Inspiration:
Scene Writing Practice

Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur

Funnily enough, I never used to think of writing as an activity that required practice. I started writing when I was eleven years old, loved it, and wrote every day.

Of course, I didn't write something publishable every day. I wrote reams and pads and notebooks full of things that will never see the light of day.

I was practicing. I just didn't know it.

As soon as I realized what I was doing, I consciously harnessed the power of practice to help me develop my weak areas. My writing improved very quickly when I focused on those areas.

When you're starting out, it can be hard to understand scenes and how they work. When you read them, the balance between narration, dialogue and action seems flawless and transparent - which is how it's supposed to look. Bluegrass banjo players make Foggy Mountain Breakdown look easy, too. The truth becomes all too apparent when you pick up a banjo and try to play it yourself.

Writing practice improves craft and helps develop intuition about scenes. Reading helps, but you've got to put pen to paper to understand the techniques. When doing daily writing practice, it can be tough to come up with ideas. If you get bogged down in sheer invention, you'll never get the practice done.

Which is why I recommend stealing. In fact, I highly recommend it.

Take a scene from your favorite movie. Watch it several times. Study it. When you feel you have a pretty good grasp of how it works, write it as you would a scene in a story.

Here's an example of what I did with the opening sequence from Walter Hill's 48 Hours, starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy:

Albert Ganz waited for the blue truck.

Heat hazed the air above the hill. It was always hot out here, even if you weren't tearing at an unforgiving earth with a dull pickaxe. Even if you weren't laboring under the watchful eyes of a trio of prison guards.

A beaten ribbon of single-lane dirt bisected the hill, bracketed by an ancient picket of barbed wire fence. The road was not well-traveled. But the blue truck was coming. Ganz knew it.

When it arrived, everything would change.

Brady, a tall guard with a crooked, humorless smile, stood near Ganz, a Remington Model 870 riot shotgun riding easily over his shoulder. He made small talk, an occasional joke. Ganz was in good with Brady because Ganz kept his mouth shut, his back bent and his arms in motion. Unlike many of the dozen prisoners on the road gang, he never made waves. Never made trouble.

Nobody thought of Ganz as trouble, which was how Ganz wanted it. Model prisoner. What Brady didn't know, it wouldn't hurt him.

Yet.

Brady was saying something, but Ganz didn't hear it. Beneath the laconic drone of Brady's voice, Ganz heard another sound: the low, thumping rumble of an engine. A vehicle approaching.

Ganz kept his face neutral. This had been a long time coming. If he played it right, it would be worth every second he'd had to wait.

The engine noise rolled off, then up, peaking as the vehicle itself appeared, cresting the hill in a hurricane of dust and forward motion - the blue truck, hitting the rise with enough speed to catch air before slamming to earth on the downward side. It slewed sideways, all four tires fighting for traction amid road ruts and flying gravel, and disappeared momentarily behind the hulking silhouette of the 33-passenger bus that had brought them here.

For one awful moment, Ganz thought the truck would simply topple sideways as it came back into view, tumbling ass-over-tincups down to the bottom, landing on its roof. But at last the tires caught, propelling the truck to a sliding halt less than ten yards from Brady and Ganz.

Dust whirled around the driver as he got out of the vehicle - a big, solid tree trunk of a man, Native American in the black hair and seamed, tanned skin, crazy Irish in the blue eyes.

Billy Bear.

Ganz watched, waiting to see how he would play it.

Billy walked closer. Brady took a protective step forward, bringing the Remington to port arms. Ganz saw him mark the position of the other two guards, already planning what to do if this big Indian started something.

"Wonder what reservation they let him off of," Brady said. Ganz chuckled.

Brady thought he was ready for anything. Ganz hoped he was wrong.

The man took another step forward. Blackfoot-Irish mix, maybe, but when he spoke, the voice was pure Texas.

"Sir, my truck's overheating. It's thirty miles to the next station. Can I get some water from your cooler?"

