Sequences: How They Work
Make your story more cinematic by thinking and writing in sequences, not scenes.
These notes refer to the document Sample Sequences, which was written to illustrate various aspects of sequences. I suggest printing out the example, reading it, then working through this analysis with the example on hand.
Storytelling: Guided Conversation, not Lecture
There’s a saying that floats around in post-production: ‘No film is ever completed, just abandoned.’
And it’s partially true. You can always spend more money, and more time, on a film. But would it make for a better movie?
It’s not because of budgets and release schedules that no film is completed. It’s because a completed movie is not the locked-off cut that gets distributed and screened. That artefact is just the trigger for a continuing series of new stories, each of them co-created with an individual viewer.
Every individual in every screening uses your story to tell themselves a slightly different personal story. Sure, their story is triggered and shaped by your story they’re watching up on the screen. But it’s equally triggered and shaped by their life experience.
Ideally, they are co-creators and co-owners of your story.
Good storytelling recognises this. A good story is not a lecture, it’s a guided conversation. You lay out the dots; the audience draws the lines.
Keeping the audience on their toes
But to do this, they must be engaged. And engagements stems, in part, from variation. From avoiding predictability, while keeping it comprehensible.
There are many kinds of variation.
- Fast, slow, still.
- Tension and release. Pressure in waves, not one long climb.
- Length: micro-beats, mini-scenes, full scenes.
- Time: compressed, real, stretched.
- Point of View: through whose eyes are we looking now?
- Hidden connections: metaphoric transitions and connections; visual and aural rhymes.
- Connection with the characters: Empathy, Projection, Observation.
- Audience Information: Behind the characters, With the characters, or Ahead of the characters.
These sample sequences were written to explore all these variations. The following segments unpack a few of them.
INFORMATION: Behind, With or Ahead
A key part of storytelling is managing the flow of information, and specifically the relationship between what the characters know and what the audience knows.
The audience can be
- Behind the Character: the audience engages through curiosity and puzzle-solving.
- Beside the Character: we share a character’s significant realisation and identify.
- Ahead of the Character: we anticipate potential wins and losses, invest in the choices the character must make soon.
All three possibilities are visible in these sequences. Generally, you don’t want to be Beside the Character too much of the time, because it diminishes the impact of the moments of shared realisation. This is a hazard of dialogue based action: it tends to put you Beside the Character too much.
Sequences 1 & 2 – catching up and catching on
Storytelling cliché 101: Get in as late as possible, get out as early as possible. Or, if you want to sound educated, in media res.
When you get into a story late, the characters are already in action. The audience has to work out what’s happening, and why.
Sequences 1 & 2 are both introductory sequences. They begin the story we’re being told. But the character’s stories have already begun. We have to catch up.
And that’s what we are doing, right up to halfway through Sequence 2. We are behind the characters, watching them in action, in their world. They know what’s going on; we don’t. We’re watching them go about their lives in the moment, and working out what it means.
Specifically, we are looking for and finding the contradictory situations and character contradictions that we expect to find at the beginning of a story. And, as long as the writer plants them, and lets us find them, we will.
After all, that’s what we’re here for – a story.
But even the big reveal at the end of Sequence 1 is old news to everyone in the story. Not that the women are lovers, but that one of the women is the Queen.
The first moment we are beside the character, finding out something at the same time they do, is midway through sequence 2.
Switching POV to connect
It’s [Moment 1 – WITH] in the script, where the Queen, sitting at her mirror, admiring her new earrings, realises that the King isn’t leaving. And isn’t going to leave…
This is the first major moment where we are in step with a character. We realise something crucial at the same moment the Queen does. Better yet, if the actors play it well, we will realise moments before she does, which will make us feel anxious on her behalf. Then, as soon as she also realises, we will be with her, identifying deeply with her situation.
That moment solidifies our connection to her.
Up until now, we have been seeing the story through the maid’s eyes, and our connection is with her. And for the first moments of the second sequence, we are more like an outside observer, watching. Up to the moment with the King, the scene emphasises the unbridgeable gap between Queen and servants.
But this moment shifts our point of view for the rest of the sequence. It creates a strong connection with the Queen, even as we observe her hands on the earrings, and her feet in the stirrups. We’ve connected with her, and now we’re having that connection stretched a little.
Do we sympathise with her plight, or judge her for making this compromise? This is a question the rest of the story will explore.
What have we learned so far?
What do these 2 initial sequences tell us? What do we deduce that’s under the surface? How have they set up the story?
Together, the two sequences tell us that these 2 women are united in affection and intimacy but divided by role and class. They tell us that they share a large building with many corridors and many rooms, which gives many opportunities for secrecy, but also many people, and great risk of discovery.
They tell us that in this world, these women can only be together because of their roles. But at the same time, those roles make it impossible for the relationship to become more than snatched moments.
Both women are trapped by their roles, but also trapped within their roles. Their roles make the relationship possible, but they also make it impossible.
This is the core narrative question – does this relationship have any kind of future? What would have to change for the relationship to survive? What would have to change in their circumstances? Within each of them?
The maid does not challenge the hierarchy, or her role in it. The Queen does not challenge her wifely duties or royal expectations. They are both trapped, because in this world, both must choose between their role and the relationship.
The Queen cannot be Queen and also be with the woman she loves. But she likes being a Queen, and the world wants her to stay Queen. She is trapped.
The maid is also trapped, but in a different way. The only way the maid can continue to have a relationship with the Queen is by working at the palace. But the only job available to her at the palace is as a maid, which limits their relationship to those secret, snatched moments.
The maid has a pinch of power in the situation because she is insignificant and therefore largely invisible. To some extent, she can hide in plain sight. But that’s the limit of her power.
Although the Queen is theoretically more powerful, in reality she probably has even less power. The power that comes with her role is largely symbolic. What power she does have depends on staying within the bounds of her role. What’s worse, she is fond of the rewards that come with her role (or at least has made a trade in her mind between her duties and her rewards).
Which brings up a sub-theme – what is the nature of power? Can the powerless become powerful, and vice versa?
Neither of the sequences says these things explicitly. They say them implicitly – and are all the more powerful because of that. We joined the dots, so we own the picture.
For the next steps, see Sequences: How They Work, part 2
