Screenwriting : How many ideas do you discard before settling on a scene? by Alex Bloom

Alex Bloom

How many ideas do you discard before settling on a scene?

It's pretty much guaranteed that your first, or even second or third idea for a scene is probably not interesting enough. Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm every outcome and character, and character reaction in a scene. Try making everything as unusual as you can, and not just write in the first thing that comes into your head. : )

Tony McFadden

I'm on my tenth (book or screenplay) and some of the "boring" ideas now get filtered pre-typing. Not to say there aren't any boring ideas in a first draft, but I'm getting a little bit better at excluding them before they get past my fingers. It helps that I plot in advance, so I've got a pretty good idea what a scene needs to do. But you're right. There are a multitude of ways to achieve what a scene needs to achieve. The key is to find an interesting way of achieving that goal. I've just (today) finished the first draft of a screenplay. After I let it sit for a couple of weeks, as an exercise (prompted by your post) I think I'll go through it scene by scene and see which can be implemented in a more interesting way.

Jaime Klein

You need to FEEL it. No one else can tell you. Tell your story.

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