While talking with a writer friend about his script tonight, he described a potential scene for his climax that we agreed was awesome, but he didn’t want to write because, well, I’ll let him explain it…
“…as awesome as it would be to see [secondary character] go berzerker on these guys at the climax (hooked up to a car battery, I agree, is an awesome visual), that robs [main character’s] sense of urgency and agency over the climax”
Writers think and say and live by stuff like this, and frankly, it holds us back. We cling religiously, fanatically to abstract notions of how a story is supposed to be constructed, as if narrative was a mathematical formula we need to solve. It isn’t. This is how bad, boring movies happen (the writer in question is not guilty of boring writing by the way). The problem is, we get so neck-deep in the mind-numbing crawl out of the oblivion of the blank page, we start to serve abstract notions of story instead of our reader/viewer/audience. We let ourselves stop asking the question, “What’s the audience supposed to get out of this? Is it any fun?”
Have you ever asked a person what the plot of a movie was that they saw once a month ago? Usually, they can barely tell you. Hitchcock was right when he said the audience doesn’t care about the MacGuffin, they don’t, and they don’t really care about the plot either. That stuff is just an excuse to have the good stuff: good scenes with conflict, excitement and drama. That’s what people remember. And yet we seem to spend all of our time ironing out the MacGuffins, troubling ourselves with dorky little rules about who needs to be active and passive and whatever else.
My point: When you’re writing, don’t hold back. Open the freaking tap, give your audience everything, even if it doesn’t all make complete sense. I would rather do a second draft where I have to take a bunch of awesome stuff and make it make sense then try to spice up a perfectly logical bore.