Tuesday, September 30, 2014

All about Scenes

Scenes are the building blocks of a play, a screenplay, a short story, and a novel. There are various types of scenes; therefore, there are different words to describe them. Here are a few: scintillating, gripping, intense, memorable, funny, scary. What we as writers want to avoid is the scenes mentioned below:

1) a long scene
2) a talky scene
3) a static scene
4) a clichéd scene

I'd like to talk more about a clichéd scene. I have come across a lot of articles about avoiding clichés in our writing; however, I have seen many clichéd scenes in movies, TV series, and Web series. What are they? The first kind that comes to my mind is the car-chase scene. It has been overdone. What is the fix? It has been turned into a subway-chase scene. That, too, has lost its glamor. The second kind of a clichéd scene is the sex scene. Nine out of ten times, if those scenes were cut, they wouldn't hurt the story. Interestingly, although they are deja vu all over again, they haven't gone out of favor. What I have seen in those scenes is a lot of flesh but nothing fresh.

Yes, fresh. We should aim at writing fresh scenes.