The emotion dictates the action line.

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When you get stuck with a scene, or even a single line of your screenplay, there are two questions that will get you out of most trouble:

1. What story are you telling?
2. What emotion are you trying to evoke?

The answer is dictated by context.

That is, the story of the screenplay is a different answer than the story of the scene, which is a different answer than the story of the moment.

This holds true for the emotion as well.

In today’s email, I want to focus on the single action line of the screenplay.

Because if you make the two choices above, that choice will just about tell you what to write.

The non-choice kills. As always.

It’s a joke I have in my UH classes. Clarity of intent is vital (and worth its own post), but to have clarity of intent, you need… intent.

Decisions must be made about why something is in the script.

I’ve never actually counted, but I suspect at least half of my emails preach the dangers of the non-choice and how much it undermines your writing.

I am convinced the non-choice is the biggest barrier to most people’s storytelling.

Sometimes the non-choice is because we truly didn’t make a choice, and sometimes it’s there because we think the choice is implied when it’s not.

Either way, it leads to the same results: moments that don’t engage and evoke nothing other than the occasional query: “Why is this here? What is this about?”

Six questions for every action line.

This question is one of the primary principles of my rewriting:

I wrote a line. Either dialogue or an action line. There should be no useless words, so I ask myself:

1. What is the line’s purpose?

This is the single-line equivalent of “What story am I telling?” That is, what needs to happen here? What changes?

Then, the next question:

2. What emotion do you want to evoke?

How do you want the audience to feel? What do you want their reaction to be?

Do you want hope? Do you want fear? Tension? Joy? Awe? Arousal?

All problem-solving starts with those two questions. Once you determine them, you know where you want to end up.

You know your intent. Now it’s time to find the clarity.

So now that you know the emotion you want to evoke:

3. Is the writing actually achieving it?

And if not:

4. How do you fix it?

Because you need to fix it. Don’t take the reader’s emotion for granted.

Don’t just describe the house.

How do you want the audience to feel about the house? Do you want them to judge it? Be impressed by it? Repulsed? Do you want them to laugh?

You ask this for every single line.

Now, sure, sometimes a character is just getting out of bed. But is that all there is to it?

HOW do they get out of bed? If they struggle, that means something. If they bounce out, that means something else.

I’m not suggesting you go into detail. I’m recommending strong, thoughtful verb choices. Let your verb do the heavy lifting for you.

What if no emotion is intended?

That’s rare. It’s more often that we just don’t want or need to evoke much emotion. This is where the verb choices make such a difference.

Janet gets out of the car.

Is very different than:

Janet bursts out of the car.

Each creates a different image in our mind, and we have a (slightly) different emotional reaction to each. We need this line to get Janet out of the car, sure, but a simple verb choice creates the emotion.

More often, when no genuine emotion is intended, it is because that action is required to get to an action that will evoke emotion.

In that case:

5. If no emotion is intended with a specific line, write the action as direct and succinct as possible.

Last but not least:

6. If no emotion is intended, and the action is not visually required to understand the moment, can you cut it completely?

The answer to that question is almost always YES.

An Example:

Take these action lines here.

Let’s go through the questions and rewrite this moment.

1) What is the line’s purpose?

The story of the moment is that she drops a fork and hurts her back. That’s what needs to happen here. Pretty clear.

A fair question is whether a fork is the most interesting way to do this, but that's for another time. For this example, we're going with the fork.

2) What emotion do you want to evoke?

Here, you have a lot of choices, and you need to make one.

This could be a moment where she has thrown out her back a third time, and that’s the joke. She keeps throwing out her back. If so, it’s not clear here. We would want to emphasize the “again” aspect.

The current version dips a toe into tension with the juggling, but retreats immediately. This is a non-choice because it lacks follow-through.

Do we want tension here?

Maybe. But only if we know the potential bad result. If so, we can create tension with the juggling. If the fork was nitroglycerin or anything fragile, for example.

But here? I don’t think so.

Here, the emotion is in the injury. We can make it comic or tragic or whatever we want, but the injury is the thing.

The first part, dropping the fork, just needs to happen to get to the second part, the injury, which is where the emotion is.

3) Is the writing actually achieving that emotion?

The first part doesn’t need it, and the second part isn’t achieving it.

4) How do you fix it?

Since the first part, the fork falling to the floor, is just something that needs to happen to get to where we want to go, there is no point in spending extra time or space on it.

We want that part to be as direct and succinct as possible. That’s question 5, remember?

5) If no emotion is intended with a specific line, write the action as direct and succinct as possible.

That’s it for the first part. It doesn’t need more than that.

But for the second part? For that second part, we go back to:

4) How do you fix it?

We DO want the injury to evoke emotion. So while succinctness is always important, the effectiveness of the emotion is the bigger priority.

The right emotion is always worth the real estate.

This is now a much better allocation of our words and our page space to achieve our actual intention.

The fork just needs to drop.

Everything else after that is designed for the emotion of the moment.

6) If a line or action has no emotional intent, and it’s not required to visualize the scene, that’s an action you cut.

In this instance, this was the juggling of the fork. It was a half-measure that helped us none. Either go all-in so it achieves something, or we cut it.

In this case, we cut it. And we never need to think about it again.

Process becomes talent.

Six questions may seem pretty cumbersome for every line. But we do much of it naturally once we make a choice of our intention anyway.

1. What actually needs to happen?
2. What emotion do I want to evoke here?
3. Is the line actually evoking it?
4. If not, rewrite it so it does.
5. If no emotion is intended, write the action as directly and succinctly as possible.
6. If no emotion is intended, and it’s not required to visually understand the moment, CUT IT.

If you ever get stuck, just go back to these questions.

Like any process, the more you do it, the more it becomes muscle memory and the less you think about it.

The less you think about it, the more hard work looks like talent.

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

​ Tom Vaughan
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