Munday: Framing the Scene
What are your favorite type of scenes to write? Fight scenes? Love scenes? Funny scenes? Dramatic moments? Why? Do you make an attempt to write outside your comfort zone and try others, or do you tend to indulge yourself?
This one time, at drama camp, I got some good acting/writing advice: there are, the teaching artist said, fundamentally only two types of scenes -- power scenes and love scenes. Not love as in romance, necessarily. The distinction lies in whether the characters involved in the scene are concerned about each other as ends ipso facto, or whether one (or both) consider(s) the other to be merely a means to some other self-interested end.
As I've noted in previous mun prompts, I love multi-layered characters whose motivations are like Schroedinger'a cat. I also love the complex scenes produced by sticking two of them together. Writing at the boundary, where my readers are left guessing which type of scene it is, love or power, that is my favorite. Dramatic, tense scenes.
At the other extreme, "death is easy, comedy is hard." I'm still trying to figure out how to accomplish my goal of having my main pair of characters make each other laugh, under honest circumstances.
This one time, at drama camp, I got some good acting/writing advice: there are, the teaching artist said, fundamentally only two types of scenes -- power scenes and love scenes. Not love as in romance, necessarily. The distinction lies in whether the characters involved in the scene are concerned about each other as ends ipso facto, or whether one (or both) consider(s) the other to be merely a means to some other self-interested end.
As I've noted in previous mun prompts, I love multi-layered characters whose motivations are like Schroedinger'a cat. I also love the complex scenes produced by sticking two of them together. Writing at the boundary, where my readers are left guessing which type of scene it is, love or power, that is my favorite. Dramatic, tense scenes.
At the other extreme, "death is easy, comedy is hard." I'm still trying to figure out how to accomplish my goal of having my main pair of characters make each other laugh, under honest circumstances.