How changes can affect narrative momentum.

This week is some real inside baseball stuff on screenwriting. I am going to dive into a challenge I encountered and the solution I came up with.

That said, the real lesson here is not so much the solution, but the challenge, and how it needs more attention than most give it.

It is the challenge of narrative momentum from scene to scene.

There are two primary ways to keep narrative momentum going.

A dramatic question.

This is usually derived from a character's immediate want and the question: "Will they get it?"

Will the character get there in time? Will they catch the bad guy? Will they escape the dinosaur?

If the same dramatic question extends into the next scene, then the dramatic momentum carries over with it.

But eventually, we have to answer that immediate dramatic question.

They DO catch the bad guy, or they DO get there in time.

When that happens, we have two options to keep momentum moving forward.

The first is to immediately ask a new dramatic question. The other is —

The emotional residue.

The emotion of one scene carries over and affects the next scene.

In either case, something happens in one scene that carries over to the next, keeping the narrative momentum and our attention moving forward.

Short of these two things, narrative momentum stops.

This gives the audience a chance to lose engagement. In addition, once momentum is lost, it takes considerable time and effort to regain it.

But even when you have found that momentum, and each scene links to the next, any revisions to the script may break that chain.

This is the dilemma I encountered while rewriting an old screenplay.

First, I will explain how the story was originally written, then explain the changes I wanted to make, the challenges those changes presented, and the solutions I came up with.

The first draft, as it was originally written.

This is a science fiction film noir piece. It takes place in the near future, and at its heart, it is an amnesia story. The reason he has amnesia is the science fiction aspect, but for our purposes, let's focus on the amnesia itself.

At the end of Sequence 2 (The end of Act 1)

KYLE KEENUM WAKES UP IN THE HOSPITAL.

Kyle is a cop. His Captain tells him there was a murder. Unfortunately, Kyle can't remember the last 90 days. He doesn't know who killed this person or how he is involved, but he knows he might be a suspect.

One of his only clues is that he had a hotel key when they found him.

His primary concern right now, however, is his family. He can't get hold of his wife.

→ This need to "Go home" drives us into the next scene.

Which sends us into Sequence 3.

KYLE GOES HOME

But his wife is gone. So is his dog. He learns his wife is leaving him, he has no idea why, and assumes the dog is with her.

→ Both the emotional residue and the question of what happened carry us into the next scene.

TO THE PRECINCT

All of his friends at the precinct have turned on him. His Captain says, "Don't look into it, and go talk to your wife."

→ "Go talk to your wife" carries us into the next scene.

KYLE AND HIS WIFE

Kyle visits his wife. She does not want to reconcile.

→ In this draft, little carries us into the next scene except for how interesting the coroner scene is and how much we want to see it, but it is not the best transition.

THE CORONER

Kyle gets information on the dead body. He is sad. Goes home.

→ Emotional residue carries into the next scene.

HE GOES HOME AGAIN

Kyle is depressed after the coroner scene. He's lonely. He looks at the hotel room key. Now he decides to investigate.

→ "Investigate the hotel key" drives us into the next scene.

This is the end of sequence 3, First Steps, and pivots us into Sequence 4, First Attempts.

THE HOTEL

Kyle arrives at the hotel with the key and finds his dog waiting for him!

So he's been staying at this hotel for some time! This launches him into his investigation, which pushes us all the way to the midpoint.

The assessment

That's a lot of information, I know. But it helps to know this as we figure out the revisions. These are the main things I wanted to change.

I dislike that he has the hotel key for about 12 pages before taking action. That is a leisurely pace. I want momentum instead.
I want the discovery that he has been staying at this hotel to be an "ah ha" moment and then have that immediately launch him into investigating the crime. (Sequence 4)

Just as important, here are some complications I realized in between drafts.

I did not have a dog when I first wrote this. Now, as someone who has anxiety dreams about forgetting to feed my companions, there is no way Kyle is not asking, "Where is my dog? Who has my dog?"
Why didn't the cops on the case take his key card and investigate this clue themselves? For logical reasons, any clue has to be something the cops on the case would not have access to.

The Plan

I am going to cut the hotel key altogether. It's gone.
Instead of the card key being the clue that leads him to the hotel, he tracks his dog there instead. By finding his dog, he discovers that he has been living in a hotel room.
I decided to put a GPS tracker on the dog. More importantly, in their microchip. It's the future, after all. Kyle follows the tracker, finds the dog, and then locates the hotel room.
BUT. He has to NOT KNOW that is an option. Otherwise, checking the GPS is the first thing he would do as soon as he discovers the dog is missing!
Solution: The coroner will know that some fancy microchips have locators! Kyle didn't know that because his wife did all that. Do I buy it? I think so. Maybe.

