The No Rules Handbook for Writers (know the rules so you can break them) by Lisa Goldman

Author:Lisa Goldman [Goldman, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oberon Books
Published: 2012-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

What keeps ‘em guessing more?

Rachel Anthony explains how she wanted to build suspense in a more organic way than the soap she was writing for would permit. Her experience reminds us that there are many different ways to achieve a desired emotional effect.

‘When I was working at EastEnders, at one point there was a rule that a scene couldn’t go on for more than three pages without cutting away to another scene. I had a scene that was about five or six pages long, I think it was Grant and Tiffany in the Vic – and I felt that cutting away and then cutting back to them would break the tension building up. Before I ever worked on EastEnders I’d seen a fantastic Tony Jordan episode, where Phil and Sharon had been having an affair and were arguing upstairs at the Vic while Grant was downstairs, and I was almost shouting at the screen for them to keep their voices down – it was a brilliant scene and the tension was sustained by staying with them. Luckily I had Kath Mattock as my script editor and she agreed with me and we argued to keep my scene complete rather than inserting some other random scene halfway through it. Then when Kath went to meet Tony Garnett at World Productions, to talk about working on The Cops, she talked to him about our battle to stay with the characters rather than cutting away – and later, when she’d got the job, she found that this was part of the mission statement of The Cops, that they wouldn’t use artificial cutaways to impose a false pace or tension – they wanted it to feel more like real life, where tension builds where you are. Then I worked at World for about four years, on a few different shows, and they were wonderfully innovative, and made so many inspiring and groundbreaking shows because they always looked for a new angle on drama, and challenged conventions.’

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