A tip from acting for the screenwriter.

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Some of you may know, my interest in film and theatre started as an actor. I studied acting as a serious pursuit for seven or so years and had a brief stint where I made a (very bad) living at it, jumping from one stage show to another.

Sure, one of those shows was me playing a cat at the Houston Planetarium, but it was a gig, damn it!

While an actor, I was taught a little trick about giving my character a secret. 

It was something only I was to know about. It wasn't an overt part of the text, and I wasn't to share it with anyone else.

It was mine. And while it would affect how I played a scene, no one else would know it. They could only listen and react.

It's not meant to change the meaning of any scene, but maybe perhaps enhance it by making it more specific.

We can make these specific choices for our own scene work as well.

For example, in American Beauty.

There is a scene at the dinner table with the family. The family is starting to fall apart. The husband is going through an emotional and spiritual crisis, the wife is having an affair, and the daughter is feeling detached from life, and, like most kids, desperately trying to figure out who she is.

The secret you would want to choose here would be making a more specific choice about the given moment.

We know the wife is having an affair. We could make that more specific. Perhaps she was with her lover in the hotel room just an hour ago.

Again, the audience doesn't have to know this. The other characters don't have to know this.

But how does it affect how you write the scene? 

Often, we get stuck between what is happening in the scene itself and the very general attitudes of how characters feel about each other.

We forget to give them a life outside of that. Where were they moments before the scene started?

What were they thinking? How does it affect their mood?

We know what affects their choices in the big picture, but we tend not to get much more specific than that, feeling that if we do, we will need to share it.

"This is a tool for your writer's toolkit.

Use it when you want to find extra layers for your characters, so they're not just slaves to the scene. It's an aid to give them more life.

(But do not feel compelled to implement this where it's not needed.)

I wrote a scene recently about a grown woman who runs into a small-town Sherrif who she hasn't seen since she was twelve years old.

He is delighted to see her. I wrote him as a jolly fella who just seems damn friendly. Later in the story, he goes out of his way to protect her and gets killed for it.

It's written as this man just doing the right thing. He is sick of the corruption, and the ghastly acts in front of him are just one step too far. 

But now that I am thinking about it, I am sure there is something else there.

I'm curious how much those four or five scenes with him would be affected by the decision that he had a crush on the woman's mom years ago. 

Maybe he sees her as the child and life he could have had.

It's tempting to want to put that in the script.

And maybe that's best. Or maybe that should stay hidden in the moments, as it's not part of this woman's story anyway.

Whichever it is, the key is to make a specific choice about it. 

And make the decision to share or not be specific, too. Don't hedge. Don't be squishy.

Make the choice.

I can pretty much guarantee you the choice the actor would make.

The Story and Plot Weekly Email is published every Tuesday morning. Don't miss another one.

​ Tom Vaughan
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