This One Rule Saves Bad Script
Segun Iwasanmi@iwasanmisegun212159
17 days ago
© Segun Iwasanmi
✍️✍️✍️
An old village storyteller once said something that stayed with me.
He said when elders gather to tell long stories at night, nobody notices the hours passing. But the moment the storyteller starts wandering, adding things that don’t move the tale forward, people begin to cough, stretch their legs, and quietly leave the fire.
Stories have always been like that, even before cinema arrived.
The camera simply made the rule stricter. A film scene is not there to decorate the story. It is there to push something forward. Maybe a secret is revealed. Maybe a relationship changes. Maybe a decision is made that will cause trouble later.
But if the scene ends and the story remains exactly where it was before, the audience feels it immediately, even if they cannot explain why. The energy drops. Attention begins to drift.
I sometimes ask writers a small question that sounds simple but causes serious silence.
“If we remove this scene completely, what exactly breaks?”
If the honest answer is nothing, then the scene was only visiting the story. It was not living there. And visitors, no matter how entertaining, cannot stay in a script forever.
The strongest scripts I have worked on were not the longest ones. They were the ones where every scene had work to do. One moved the story. Another deepened the character. Another quietly planted a future explosion.
Once a writer begins to see their scenes this way, something interesting happens. The script becomes tighter, faster, more alive. And suddenly the audience cannot look away, because every moment feels like it matters.
Not many people realise how much power sits inside that one small question. But the moment a writer begins asking it seriously, their scripts start behaving very differently.
© Segun Iwasanmi | ™The Man With The Story.
Book Writer | Screen and Scriptwriter | Creative Fiction writer | Book Editor.
I help people turn rough ideas into bold stories that work
