Introduction
It can be hard sometimes to unwind as a writer. We might constantly be feeling like we have things to do, stories to write, Twitter to scroll, and often full time jobs on top of that.
That’s why I sometimes struggle to sit down and watch something. To get around this, I’ll often give myself a focus for a show I’m watching.
Maybe I’ll only think about tone, or tension, or dialogue.
Well, in Pieces of Her the Netflix series based on the Karin Slaughter novel, I decided to dig in and take notes on the first fifteen minutes.
3 Lessons Learned
🧨 Inciting Incident
The inciting incident of this show is intense.
And honestly, it comes mostly out of nowhere. It’s what made the first fifteen minutes so compelling.
There are so many ways to do inciting incidents to make them work. But in this particular story, what I noticed was how jarring the scene was.
It went from laid back setting of mother and daughter having breakfast, to an absolute massacre. It’s this fast 180 degree turn that kept me engaged.
Does your reader see your inciting incident coming? Can you make it more dramatic? More surprising?
These are questions you should be asking yourself!
👊 Conflict at Every Turn
Just a thought: even if your characters are going to say ‘yes,’ make them say ‘no’ first.
I noticed this right toward the end of the opening fifteen minutes. a pair of officers come to talk to Andy (the daughter). Her step-father is there as well. Her mother has told Andy not to talk to police. Andy relays that message to her step-father quietly. So when the police ask to talk to Andy, she and her step-father decline.
This creates tension where the police are now wondering (as is the audience) why she’s refusing.
Even though the storyline required Andy to eventually talk to officers, by having her say no at first, it amplifies the tension.
Where can you find places to up the tension and conflict by making your characters even just slightly more adversarial?
👯♂️ Complex and Uncommon Character Relationships
One thing I noticed about this first fifteen minutes was how the story relied on complex relationships to reveal backstory and to complicate relationships in an interesting way.
As writers, we’re often using parts of stories we’ve read or watched before. By doing this, we sometimes rely too much on cliches.
Can you create an unusual relationship for your characters? Can you develop a dynamic that isn’t shown as often? Just something slightly off from what we normally see might be enough to make it interesting.
In a recent interview, Johnny Compton, said this…
“…there’s a lot of luck and everything involved, but if you can find something that’s just a skew of what everybody else maybe is typically doing. That can go a long way…The thing that got me in the door was not the good writing. The thing that got me in the door [and] What got me the attention and got me the agent and got publisher’s attention was the fact that I had a haunted house story that was just in a different setting…There’s a lot that’s out there that’s either under-examined or completely unexamined.” – Johnny Compton (THE SPITE HOUSE)
I noticed the way, in Pieces of Her, the story was just slightly different from what we’ve seen before.
Try to find ways of making relationships off-kilter from what an audience has seen before. It can keep readers on their toes and might make them more invested in your story.
2 Quotes
“She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.” –Karin Slaughter
“She had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.” –Karin Slaughter
1 Final Thought
I really enjoyed this show and recommend it for writers of all types. Whether you’re writing thrillers or not, this opening storyline will give you enough to help you build a story that readers won’t want to put down.
