Skits

Day 254 (112) – Assignment 6: Office Games

With the 6th assignment of the Internet writing course came the classic “fish out of water” premise.  The idea being that a character (or host of characters) is in a “clash of context,” meaning someone is in a place that doesn’t fit.  It could be a brain surgeon enrolled in a preschool class, or Hilary Clinton in a women’s restroom…

In the case of my assignment, it was a rabid football fan in the office place.  Check out Assignment 6 – Office Games before continuing on to the critiques.

Unfortunately for this week’s assignment I took the bait and tried too hard to make the scene funny.  While I think it is a humorous scene, my instructor points out that there’s no character development what-so-ever.   The characters are the same at the beginning of the scene as they are at the end, and there wasn’t much reason to care about any of them.

The point of this class is to focus on each character’s objective and their strategies.  And in all good scenes, they must overcome obstacles to achieve these objectives – that’s what makes it compelling.  Chad doesn’t really have a greatly defined objective – bring more football stuff into the work place?  Become the number one sales guy?  What stands in his way?  After the first sale – nothing.  And I never address why he is so adamant about having aspects of football in the office.

The secondary characters aren’t any better.  Who cares about Ray and what he’s doing?  And Marvin goes through the biggest transformation, but even that can be seen a mile away and isn’t anything spectacular.

Hopefully I’ll start to understand that strong objectives and strategies are necessary for successful scenes.   I only have 2 more assignments to show that I’ve actually learned that in this course, so here’s to doing some good writing over the next week.