“The Frog Principal” 5: Fixing the Mess

Okay, so clearly I got so far up my own nose on this scene rewrite that I damaged my brain: this needs simplified, clarified, and above all focused. So definitely the conflict box again and a beats analysis, but also a better look at the characters.

I read that Russell T. Davies scripts never used more than three adjectives to describe his characters in his teleplays, two lines to describe his settings. So Pet is smart, cautious, and lonely. Wy is instinctive, suspicious, and aggressive. Geoffrey is kind, curious, and arrogant. Felix is cheerful, hardworking, and naive. I can move outside those words as I write, but that’s the general impression that readers should get.

But then I realized, I’d already described Wy in a later scene, when Petal is trying to explain him to Mirra:

“I think what you see when you look at Wyland is what Wyland is. He heads straight for things. He has all this energy, it’s like controlled fury, and he heads straight for a problem and then just bangs at it until something breaks. I don’t think he’s capable of duplicity, he’s just so . . . there, every moment, all the time. Frankly, I don’t know how he sleeps.”

So Pet’s protecting a secret and Wy is going on the attack until he gets an answer:

Another way to analyze is a steal from the Pixar Poster (click to enlarge):

That’s my scene and I’m sticking to it. So now all I have to do is break it down into beats, Pet vs. Wy:

Beat One: Pet calls the EMTs, gets Wy, too, tries to be helpful until Wy’s questions get to close to her secret. So the stakes move from saving Colin to saving Colin and keeping her secret. TP: Pet asks them to leave.

Beat Two: Pet tries to get them to leave and take Colin with them, but that makes Wy more suspicious, pressing her until she makes a mistake. The stakes move from saving Colin/keeping her secret to saving Colin/keeping her secret/getting rid of Wy as soon as possible. TP: Colin’s gone.

Beat Three: Wy tells the EMTs to take the frog and go, but it’s disappeared. Pet suggests they all leave, but the EMTs start looking for the frog, and Wy tells her she should take him inside the house to talk since she’s in a royal mess, which tells her he knows her secret. The stakes rise to their highest point and Pet loses: Wy knows her secret and Colin’s not only a frog but missing.

Then take my new rough draft, break it into one document per beat, get all the set-up stuff into the first beat so nothing disrupts the tension in the second and third beats, make sure each beat gets shorter and escalates, fix all the minor stuff the betas found, and try to get my voice back. Then fix the next scene . . .

Clearly this is not going to be the last draft of this scene.

I’m going to try to get the next rewrite up tomorrow. Argh.