The ripple effect.

Now, the sequence of scenes remains essentially the same.

The scene with his wife is when it gets complicated.

Here is the dilemma: as soon as Kyle discovers that his wife does not have the dog, that is going to take over their scene.

But that scene is there for a reason, and it's not the dog.

Now, you can end the scene with Kyle discovering his wife doesn't have the dog, but that would then require THE NEXT SCENE to be about the dog.

But the next scene is the coroner, and we already lack strong momentum between those two scenes! This would make the flow from one scene to the next disastrous.

Why?

We cannot see him discover that no one knows where the dog is and then move on to something else in the next scene.

The audience would 100% reject it. He has to deal with the dog.

One solution I did not take.

The most obvious solution is to move the coroner scene to later. Have Kyle find out the dog is missing, then go immediately to the microchip locator to discover the hotel.

The main challenge with this is that the nature of the coroner scene is a Sequence 3 scene.

It's a part of his "new world" where he is learning and discovering the new rules. There are a couple of things we set up for later, but it's really about the emotional effect on him.

After Kyle's discovery of the hotel launches us into Sequence 4, it's full momentum now, and a pit stop into the coroner will slow things down even worse.

The solution I embraced.

I decided that mentioning the dog at the end of the scene between Kyle and his wife would create too much pressure to have the next scene about the dog and the dog only.

So I had to find a way to have the dog mentioned but not take over the scene.

This is where the question, "What story are you telling?" comes in handy.

KYLE AND HIS WIFE

This is the story of a man who is scared of intimacy. While he does not betray his wife in other ways, he will lie to his wife about his feelings and his trauma, thinking he is protecting her.

When he realizes she doesn't have the dog and he is supposed to be taking care of him, he lies and says that he is.

But she isn't sure if he's telling the truth, and that leads into what the scene is really about: their disintegrating marriage and how she no longer trusts him.

The button of the scene is about that.

We still go to the —

THE CORONER SCENE

But the first image is now of Kyle uploading a photo of his dog as he reports him missing to the neighborhood database.

The coroner interrupts him, but we show the dog on Kyle's mind, doing what he can to figure that mystery out, too.

A bit of a compromise? Yes. But it's actually an even better transition than before.

Now, for reasons that are too complicated to get into, Kyle mentions to the coroner that his dog is missing. The coroner asks what kind of microchip the dog has.

Kyle isn't sure because his wife did that.

The coroner explains that the nice ones have GPS on them.

From there, we cut to…

A GPS MAP

And Kyle following the location to —

THE MOTEL

It leads him to the back where the dumpsters are, and after being terrified that his dog might be in there, he hears the dog barking in one of the rooms.

Kyle goes to the front desk to explain that someone has his dog, but the clerk recognizes him and Kyle now realizes he's actually been staying at this place for months.

This marks Kyle's first significant step toward understanding what happened, and from that point on, he is full steam ahead in trying to unravel this mystery.

Embrace The Revisions

There wasn't anything necessarily wrong with the earlier version. It just wasn't as good as it could be.

I didn't love Kyle seeing something that he possessed for a couple of days and then deciding to do something with it.

It robbed us of a sense of discovery, that "ah-ha" moment that I spoke of. We just kind of slouched our way to a reveal rather than a clear want driving us there.

Once I decided on that change, more changes popped up.

I had to revisit the flow of the narrative and how all the scenes linked together. Some scenes are obviously connected, others we will have to connect ourselves.

What is the last button of the scene?
What is the first image of the next?

While there are obviously times we will want a sense of a bigger transition, more often we will want each scene to flow naturally into the next.

The changes created more opportunities for emotion.

Every single one of the scenes now has more emotion.

Kyle hides his shock when he discovers the dog is missing.
Lies about it.
His wife confesses she has no idea if he is telling the truth or not, and that is the problem.
Kyle is emotionally engaged when he is at the coroner's.
We cut the "sitting around feeling sad until he decides to do something" scene from the first draft.
He is now at the motel to find his dog and is terrified when he thinks he might be in the dumpster.
He is furious to discover someone has his dog.
Only to feel the shock of realizing he is the one who has been staying at the hotel.

Avoid the drive-by revision.

This is when you quickly implement the note without exploring its impact on everything else. You treat it like homework. You do the bare minimum required to check the box.

Remember, if you see the logic hole or an emotionally false moment, other people do, too.

Hoping no one else notices is a poor strategy. Believe me, I've tried! For many years, I tried. It never paid off.

As with everything, if you're going to do it, do it right.