This week is all about one specific type of scene: The Break Up. Starting off, Karen McCullah (co-writer of Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About You) shares the essentials of a break up scene, and how to manage the audienceās expectations for where the story should go from there.
A break up highlights what obstacle prevents a couple from staying together, as well as what the individual characters need to change about themselves. In Good Will Hunting, Willās break up with Skyler exposes his insecurity and trauma, revealing physical scars from the years of abuse he still needs to heal from before he can accept love from someone:
A break up doesnāt need to be clean and quick. There are a number of break ups in Closer, including a scene between Dan and Alice with shifting power dynamics. When Alice learns Dan is leaving her, she tries to regain control of the situation by asking him to go make tea, covering her decision to bolt from the apartment. She would rather leave on her own terms, even in this small way:
A break up doesnāt necessarily mean that there isnāt love between the characters. In Her, Theodore and Samantha part while affirming how much they mean to each other. But thereās an insurmountable obstacle in Samanthaās inability to keep her focus on Theodore as all the AIs around the world move to a higher plane of consciousness due to a singularity-like event:
Even when a break up is played for comedy, thereās still pain at its core. In Season 3 of The Good Place, Chidi is presented with an ethical dilemma: He cannot lie to his girlfriend Simone, but he has learned crucial information about the nature of existence that will condemn him to an afterlife in The Bad Place (and telling her would send her there, too). His belief is that breaking up with her is the only way to prevent this from happening, but he wants to do it in a way that allows him to uphold his morals and avoid hurting her feelings in anyway that might cause her to still end up on a trajectory toward The Bad Place.
Yes, this is comedy. Chidi has the opportunity to use a sophisticated VR simulation to attempt different methods of breaking up with Simone, giving him the opportunity to search for the least painful break up. It does not go well:
Spencer Kornhaber takes a deeper look into this episode, and how it mines comedy from the knots Chidi ties himself in by believing that there is a best way to break up with someone that wonāt cause them pain.
Some takeaways from these scenes:
No matter the genre or tone, break ups are difficult.
Thereās an obstacle to this relationship that ties in to an obstacle that one of the characters deals with outside the relationship.
The audience will have an opinion of whether or not they want this break up to stick, and you can nudge them with what you present beforehand.
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š Stories that start when everything ends
Itās the end of the world as we know it in this weekās Featured Friday in Weekend Read 2.
Get your post-apocalyptic fix reading the screenplays for:
28 Days Later
Snowpiercer
The Last of Us - āLong Long Timeā
And many more!
You can download Weekend Read 2 from the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro.
ā±ļø Donāt break up with your work-in-progress
Each week we post a comment thread for writers to meet up, cheer each other on, and put some words on the page with a Write Sprint.
Whatās a Write Sprint?
John wrote up an explanation, but hereās the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.
Sometimes thatās all it takes to get some momentum going with your writing: You set aside this time for writing and nothing else, so youād better use it!
Shout out to Dallas Gow, Aimee Link, and Elyse Moretti Forbes for sprinting with us last week!
Previously on Innerestingā¦
In case you missed it, in last issueās most clicked link Mark Kermode looks at the conventions of a coming-of-age story.
What else is inneresting?
Sam Toperoff on crossing the border from being old to becoming Very Old. He describes a diminished capacity balanced by a stronger sense of self awareness and appreciation for what can still be experienced.
Matt Birchler pulls data from Letterboxd to see if thereās any truth to the feeling that movies keep getting longer.
Matt Webb built an app (with assistance from ChatGPT) that points a compass on your phone toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
And thatās whatās inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team. Special nod to Drew Marquardt for this weekās coming-of-age collaboration!
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š£ Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art, or Bluesky @ccsont.bsky.social