In Creative Screenwriting, I read this quote from documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick: “An interesting thing about documentary is that you don’t know what you’re going to get when you shoot. And even after you’ve shot it, you don’t really know exactly what you have until you edit it.” He says he shoots “every possible scene and situation…the idea is to gather as much material as possible.”
This suggests an experiment you might want to try when writing fiction. Write three or four versions of several scenes and then mix and match them to see what works best. Sometimes the most interesting effects come up when you write several sequences of scenes, and then piece together one from each to break up the predictability of the sequence.
For example, version one might be: (1) George gets called into his boss’s office and gets fired; (2) George goes to a neighborhood bar and gets drunk; (3) When George gets home, he tells his wife he quit and they get into an argument.
Version two might be: (1) George overhears that he’s about to be fired; (2) George goes into his boss’s office and punches him; (3) George goes home and pretends to his wife that nothing is wrong and he still has his job.
Finally, version 3 might be: (1) Something happens at work that is the last straw for George and he quits; (2) George goes back to his old college, which represents a more innocent time of his life, and watches the young people walking around; (3) George goes home and lies to his wife that he’s been fired, so she won't get bad at him for quitting.
If we do a mix, we might end up with: (1) Something happens at work that is the last straw for George and he quits; (2) George overhears that he was about to be fired anyway; (3) George goes home and pretends he still has his job.
I’m not suggesting this is a masterpiece, but at least it has the little twist in the middle, that he gets deflated when, feeling proud of himself for leaving the job, he finds out they were about to chuck him out anyway.
The next time you have a sequence that feels too predictable, you might want to give this a try.
