I think for me a scene is a unit of action in which something changes you're telling your story to the audience and your scene is gonna move the story forward in some way so it's either going to give you new plot information or maybe new information about the characters I'm really interested in the notion that a scene is a kind of moment of behavior so for me seems a built around the things that people do and I'd tend to find it useful to think about desire as the engine of behavior so somebody goes into a
scene and they have something they want and the scene is about their attempt to get it and when that's clear and specific it's really freeing so for me it's not necessarily visual and it's not linguistic psychological behavioral I very rarely imagine the whole scene it's in its entirety before I've written it I love them had one one thought about it and but that could be visual law or one thing that needs to happen or even needs to be said and and then and then I have to grow it you need to make sure that not
everything is the same at the end of the scene as it was at the beginning and that's a really good way of telling if the scene is having an effect and if it's worth its place in your play in writing each of my scenes down as one line on a cue card or two lines and figuring out what that scene is and looking at it all I can then say oh is there something missing in my story in my play that needs to go into one of these scenes that actually one of these scenes are
not finished or actually saying oh well that there is very similar to this here and they're kind of doing the same thing so actually that scene doesn't need to be there anymore or that scene used to start later or that scene said earlier when we were reading out in the her room and I see an actor begin to shuffle a little bit I think okay there's something here the beat is dying slightly it's changing it I need to fix that or get rid of it but also when when the language begins to sag on the
a bit and the rhythms of speech begin to feel repetitive or the imagery in the specific specific scene feels been labored or is in new ways and fresh exciting again then I began to just pull things out let's see what's left on the page I love subtext I think that's for me that's the sign that you're seeing is really working when you're like oh yeah there's some great subtext in there it's brilliant a good way to think about it is the subtext is the thing in the room that is there but that people aren't talking
about and it's really interesting if you can try to write characters trying really hard not to talk about something or saying things that reveal what's going on underneath even though they're not actually talking about it sometimes the writing goes bad when I am too conscious of what the scene is supposed to be doing because it becomes like a shopping list rather than something that is that is organic and lived and felt and surprising
