Diagnose the Missing Pressure

A writer can rewrite a scene’s dialogue for a week and still not get it to move. A common case, and a composite, is two siblings in a kitchen discussing their mother’s will. Both speak courteously, and each says what the writer already knows. The writer suspects the sentences, but the sentences are fine.

Desdemona is in a garden with Cassio, who has lost his place as Othello’s lieutenant, in Act 3, scene 3 of Othello. She promises to plead his cause and says Othello will stand no farther off from him than policy requires. He answers that he fears that, absent and replaced, the general will forget his love and service. Then Othello and Iago come in. Cassio says he will take his leave. Desdemona tells him to stay and hear her speak. “Madam, not now,” he says; he is ill at ease and unfit for his own purposes. He goes. Iago says, “Ha, I like not that.”

Count the wants. Desdemona wants Cassio reinstated, which she thinks both generous and easy. Cassio wants his place back and, at this moment, wants more urgently not to be found here. On one reading, Iago wants Othello to ask a question and prompts it with a half-sentence that costs him nothing: Othello asks “What dost thou say?” and Iago answers “Nothing, my lord.” Othello, at this point, wants merely to know who has just left. Each of them is moving toward something, and each movement presses on someone else’s movement. The siblings are not moving toward anything, and their scene is slack because it lacks pressure.

Polish the wording of a scene in which nothing is at stake and you get better-worded nothing. The structural absence is usually in one of three places. There may be nothing the reader, or a character, wants to know that this scene has made urgent. A participant may want nothing from the others right now, specifically and in this room. Or failure may change nothing, so that the next scene would proceed unchanged.

In an argument the pressure takes other forms. An essay section stalls when it answers no question the reader has yet asked, and a historian’s chapter drifts when it presents events without any competing explanation that the evidence is meant to adjudicate. Ask what a skeptical reader would say at this point, and whether the section takes that seriously. If the claim, wrong, would cost the reader nothing, the section can be skipped.

A quiet scene can still be held under tension. The reader may know something the characters do not, or a character may be concealing something small, in which case the desire is to not be seen. Invented shouting and manufactured crisis add noise and no stakes. Some units also rest on purpose: a scene after catastrophe, a transitional paragraph, or a sequence that lets the reader recover may deliberately lower the pressure, and may be right to, provided you know the unit is resting and the pressure on either side of it is strong enough to carry the pause.

Practice. Before you revise a scene or section that will not move, stop editing sentences and spend twenty minutes on this instead. On a separate sheet, write one line for each participant: “wants [what] from [whom] right now, and will lose [what] if they do not get it.” For an argument, write the question the reader is asking and what the reader will conclude if the section fails. A line you cannot complete tells you what is missing, and the repair is to decide, not to rephrase. Then reread the scene with those lines beside it and note what the dialogue or paragraph actually does. Whatever serves none of the lines is the first thing to sharpen or cut.