Banter Is Not Story
A famous screenwriting guru once said that every scene had to have conflict or be funny. I threw his book against the wall. I don’t think being funny is enough of a justification for a scene in the movies, but I know it’s not enough for a novel because while moviegoers watch, novel readers participate. You can be a passive watcher, but you can’t be a passive reader. And that means that at a subconscious level, a good reader is going to try to make that scene fit into the puzzle of the story. I think good readers can keep a lot of plates spinning in a plot as they read through, but if there are still plates spinning at the end, they’re going to feel unsatisfied. So every scene, in my humble opinion, must be crucial to the story, must fit into the plot arc and character arc, and must stop spinning at the end, must finish the puzzle. Anything that doesn’t fit is going to be a broken plate, an extra puzzle piece. That’s bad.
In my discovery drafts, I write anything, but in the rewrites, I look at a scene and ask, “How does this move the plot, develop character, deepen theme, escalate the tension?” Sometimes a scene doesn’t do any of those things but I don’t cut it because it feels like it might become something, because I feel it’s important in a way I just haven’t seen yet. Those often get cut in the end anyway, but sometimes they turn out to be the softball scene in Welcome to Temptation, that started off as snappy patter and turned into Phin making Sophie officially his girlfriend in front of the whole town. It arced the relationships and deepened the hatred that the antagonist had for Sophie, spurring her to up her attacks. It pushed into the open the conflict between Phin and his mother. And it finished the Dillie/Sophie subplot; Dillie chose Sophie as her new mother before Phin did. Oh, and it underscored the mother theme. It didn’t do all of that in the first pass because I was just getting the words on paper, but by the time the rewrite was done, it was pulling its weight and multi-tasking like crazy.
Which brings us to banter, the “funny” justification for a scene. Banter is like sugar, it makes the plot go down easier. But also like sugar, if that’s all there is and there’s too much of it, it can smother the taste of the more important stuff. (A little sugar in a lot of tomato sauce is piquant; a lot of sugar in a little tomato is a mess.) I have a particular problem with this because I love dialogue; if I had my choice I’d write radio plays. So my first drafts are always dialogue heavy, sometimes just dialogue. The problem with dialogue is that it’s often just people chatting. It might be clever dialogue, but unless it’s doing something, it’s just chat. That becomes filler, and if you’ve constructed a good plot and then the reader hits filler, she’s going to skim that looking for plot. It’s similar to the problem with sex scenes; if there’s no plot there, it doesn’t matter how funny/sexy/well-written something is, the reader is trying to put the plot puzzle together, make every piece fit, and this thing doesn’t.
So when I hit a scene like the marriage discussion scene which popped up after another discovery draft scene in which big things did happen, I look to see what’s in there (nothing important) and if any of the chat could mean something I just haven’t seen yet (what’s this whole marriage thing about?). I wrote this scene because the one before had huge implications and then everybody left Nick and Nita alone in the apartment with breakfast and I knew I wanted a breakfast scene. Momentum carried me there, not story.
To decide if I want to keep it, I look at scene basics. It’s Nita vs Nick because it’s in Nita’s PoV and there are only two people. So what’s the conflict? There isn’t any. They do discuss solving Nita’s cash flow/job insecurity with marriage, but they don’t struggle over it. Nita isn’t against it and Nick isn’t for it, they’re just explaining things to each other so they can understand the situation. That’s actually a good thing for a relationship plot, they talk to each other and listen, but that also happens in just about every scene they’re together in for the rest of the book, so this scene can’t rest on that.
Okay, how do the characters change? They don’t. Nick is changing, but it’s not really demonstrated in this scene. I can up the emotional content, but the scene that really nails Nick’s change comes right after this one, so this isn’t needed. And Nita’s changing, too, but the scene before this shows that because she wakes up after her day of traumatic new knowledge and says, “Okay, this is the new normal.” The previous scene makes that clear. This one just sort of continues it. It’s an empty scene between two strong ones. I don’t need it.
Fine, how does this move plot? Uh, it doesn’t. If they decide to get married, it would do that, but that’s all it would do. I think the problem is that I haven’t set up that Nita has money troubles because she doesn’t; she’s not rich by any means but she has a job and she lives within her salary. The worry is that she’ll lose her job, and that’s foreshadowed by Button’s notebook, but it’s not something she’s truly worried about. Marriage is a solution to a problem she really doesn’t have. And I don’t see how making it a problem adds to the rest of the story. It doesn’t make sense: she’s a good cop, people on the island like her, her dad’s the mayor, there’s no reason to fire her. She’s going to give the department a reason to fire her shortly, but at the time of this scene, it’s just not a problem. So the whole marriage conversation is a solution in search of a problem. Meanwhile, there’s actual plot going on around it that needs the story real estate this is taking up. A scene has to earn its place in a story. This scene is freeloading.
Snappy patter is not story. It’s like sugar in tomato sauce, salt on french fries, it adds a lot, but if that’s all there is, it’s not only not satisfying, it’s actively off-putting, ruining what it’s supposed to enhance. Read in just one scene, empty banter is fun. Read in conjunction with a hundred thousand words of story, it’s a waste of a reader’s time.
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