Friday, November 16, 2012

Emotional Change: Insight into Editing Your Own Work

I spent this morning as I have the last several mornings: going through the outline of Eva and making sure each scene has an emotional change.

I first learned of this story principle from Robert McKee's Story (he calls it a Value Change, I believe). This guideline now seems so obvious, and I'm chagrined I didn't figured it out on my own.

A scene without emotional change is a scene that has a character in the same frame of mind or experiencing the same emotion at the beginning as it does at the end. Scenes without emotional changes are wasted scenes. Either nothing happened to move the plot forward, or nothing happened to the character (no character development).