I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me while I’m eating this 17kg squid.
You know when you’re talking to someone and you both run out of things to say so you sit there silently? In your head, you’re running through everything that you’ve talked about and trying to find intelligent questions, but you’re coming up with nothing.
This happens a lot in scene work. One solution is to say something totally unexpected then find a way to justify it and relate it to everything that came before. If you can pull it off, you’ll add new content while also enriching previously generated ideas.
Using Non-Sequiturs to Generate/Enhance Themes
Non-sequiturs are useful for generating themes:
Alice: Hey neighbor, here’s your rake! Thanks for letting me borrow it.
Bob: Oh great, thanks. I’ve been looking for this.
Alice: Yeah, lots of leaves falling right now.
Bob: I’ll probably rake leaves tonight and play in them with my son.
Alice: (panicking) Yeah… I have a kid too.
Bob: (non-sequitur) Last night I found a T-rex fossil in my attic. No idea how it got there.
Alice: (framing) What? Like a real dinosaur fossil?
Bob: (adding context) Yeah! The crazy thing is that it must have been hidden there the whole time, and I didn’t realize until I started cleaning.
Alice: (framing) It makes you wonder if things are hidden everywhere and we’re just not looking hard enough.
Bob (connecting) What do you think we’ll find under these leaves?
Sure, not the best scene, but it illustrates how to weave a non-sequitur back into a scene to enrich previous ideas. At first, raking leaves is just raking leaves. Now, it’s a metaphor for uncovering new things. Raking leaves and finding the t-rex fossil have the same theme, and we can switch back and forth between them while maintaining thematic unity. Instead of having a single thread, we now have two threads woven together. We can switch between them at will, but we’re always going in the same direction.
So, how did Bob generate the non-sequitur? He thought: “leaves… decomposition… carbon… fossil fuel… fossils”. Below, I describe an exercise I call Unusual Associations that trains this ability to make long chains of associations that create an idea that feels like a non-sequitur.
Using Non-Sequiturs to Generate Characters
Non-sequiturs are also useful for building a character, especially at the beginning of a scene.
Suppose Alice initiates with a very strong choice. Something I see happen far too often is that Bob yes-ands Alice’s choice, but doesn’t make a strong choice of his own that defines his character. Throughout the scene, Alice will have a playable gift (one she gave herself), but Bob won’t have anything to do except respond to Alice. We can see tag-runs that explore Alice’s character, but Bob is entirely disposable. The scene is always going to focus on Alice’s character; there can’t be give and take, because as long as Bob doesn’t have a playable gift, he has no way to take the scene and make it about his character.
If Bob instead responds to Alice with a non-sequitur, then he gives himself a playable gift. Bob needs to listen to Alice carefully, but he shouldn’t respond to the content of her line just yet. In lines 3 and 4, Alice and Bob will double down on their initiations, then starting in line 5, they’ll negotiate over who drives the scene first.
They’ll both have a playable gift that they can fall back on at any time. This lets them both alternate between being the focus of the scene, creating a give and take dynamic. Because they both have a playable gift (which is easily transformed into a strong want/desire), they both have a way to take the scene. And that lets the other person give, because being affected by another character’s choice is a way of giving and enhancing their choice.
Here’s an example without a non-sequitur 2nd line:
Alice: Alright, I’ve gotta take off, my daughter’s elementary school play starts in 30 minutes.
Bob: I’m glad my kids are all grown, I don’t miss those days.
Alice: I want to cherish her while she’s young. Kids grow up so fast.
Bob: Psh, I wish my kids came out at age 14, I just don’t like kids.
Okay, not bad – we have some playable points of view here. Alice wants to cherish her kids while they’re young – in the most general sense, she wants to appreciate the present moment. Bob just doesn’t like kids. Maybe in the most general sense, he’s always looking towards the future and not appreciating the present. Cool. But their points of view are focused on the same thing: present vs future. This is kind of limiting. Notice how much richer this example is:
Alice: Alright, I’ve gotta take off, my daughter’s elementary school play starts in 30 minutes.
