In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 214.
It was one of those calls you never forget: A Hollywood producer wants to talk to you about your book—and not just any producer, but Lynda Obst, who made The Fisher King and Interstellar, who paved the way for women in the industry and practically invented the nineties romcom. On the phone, I was nervous; she was sharp, funny, and deliciously no-nonsense. She wanted to adapt my memoir, No Way Home (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), about my childhood on the run from the FBI with my pot-smuggling dad. And, in what still feels like a dream, she offered to mentor me through the process of writing the script.
I put aside my then novel-in-progress, Amphibian; I had hit a wall with it anyway. And over a series of lockdown-era Zoom calls, she in Los Angeles and I in the damp English countryside, I learned how to structure a screenplay. We spent six weeks just on the outline. When Lynda, ever candid, read my first attempt at a beat sheet, she told me if we made this movie it would be four hours long. Weeks of contraction and compression followed; we combined multiple scenes into one and conflated characters. We were so brutal in this process that my brother was cut from the script entirely.
One written page equates to around a minute of film, and with just 125 pages, every single line must count. As I worked on the outline—creating in-depth scene cards—I stuck a Post-it note behind my desk with the reminder: Each scene must achieve three goals: plot (tension), character (conflict), and theme (emotion).
An effective scene can introduce a vital plot point, contributing to rising tension. It can also develop character, demonstrating internal or external conflict. And it can be thematically important, building the emotional texture or tone of the movie. Ideally it achieves all three. And in doing so, it keeps the story moving forward.
Much of the work writing a screenplay comes in the arrangements of these scenes into sequences, and sequences into the larger story, organized in a cause-and-effect relationship. If tension is a thread, then causality is what ties it together, pulling the narrative tighter.
I stuck another invaluable note from Lynda on my desk wall: Each scene should contain a cause with its effect felt later. If you’re asking the viewer to pay attention, when will that attention be rewarded? Because the language on the page of a script is so sparse, every detail has significance.
After a few rounds of revisions, Lynda told me, in her inimitable gravelly voice, that I’d brought her to tears; it was ready to take to market.
While I waited for news and tried not to daydream about my Oscars acceptance speech, I returned to my novel-in-progress—a coming-of-age story about the mythic terror and wonder of girlhood. I’d previously submitted a draft to my agent, who was unconvinced, naming more successful comp titles like My Dark Vanessa (William Morrow, 2020) and Marlena (Henry Holt, 2017). I realized that these books had what mine lacked: propulsion. I’d written a series of pretty scenes, but they lacked that vital thread that tugs the reader through the story—the thread I had just so meticulously constructed when writing a screenplay.
Sitting at my desk, I looked up at the same sticky notes. I realized that Lynda’s directives could also be applied to my novel. The scene is the building block of fiction in prose as much as it is in a script, and yet I hadn’t considered these units of story with the same structural rigor as I’d just practiced over the previous six months.
I knew my characters, their motivations and conflicts; I knew the story world, the plot, and narrative arc. But I hadn’t closely considered the causal relationship between my scenes or the ways they could act as fractals of the whole.
I broke down my novel into an outline, and for each scene I asked myself, what is its goal? What is driving the tension? What does my reader want to know? I tracked the chain of cause and effect throughout the story, looping those threads together. In doing so I saw which scenes didn’t serve the book—or which details didn’t serve the attention of the reader—and followed the same logic of contraction, compression, and conflation I had applied to my screenplay. Whole characters and subplots were cut as ultimately superfluous to the story. And while in fiction there is more space to stretch out, to be elegiac, screenwriting taught me how to effectively use each scene to its greatest potential—and as an agent of propulsion.
Lynda sadly passed away in October. We never got to make our movie together, but I’ll be forever grateful for her mentorship—and that, unbeknownst to her, she saved my novel, too. Amphibian came out from Ig Publishing on October 22.
Tyler Wetherall is the author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, 2024) and No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, British Vogue, and Condé Nast Traveler, and elsewhere. She is also the creator of the New York City book events newsletter Reading the City. Find Tyler on Instagram, @TylerWrites.
image credit: Kelly Sikkema