Now Ganz would find out if he truly had Brady where he wanted him. "Maybe you shoulda stole a better truck, Tonto," he said.

Billy glowered, edged closer. Ganz waited for Brady to notice, tell him to step back.

"You got a big mouth, convict," Billy said.

Brady grinned. "Take it easy, chief," he said. "He was just joking."

Billy took another step. Now Brady's training would kick in, warn him that Billy had just stepped inside reaching distance, breaching the reactionary gap officers learned to keep between themselves and a suspect -

"Okay," Billy said. "Can I have the water, please, sir?"

Billy stood less than six feet away. Brady still appeared relaxed, not threatened. Ganz stood frozen, a moment's hesitation. It was time now, after all the waiting.

His chance. Finally here.

Now.

"Fire water!" Ganz said, jabbing his middle finger at Billy. "Isn't that what you mean, Tonto? Fire water!"

Billy was on him before he could think about it, tackling him, rolling them over into the filthy water of a drainage culvert just beyond the railroad track. Billy came up on top and slammed a very real right cross into Ganz's jaw. Ganz's howl of pain was also real; the jaw would still be sore three days later.

"Hey!" Ganz heard Brady shout. "What the hell are you doing? He's a state prisoner! Get off him! Get clear!" He couldn't see Brady, but he knew the guards would not fire on what they considered to be an unarmed civilian.

Ganz wrapped his hands around Billy's throat. Billy continued to pummel his face and body. The first punch had to look good, but now the blows were light, creating a flurry of motion that did little damage but hid Billy's real actions, which took place beneath the muddy water.

Those actions aburptly turned the wrestling match into something else entirely. Billy leaped sideways, and suddenly both he and Ganz were armed with handguns - big, ugly .44 Magnums, perfect for close range work.

Brady was twelve feet away, still stunned by the rapid turn of events, the sudden appearance of the pistols in the middle of what had seemed to be a spur-of-the-moment throwdown. He began to draw down with the shotgun, but he never got the weapon past the midpoint of his shoulder. Billy and Ganz opened fire, and Brady went down, the shotgun flying from his hands.

Ganz struggled up from the muddy water, immediately tracking the next target - the second guard, shotgun already leveled, waiting for scrambling convicts to clear his line of fire. "Get out of the way!" the guard shouted.

That necessary hesitation cost him his life. Ganz, not at all concerned about wounding or even killing his fellow road gang members, fired on the guard. His first shot went wide - Ganz running, firing a pistol at a moving target - but the second caught the man in the torso, knocking him off his feet.

The third guard ran, scrambling for cover behind the open bus door as Ganz and Billy drew down on him. Ganz put his last two rounds into the bus door, leaving the wheelgun empty. Billy tossed him a speedloader, but he didn't need it. The last guard was inside the bus now, trying for the radio. There was no immediate threat to their flight.

That was the priority now. Get the hell out of here.

Ganz glanced over his shoulder, laughing at the sight of the lone officer desperately radioing for backup while gray-suited prisoners scattered through the tall brush like strange birds. Those prisoners would be back in lockup in a matter of hours.

Ganz had different plans.

Because you're writing for practice, you can use copyrighted characters and situations to your heart's content - as long as you don't try to publish your "exercises".

Writing from movie scenes can be very instructive - not to mention a lot of fun. You have to translate a form that is primarily visual into a form that is much more internal, which give you the opportunity to invent things, put your own spin on the story and include things like backstory and narrative that don't exist in the scene but are appropriate for fiction.

The relationship between Brady and Ganz doesn't exist in the movie; Brady's name appears in the screenplay, but is never spoken onscreen. The first part of the sequence is all inside Ganz's head, with the action moving out when Billy Bear arrives. Giving Ganz a character to play off adds some dynamics to the scene, and builds reader sympathy for Brady when he's shot by Ganz and Billy.

Play around with a scene from your favorite movie and see what you come up with. Any writing you do will further "prepare your mind" for an original scene all your own.

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