Scene Exercises

An old friend of mine from grad school recently got in touch. He’s going to be teaching a screenwriting class this semester and he was wondering if I still had any of my notes about the scene exercises that we did in our first-year writing seminar.

To my credit or shame, depending on your point of view, I’ve dutifully filed away my notes and reference material for every course I’ve taken since I started as an undergrad at Hamline in 1993. It was the work of about 45 seconds to find the right file, once I actually made the time to get the job done.

On the one hand, there was the nostalgia, going through that file. That’s a topic for another time.

The thing that struck me while I was transcribing the scene exercises into an e-mail is how easy it is to forget all of the lessons of good writing you’ve learned when you’re actually down in the weeds of writing. It’s very easy to get caught up with plowing the storyline forward and completely neglect—or completely forget—to weave in the characterization and texture that a good scene in any creative medium needs.

Here’s an example scene exercise:

Preparation for a Date: Show a character preparing for a date. You may not use dialog. The action must occur in real-time (no cuts in time, no montage, etc.). The scene must communicate who the date is with, where it will take place, and whether it’s a first date. The scene must communicate how the character feels about the date. (Is he or she apathetic? Excited? Does he or she dread it?) The character’s date may not be a part of the scene, and the scene must end when the character leaves the immediate location where he or she is preparing.

It’s plain to see that doing a scene exercise like this begins to teach you strong techniques you can use in actual writing. The ability to telegraph detailed information about scenes to come is critical craft for screenwriting, but all too often, in a scene written in the wild, the characters just wind up just talking to each other about what’s going to happen in the future, which is boring and horrible, because you ought to be dedicating the talk in a scene to drama, not to the laying of pipe. (David Mamet, for one, has expressed his feelings about this IN ALL CAPS.)

There’s a lot more to say about the business of writing scenes, obviously, because I spent forty grand on a Master’s degree in doing it and I’m still puzzling it out a lot of the time.

But one of the non-obvious things that transcribing these exercises made me think about is the way that it’s also easy, in the thick of GMing a tabletop RPG, to forget every bit of good craft that you know in favor of calling out the next initiative number, rolling the dice, hash-marking the damage, and step-and-repeating as fast as you can in the hope that no one will get bored.

The first thought that arises from that is an exhortation to keep your wits about you in the thick of play. Don’t let yourself get stuck in that turn-by-turn rut where game runs you, as it would in Soviet Russia, instead of the other way around, as it should in all freedom-loving nations.

But the second thought I had was that it might be interesting to craft a series of creative scene exercises for GMs. They’d be the same kind of exercise as the screenwriting scene exercises, intended to stretch a GM’s creative muscles by asking them to craft encounters that might or might not ever see the light of day, but which would have the tendency of re-reminding GMs of all the craft they know.

Here, in that spirit, are three encounter exercises.

Reluctant Informant: Create an encounter in which a party of adventurers must convince a reluctant NPC to divulge information that he or she wants to keep secret. The NPC will not give up this information based on the simple results of any kind of mechanical test (Persuade vs. Willpower, for example). Rather, leverage and background must rule the day. Successful resolution of the scene must not be dependent on prior events, or prior knowledge about the NPC in question.

Rock and Hard Place: Create an encounter in which there are two concurrent physical threats to the life and limb of a party of adventurers, and one must be pitted against the other in order for the heroes to survive. The physical threats are such that the party would likely be unable to match either of them individually, much less at the same time. The heroes’ goal is to move past the encounter; they need not necessarily best either or both of the threats.

Ambush Reversed: Create an encounter in which the party of adventurers is ambushed by a foe that they absolutely must not kill. The reason that the foe must not be killed is not known to the adventurers at the beginning of the ambush, but is only revealed mid-way through, after the party has (presumably) begun their counterattack. The encounter ends when the ambusher has been subdued or persuaded to stop the attack.

One of the tricks, I think, in crafting encounters in response to exercises like these, is to avoid scripting them too aggressively. As we all know, roleplaying is at its best when it’s open-ended, when the players have legitimate choices to make, and where the world responds to their choices organically. That is, one of the challenges at hand will be to avoid writing railroad encounters, but instead to create situations that can provide adaptive challenges depending on what the heroes do.