Give the Scene More Than One Job

A scene needs at least one job, something it causes, and the strongest often do several at once, drawn from material already in the scene rather than from added speeches. One scene in Casablanca (1942; screenplay credited to Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch) does four, and they hold one another up.

Victor Laszlo, the resistance leader, has tried to buy from Rick, the café’s owner, the letters of transit that would get him out of the city, and been refused at any price. Rick tells him to “ask your wife” why. The talk breaks off because German officers have gathered at the piano downstairs for “Die Wacht am Rhein,” Major Strasser on his feet among them. Laszlo walks across the room and tells the band to play “La Marseillaise.” The bandleader looks up toward the steps where Rick stands, and Rick, in close-up and silent, nods. The band plays and the room begins to sing. Yvonne, who came in that evening on a German officer’s arm, stands and sings with tears on her face, and the room drowns the German song. Strasser tells Captain Renault, the prefect of police, to close the place. Renault has no grounds, thinks for a moment, blows his whistle, and finds some.

Strasser takes the singing as proof that Laszlo is dangerous. The café is shut, and Strasser warns Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa, that life in Casablanca is cheap. Rick, who told Renault he would “stick my neck out for nobody,” has shown with a nod which side his café stands on, almost without words, and Ilsa’s proud look at her husband as he sings, straight after Rick has sent him to ask her a question, makes the question heavier. A room of separate tables has become one crowd with the Germans alone in it, and Yvonne is on the other side from the officer she came in with. Rick’s rule for his café was to stay out of politics, and the nod breaks it. Soon afterward he asks his waiter how long he can afford to stay closed, and the answer is two weeks, maybe three.

The scene to fear has a single job. It exists to deliver a fact, or because the outline says the two leads must meet, or because the location is beautiful. A manuscript of two hundred such scenes is two hundred rooms, and the reader tends to feel every seam between them. A reader seems to follow a scene through what it does to the people in it, so several jobs in one gesture send the reader on with several threads to carry, where one job sends one. The test is to take the job away and see whether anything is left standing.

One job, done cleanly, is sometimes exactly right. A breather after violence, a letter read aloud, or a short bridge between places can each do a single thing superbly, and the work breathes because they are plain. Overloading has its own cost, since when every scene is asked to carry everything, none can breathe and the reader sees the machinery working. If a scene’s second purpose needs the characters to stop and explain it, it is exposition (Practice 66), and it must earn its place on those terms.

Practice. Choose a scene and write its primary function as one verb phrase: “forces the sisters to choose a lawyer,” “convinces the jury the witness is lying.” Then list any secondary functions already present. Delete the primary function in your mind and ask whether the scene is still needed, and do the same with each secondary one. A scene with only one job leaves you two moves. Fold it into a neighbor that has room for it, or find in what is already on the page a second effect and sharpen it, without adding a speech to deliver it. Ten minutes will do for a scene, an hour for a chapter’s worth.