“The process of writing is a process of moving from chaos to order.”
– Linda Seeger, “Making a Good Script Great, 3rd Edition”, p.2
Unfortunately, the process of wrestling order out of chaos is neither smooth nor easy, and at one time or another all writers run into a wall. Perhaps they feel they’ve run out of ideas; or don’t know how to fix a broken scene; or how to extract themselves from an unexpected dead end.
Enter the infamous Writers’ Block.
Thankfully, there are lots of ways to get un-blocked and today’s post focuses on one way Improv can help you cure your writers’ block and get you moving forward again when you have a scene that just isn’t working for some unknown reason.
A couple years ago, the wonderful and incredibly welcoming folks at The Manuscript Academy were kind enough to invite me to run a live, interactive webinar in which I used Improv principles and exercises to give authors some tools that could help them get unstuck. After all, we writers are essentially improvising as we write – literally making up locations, actions, characters, scenes, even whole worlds or universes from scratch.
A Scene Stuck in the Mud
We have all written scenes that we know we need but which, once written, just don’t work. Oftentimes we can futz around with the scene and get it where it needs to be but sometimes our futzing fails to fix the scene and we get frustrated.
There is an Improv exercise where the (say 3) actors on stage invent and play out a short scene from the perspective of one of the characters and they then immediately replay that scene from the perspective / POV of one of the other characters and then they replay the scene again from the third character’s perspective.
For example, the scene might be a teenage son asking his parents to borrow the car for the night. Let’s say that the son wants to take his significant other out on a date and is keenly focused on making that happen. The mother wants to make sure the son doesn’t drive too fast and is safe and the father is mostly concerned that the son gets home before curfew.
This is a powerful Improv exercise because it forces the actors to see the same moment in time through three very different sets of eyes (instead of just those of the character they are temporarily inhabiting), each with their own needs, wants, motivations, fears, etc. It is always amazing how much more we learn about the three characters when they are forced to replay the scene three times through three different lenses.
In the initial scene run-through the mother may have seemed overly protective and the father more concerned with curfews than helping his son, but in the subsequent retellings, we might learn that the mother was in an accident when on just such a date as a teenager and the father is worried about making sure the son’s date is home at a reasonable hour. Neither of these motivations would be evident through the eyes of the teenage son, yet they drive the dialogue and actions of two thirds of the characters in the scene!
The same holds true for writers, and for your writing. If a scene just isn’t sitting well with you, try rewriting it from the perspective of one of the other characters in that scene. If your scene was (for example) a first date between two of your characters, then rewriting it from the other character’s perspective should uncover a lot of detail about that first date that the first draft (and first perspective) did not provide.
This works because as an author you have to “put on” each character as you write for them, and in putting on the “other” character’s perspective for that scene you immediately see it differently, through another person’s eyes. I find you also tend to uncover certain inter-personal dynamics at work that you hadn’t thought of or realized before, when you only considered the scene from a singular perspective.
Sometimes that second (or third or fourth) version ends up being much better than the original scene and I swap it in. Other times I end up adjusting the original scene based on what I learned about my characters and the dynamics between them in the rewriting. And in almost every case I find that I learn something new about each of the characters that had not occurred to me before.
Try it out – see if a rewrite from a new perspective helps you get out of your rut to head on down the road at full speed again. As E.L. Doctorow once said,
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
