Thoughts of a Mad Man

Liven Up a Scene

One of the people I was reviewing had a scene that had all kinds of latent conflict, falsely resolved conflict, and foreshadowed conflict, (Maybe that's one thing, but she did have a LOT of it) but NOTHING in the present moment. Just some people having a great therapy session.


So I came up with a way to brainstorm things for a dull scene.


Imagine that the character is reflecting on how well things went, let her rant about how things should go. Let her go on.


Fill in the blanks, over and over: "I'm glad that ____ didn't ____."


Once you have come up with twelve or twenty things that near missed, put the most interesting ones into it somehow. Either as temptations or as actual events. Make stuff happen, stir the pot.


Take one of my plots. Now, I've just thought of this method, and I don't remember how closely or distantly my actual method followed it. With this you'll nevertheless see the problem, and one venue to solving it.





Sigrun hides in her room while her custodial Aunt and Uncle are viciously murdered by a so-called 'family friend' (due to racial issues.) They leave, she hitches a ride to town with a few counter-culture types who protect her, nurture her sense of fairness and justice. Eventually, she grows up to be a bastion of strength and an inspiration to both sides of the still-brewing race war between humans and urgans.


YAWN.


Let's start after the massacre.Good thing the urgans left immediately, instead of killing her. Good thing that the hippies didn't run into another band of the urgans, and nearly get themselves killed. Good thing that they handled them without the little girl's help, leaving her survivor guilt at manageable levels. Good thing her intuition, on which she deeply relies, didn't go bonkers and tell her that it was an apocalypse - rather than a personal catastrophe - and that everybody was about to be destroyed. Good thing that if that happened, she would have stayed with her new friends, rather than decide that her parents were right- that it's 'safer' or at least more comfortable to die alone, rather than watch STILL MORE of the people she cared about massacred. (Cause Mom and Dad went off to war together, rather than stay; she could have concluded that that's because "loved ones are your weak spot.')


Suppose that I decided to use all of those. Some might be actual events, some just threatened. To whit:





It might go like this:


Sigrun tries to warn her Aunt that there's an omen of danger, but aunt Myrrha stubbornly refuses and chides her for being airy fairy.


Little girl watches her Aunt and Uncle killed by a supposed friend.


She hides, narrowly escapes detection.


The beasts proceed to party at the out-of-the-way farmhouse.


When she comes out of hiding, the actual killer is dead, but the one she blames...


Still she escapes, hitches a ride to town.


The Urgan barbarians attack her new friends.


The friends are far better than the urgans, but there's too many until:


Sigrun uses her knowledge of urgan culture to shock the enemy. Several are caught off guard, laid out; several more flee, thinking she is a sorceress. Making her think that she CAN make a difference, and probably should have tried to help her Aunt and Uncle.


Once they get to the (dubious) safety of the city, Sigrun reflects... the world where she felt safe has been destroyed. In that moment, she realizes why Mom and Dad didn't want her, because they didn't fear being hurt but would NEVER be able to watch it happen to her. She decides to run away, lose herself in the crowd at the first opportunity...


While having nightmares and trying to blame every person she saw for the tragedy... her only friends being the ghosts of her Uncle and his urgan friend, Ker...





All right, I'll admit, the latter story is outlandish! But that's the genre. More important is this: It's dramatic, even melodramatic. And a lot more interesting than, "Well, they got what they wanted in the end."





Sure that should happen too — just before THE END!