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Characters all alone should
do more than think.
You may want to have a character alone in a scene,
thoughts rattling around in his head. You do this to
show a bit of the inside, the emotions going on. Fine.
But the longer the beat goes on, the more you need
to get some action in there as counterpoint. Too much
introspection all at once gets wearying.
In James Grippando’s Last Call, jail escapee Isaac Re-
ems is hiding out in a vacant house up for sale. Now he
has to assess his next move and his need for a change of
clothes—the one’s he has on he stole from a homeless guy.
So Reems has a plot problem: Where to go next?
He thinks about it.
But to keep this from being just a thinking scene,
Grippando throws Reems another little challenge: bugs.
The clothes he stole are infested, so now he’s got them
all over his skin and hair.
He tears off the clothes and jumps in the shower.
Now he’s really up the creek in the clothes department.
But Grippando doesn’t stop there. An old man is walk-
ing his poodle past the house. The poodle sees Reems.
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