequences.

Stories

A story is the complete tale, with a satisfying beginning, middle and end. It’s hard to define, any more precisely because there are so many different kinds and genres of story.

I have theories about what makes a great story and you do too, but the whole point of this series is that I don’t think that’s the most useful thing to think about as a writer or reader. 

That way lies plot. A working plot is necessary, but not sufficient to have a great story. And, despite what gurus and reviewers might tell you, plot is pretty flexible. You can have the greatest plot in the world, but if all the scenes you use to deliver that plot are bad, no one will care. 

For me, plot is like plumbing, you only notice it when it’s broken. Nobody ever looked at a cathedral and asked about the plumbing. Or maybe plot is like structural engineering. Because you can’t admire a cathedral if it isn’t standing. I’m getting lost in my metaphors here, but I think my point is clear enough.

Great scenes are the difference between success and failure.

What makes a well-written scene

To see if a scene is well-written, you can have some success using a checklist. And remember, I say well-written, not great. I think it is a necessary condition of greatness that a scene is well-written, but not sufficient. 

Off the top of my head, the checklist is something like this: 

• A  character you have a strong feeling about

• Something important is at stake

• Things unfold in an unexpected way.

• The character makes a choice

• The scene can’t be undone. (Whatever changed is changed for good.)

Take that list with a grain of salt. Somewhere, someone there probably is a great scene that doesn’t do some or all of those things. But I think it is the exception that proves the rule. 

More importantly, a scene can have all of those elements and still be… just a scene. Because, in most mediums, a scene is more than just words on a page. There are scenes that seem great, that die on the cutting room floor. And as great as Shakespeare is as a writer, very few of his plays get produced as written. Some scenes are cut because the director doesn’t know how to make them great. (Or maybe, blasphemy of blasphemies, Shakespeare wrote some clams too.) 

To have a chance a greatness a scene must be well-written. But for anything other than a novel, well-written is just price of entry. Because the scene must be produced. And in that alchemy of production, sometimes, magic can strike. 

Some of the things that can tip a scene into greatness are

• an actor/performance

• cinematography

• editing

• sound

• production coincidence

A humbling aside about dialog

People tell me I’m good at dialog. Who am I to argue with them? But I do feel like I can write a great line. But great lines do not a great scene make. Dialog is comparatively easy (for many people) but a great scene is hard, hard, hard. That’s why they are so rare. 

But here’s the craziest thing about great lines in movies. Many of the greatest lines in movies are improvised. 

• “I am Iron Man” - RDJ did it twice, one in Iron Man and once in Avengers: Endgame

• “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” - Jaws

• “Here’s Johnny” - The Shining

• “Warriors come out to plaaaaayay!” - The Warriors

• “You can’t handle the truth!” - A Few Good Men

• “I’m funny how? I mean, funny like I’m a clown?” - Goodfellas

• “I’m walkin’ here!” - Midnight Cowboy

• “I know” - Empire Strikes Back

• “Are you talking to me?”  - Taxi Driver

• “Like tears… in the rain.”  - Blade Runner

• “He stole my line.” - Good Will Hunting

• “I need a vacation.” - Terminator 2

• “I don’t want to go.” - Avengers: Infinity War

• “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” - The Godfather.

And many, many more. So what does this pattern mean? We don’t need writers? Absolutely not. It means, in those stories the writer (and the director) did their jobs so well, that the actor was set up for brilliance. The story and the scene were rock solid, so improvisation could work. 

Which is all another way of underlining the importance of a great scene.

Towards a Theory of Great Scenes

Here’s my most unsatisfactory model of greatness — sometimes the magic works.

See how useless that is? Sure, you might be able to recognize a great scene with that model. “I thought that scene was just magic!” but it sure doesn’t help you fix a scene that falls short.

But every model and every theory is like that. As a statistician named George E.P. Box said, “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” So take all of this with a grain of salt.

A scene is great in proportion to the amount of meaning it creates in the viewer or reader. 

We experience this meaning as emotion. And these emotions can be cheap and flashy and quick like a sugar high. Or they can be deep and powerful and can stay with you for a lifetime. 

This is what the Greeks were on to when they talked about spectacle, the visual and sensational aspects of a drama. For us, a good example of spectacle would be a big Marvel Movie CGI fight. See it on the big screen, it’s fun. But you don’t really care about any of the characters in that action. And it loses power the more times you see it. 

Some of this meaning depends on context and time. In Gone With the Wind (1939), it was a big deal when Rhett Butler said, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” because people didn’t say damn in movies back then. Now we look at that and say, “What’s the big fucking deal?”

But story and scene can create deeper, more powerful effects. Not all of these feelings and effects have names, but they all seem to involve emotional tension and release. This is hardly a new idea, in 300 B.C. Aristotle called one kind of emotional release Catharsis.

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions."

Aristotle saw this cathartic effect as a central purpose and benefit of tragedy. By experiencing the emotional journey of the tragic hero, we get a therapeutic release and gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. 

Comedy has its releases as well. They are powerful and involuntary and the only real name we have for them are laughs. 

Every scene has a job to do in a story. The better it is at that job, the better the scene is. 

There are many different kinds of scenes. Fight scenes, chase scenes, interrogation scenes, shootouts, confessions of love, exposition scenes, character introductions, interrogation scenes, death scenes, hero-at-the-mercy-of-the -villain scenes, and dialog scenes — to name just a few. In a good story, each of those scenes serve a purpose. And I don’t think it’s possible to evaluate a scene without understanding what the scene is supposed to do in the story

Each one of these scenes comes with conventions and obligations. They raise certain expectations in the audience. And, as I writer, I can honor them, or subvert them or evolve them, but the one thing I cannot do is ignore those expectations.

Many scenes are ‘cursed’. That is to say, you have seen some of these scenes so many times, in the exact same way that there seems to be no surprise or interest left in them. When television writers will speak of ‘taking the curse off’, what they are a saying is, “How can we write another _______ scene without it being boring or expected.”

Examples of cursed scenes are:

• two characters talking while driving in a car that is t-boned in an intersection

• characters crawling through an air duct

• the assembling the team montage in heist movies

• chase scenes

The best (and perhaps only way) to understand the expectations that scenes raise in an audience is to watch and think about a lot of scenes. In this series, I’m going to take you through that process. I’ve got 10 written already, but if you’ve got a favorite scene you’d like me to take a look at, please send it on. I’ll get it into the mix.

Here we go.