131
40
Characters all alone should
do more than think.
You may want to have a character alone in a scene,
thoughts rattling around in his head. You do this to
show a bit of the inside, the emotions going on. Fine.
But the longer the beat goes on, the more you need
to get some action in there as counterpoint. Too much
introspection all at once gets wearying.
In James Grippando’s Last Call, jail escapee Isaac Re-
ems is hiding out in a vacant house up for sale. Now he
has to assess his next move and his need for a change of
clothes—the one’s he has on he stole from a homeless guy.
So Reems has a plot problem: Where to go next?
He thinks about it.
But to keep this from being just a thinking scene,
Grippando throws Reems another little challenge: bugs.
The clothes he stole are infested, so now he’s got them
all over his skin and hair.
He tears off the clothes and jumps in the shower.
Now he’s really up the creek in the clothes department.
But Grippando doesn’t stop there. An old man is walk-
ing his poodle past the house. The poodle sees Reems.
Z4273i_127-159.indd 131Z4273i_127-159.indd 131 9/24/09 11:21:06 AM9/24/09 11:21:06 AM
132
The miniature white poodle was barking and
bouncing up and down like a Ping-Pong ball, as if
to shout, “Run for your life—there’s a black man
in the house!”
So Reems has yet another problem, and looks for a
solution to this barking dog. He picks up a hammer.
End of scene. Well done. Because we want to find out what
happens to the poor poodle! But Grippando, skilled suspense
writer that he is, makes us wait.
And that’s how you write a scene that’s not just thinking.
Z4273i_127-159.indd 132Z4273i_127-159.indd 132 9/24/09 11:21:06 AM9/24/09 11:21:06 AM
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.