Bob (non-sequitur): You have no idea how badly my elbow hurts right now. I feel like I’m disintegrating.
Alice (doubling down on her thing): I want to cherish her while she’s young. Kids grow up so fast.
Bob (doubling down on his thing): The pain keeps me up all night. And when I lie awake staring at the ceiling, I think about how much I hate my job here and how I’m basically a necrosing walking corpse being eaten alive by spreadsheet maggots.
Alice (connects with Bob while filtering it through her want): Look, I’m sorry that I’ve asked you to work late –
Bob: You threatened to fire me if I didn’t work 12 hour days.
Alice: Right, my daughter comes first. She’s young and worth cherishing. You’re… well, your time for cherishing is up.
Bob: What? I’m 28!
Alice: Yep, basically expired.
Bob:I’m getting surgery next week because of all these repetitive stress injuries. I have a long life ahead of me.
Alice: I don’t understand why you aren’t willing to make sacrifices for art. My whole life I’ve (launches into back story as Bob shrivels)
This is much more interesting to me!
Notice how tension builds in the first 4 lines as Alice and Bob seemingly ignore each other. Then tension is released in the fifth line when Alice connects her stuff to Bob’s stuff – Bob is hurting because Alice has asked him to work late so she can help out at her daughter’s elementary school play. When they connect, they both have already made strong choices for themselves, and importantly, these choices are centered around two totally different things. This makes it feel like two worlds are colliding, whereas in the first example, the choices felt like they were in the same world.
Instead of having opposite points of view about the same thing, try having two strong points of view about two totally different things, then do chemistry with them – put them in the scenic test tube and see how things blow up.
This approach to initiating scenes was introduced to me by Kevin Reome in a workshop. Thanks, Kevin!
Exercise for Generating Non-Sequiturs: Unlikely Associations
This trains two abilities: generating non-sequiturs and mind-reading.
Everyone stands in a circle. The more people the better. Someone starts by saying any sentence, for instance:
My favorite part of a hike is when you fall into a dense green forest and lose the ability to see the sky.
The goal of everyone else in the circle is to associate concepts until they find a sentence that seemingly has no relationship to the previous. However, inside their head, the train of thought makes perfect sense.
So, my thought process might be: a dense green forest… green… colorless green ideas sleep furiously… Noam Chomsky… universal grammar…
then I say:
It’s incredible that people are exposed to a finite number of sentences in language, but have the ability to construct infinitely many.
Everyone in the circle now tries to find the connection between my sentence and the previous. If someone thinks they see the connection, they can say “connection!” and guess. If the guess is wrong, and no one proceeds to guess correctly, then we move on and repeat the exercise, this time associating off my sentence about languages and grammar.
If someone guesses correctly, then we stay on the “dense green forest” sentence until someone manages to create an association that no one else can understand.
🦑 ⢠🦑🦑
It’s important that in everyone’s heads, they’re associating away from the first sentence, instead of trying to come up with something totally random. This reinforces the idea that our minds are constantly creating complicated webs of associations; all we have to do is be quiet and listen. We don’t have to force ideas; they’re always being generated. So, to generate a non-sequitur in a scene, we just have to make a lot of associative leaps from the last line.
The fact that everyone else is trying to guess the connection between the current sentence and last sentence encourages people to associate further away. This is the same idea as a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). One person generates ideas, trying to mystify everyone else. The other people try to find the connection. This creates an arms race between non-sequitur generation and mind-reading. Both are great skills to develop!
Exercise for Justifying a Non-Sequitur: Modified Blind Line
Instead of sourcing lines from other students, write them yourself, focusing on evocative images or concepts.
Instead of using a lot of blind lines, use fewer blind lines per scene, just one or two person.
And instead of justifying just enough to get a laugh and then moving on, focus on how the concept in the line ties into or enriches previous concepts in the scene. Focus on thematic unity.