when excitement strikes

The sun has come out today, shining hot among masses of white cloud. I've just come in from my first run in a couple of weeks. I ran shirtless, and sweat runs down my body now as I type. The manly writer!

Kimmie, though still feeling bad about her exchange with Joanne, is much improved. She got a perm last night at a new salon near her office, and was pleased with it (lots of soft curls). She also had a long talk with her manager, Eileen, who was most sympathetic and supportive. This morning, as she headed out in her white denim and baby-blue top, she was just short of cheerful.

While awaiting fresh data for the estate from Harvey's stockbroker, I got back to my project. Yes: where was I? Chapter 17 notes. Right. Yesterday I had started to make a bulleted list of dialogue topics for my current scene, which became more like a series of "beats" (the little events that make up a scene). I had most of my topics, but still not the dramatic flow. What's the drama of this scene? The conflict? Who's trying to do what, and what's stopping him? Argh! This is what I'd been procrastinating. It's work--and I resent working.

Just do a little at a time, I counseled myself, like someone trying to coax a child to eat lima beans. You can rest at any time. I went back to the top and recapped for myself, with kindergarten simplicity, who was doing what and why. That helped. It got me going. I realized that I'd been spending so much time on developing the topics of my dialogue that I had mixed up that process with the process of developing the drama of the scene--the underlying conflict between the characters.

Ideally a scene, especially if it's a large, important scene, should have its own miniature "act structure"--the large-scale turning-points within it as it moves from its initial state to its conclusion. The scene is its own little story, with its own surprises. In this scene, Alexander is trying to get the astronomer Sosigenes to do something for him. The basic conflict is that Sosigenes doesn't want to--and Sosigenes has much more authority and power than Alexander does. What's Alexander to do? He's got to come up with something.

An extra ringer in the scene is the presence of Lynceus, another astronomer. The addition of a third character turns the scene into the equivalent of the "3-body problem" in gravitational physics--the equations become impossibly complex to work out. In short, a third character destabilizes the situation. This is the dynamic that works in character "triangles" such as the love-work triangle that James L. Brooks created for Broadcast News. In a triangle, when one character acts, the other two are pushed to respond, and their twoness makes their responses dynamic and unpredictable, which further destabilizes the situation.

The writer creates more work for himself, in a way, but also a potentially more interesting situation. Today I felt the dramatic line of the scene--and indeed the chapter--click into place. Eureka! Yahoo! Yes! I remembered what it's like to get excited by a project. I thought back to working with Warren on The Odyssey, the sometimes long periods of dramatic blockage. A scene would resist our efforts, and we would try different ways to make it live.

The wonderful thing was that when we got an idea that would bring a scene to life, the writing became easy. Ideas would tumble out; I couldn't even write them fast enough (I would write notes in longhand while we were working out a scene). "What was that?" I'd say "What was the third part?" The beats wrote themselves, and then writing the scene became easy. It wrote itself. After sometimes days of blockage, pages would roll out. And they'd be good. We knew they were good; we knew why they were good. And that type of material, with only occasional exceptions, would be almost rubber-stamped by the network--even network people don't usually change stuff that's actually good.

I had some of that breakthrough feeling today: I got excited by my scene. I'm not just executing outline; there's a drama unfolding here.

When I read over some of the pages that I've drafted for this chapter, I was pleased. I'm already 8 pages in--a significant start. I'm enjoying the characters, an excellent sign. Braced with my new dramatic ideas (not really new--more like connecting what I already had), I scanned through the existing material, tweaking a few lines, then typed just a few more lines. It was the end of the morning; I knew that to really launch into this scene I'd need to pick it up another day.