Now the writer’s problem is this: how to progress the scene? To build a next beat, the writer must move out of the character’s subjective point of view and take an objective look at the action he just created. This action anticipates a certain reaction from the character’s world. But that must not occur. Instead, the writer must pry open the gap. To do so, he asks the question writers have been asking themselves since time began: “What is the opposite of that?” Writers are by instinct dialectical thinkers. As Jean Cocteau said, “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction—the
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