We don’t know how they do it, but writing advice blogs seem to hit similar points at the same time. Not counting blog tours and discounting the occasional post “inspired by” an article published elsewhere, we find that articles tend to bunch up around a single topic in the same week.
Case in point: In a post for the Stage 32 blog, playwright Chris Morley talks about trusting your audience’s imagination. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the article below in which Barbara Linn Probst discusses the importance of trusting your reader’s intelligence and your own talent.
Morley offers two rules: Never tell the audience what they already know, and Knowing what to leave out is as important as what to leave in. “Letting the audience fill in the blanks of the on-screen story with their own imagination is infinitely more effective and powerful then walking them through something they have already anticipated and essentially written in their own minds,” Morley writes.
Morley shares an example from Downton Abbey. In one scene, two members of the house staff realize they have been sold plaster dust as flour, but the show cuts away before they confront the person who sold them the junk goods. Now, the audience is imagining how this will play out. However, once the show returns to this story thread, that confrontation has already occurred. The episode picks up with the vendor realizing that his entire stock of “flour” is garbage and that he’d been swindled.
The audience fills in the blanks between the two scenes. “The story expands instantly in our minds, far beyond the borders of the screen, bringing it truly to life all by giving us less rather than more,” Morley writes. The drama is increased because the writers left things out and let the audience tell the story to itself.
So how can you try this? Examining the scene above, Morley says the most interesting aspect of the exchange is the character’s self-revelation when he learns he’s been swindled. He is not a canny investor, but a fool who’d been taken in by a con man. This is a painful lesson. The moment the character realizes he’s been swindled is not shown, leaving the audience to imagine it. Instead, we see the character destroy his stock in a fit of rage.
“So which beats do you leave in and which do you leave out?” Morley asks. “Over and over again the Downton Abbey scripts cut to the essential next scene not to the logical next scene, it cuts to the unpredictable action/reaction/choice, not to the easily anticipated.”
Instead of going to the next chronological scene, jump to where a revelation occurs or a decision is made. Even revelations can be skipped if the link between two scenes is strong, as in the example above. “From a writing perspective map out all the beats in the drama and then decide which are really dramatic, which involve a choice and action and leave the rest to the audience,” Morley suggests. “There are no hard and fast rules but this exercise surely points out the potential benefits of scene sub-text and giving the audience less rather than more. Actually giving them less IS giving them more!”
