A couple years ago I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Rick Eid, co-creator of the brilliant re-imagining of the Battlestar Galactica series. Something he said has stuck with me ever since and I've been especially aware of it lately as I return my attention to revisions on my play about the rise of Ted Kennedy.
He told me that whenever it came time to make the tough choices regarding what to cut and what to keep (a daily exercise for writer-producers of television) he and his collaborators stuck to one simple axiom and it never failed.
Character always trumps plot.
So, for example, if the choice is between a scene that advances the plot and one that deepens our understanding of a central character's journey, the best choice is always the latter. Every time. This is not to say important plot points can be discarded willy nilly. Not at all. But more often than not, a crucial piece of plot mechanics can be woven into a character-driven scene more naturally than the opposite.
In my current play, I have a few scenes that are the type of scenes a dramaturge with a penchant for outlines might red-line at the first opportunity. In one, Teddy and Jackie are painting by the sea. The scene is only about a page long. Not a lot happens in it but it fills in their relationship in a way that, I'm convinced, helps set up another, longer, more plot-crucial encounter between the two of them much later in the play. As one actor in a recent workshop pointed out so astutely, a hyper-willingness to cut ones own material can sometimes result in one finding a skeleton where a play once stood.
On the other hand, some of the scenes in which I took great pains to connect the dots of this plot point and its neighbor, I'm finding myself shredding. And currently, it feels right to me.
Think about it in relation to your own writing. And let me know if you agree.
