What’s a Micro-Story in a Scene?
Not a beat but...
(Photo by Daniel Gregoire from Unsplash.)
On the page, it’s easy to read a simple action in a scene without giving it a second thought. A character sees something, registers it, and reacts. Another hears the doorbell, goes to their front door and opens it to see who’s there. Another hears a comment, glowers, and stands up from their seat in protest. Someone sad hears good news and smiles. Someone happy is told something bad and grimaces. Someone searches for something in a drawer—when do they find it? Someone else l rummages for a coat in their full wardrobe. I could go on…
I like to call such minutiae not beats but micro-stories. I don’t mean the term in the sense of a very short story under 1,000 words or so in length, how the expression is used in fiction. Even that would be a macro-story by comparison with what I’m talking about. I don’t even mean one of Félix Fénéon’s estimable three-line stories (translated by Luc Sante and published by New York Review Books—a present to me from my much-missed mentor in teaching Gill Dennis). Nor am I referring to Hemingway’s deft For sale: baby shoes, never worn (told to me by another mentor of mentoring I’m so much the less without—Frank Pierson). What could be more micro than that despite its dark chasm of a backstory? (Was it Hemingway who wrote it though?)
No. I’m talking about how the brief steps of a moment in a scene happen in a sequence that forms a vignette of behavior, of reaction, and action, although not necessarily in that order—our interaction with the world at the most fundamental level. (Perceive/assess/react/think/decide/do.)
I’m also talking about storytelling, even in this granular form, as a teasing of the viewer or reader—another kind of micro-story. We anticipate something happening, but just how will it happen?
New filmmakers often fail to tell these little stories. Even experienced directors and editors can screw up, missing out a step, an instant, a shift, a look, even several. Because these mini-episodes often take place between lines of dialogue—an exchange of silent looks, for example—they can be easy to miss.
Say someone sad sees a group of children laughing loudly as they play. What’s the micro-story? 1. The sad person. 2. The laughter of the children. 3. The sad person looks to see who’s laughing. 4. We see the person’s POV of the children. 5. Back to the sad old person although NOT TO THEIR SMILE but to THEIR SAD FACE AS THEY THEN SMILE.
In other words, we need to register not their completed reaction but the change in it as it happens. Think of how many accomplished directors and editors make the mistake of rejoining the sad old person only after they have already reacted. They miss that beat within the micro-story and as a result sever the connection of audience to character. By the time we’ve come back to the sad old person, they’ve moved on and we’ve missed THEIR MOMENT OF CHANGE—the granule that stories are made of.
Say that after hearing the doorbell ring, A. opens the door to see who’s there. Okay. Say we are ‘with’ this character, in their narrative point of view, and we don’t know who is on the other side of the door. What’s the micro-story? 1. A, seen in profile—so there’s no chance of us seeing the caller—opens the door. 2. NOT THE CALLER, but with the camera outside the door, we see A again as they look to see who’s there. 3. Then, the camera inside, WE AT LAST SEE THE CALLER. 4. A’s reaction—happy, startled, relieved, horrified, whatever—and we see it as it happens.
The act of perception, of what is perceived, and of the reaction to that is the story of our most basic engagement with the world. It’s very simple but laced with suspense—especially if for a moment we are not sure exactly what is perceived and if, for another, we are uncertain of our character’s reaction. By articulating that, by showing it, beat by beat, you are telling its micro-story. You are also teasing your audience—making them wait. You don’t ‘cut to the chase’ (in other words the character’s realization), you cut to the suspense, even if it’s only micro-suspense.
Here’s another example of how a filmmaker teases their audience with a micro-story. One scene into Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, we find boy protagonist Little running from a group of bullies. He dashes up the stairway to camera right to a row of apartments and tries the first door he comes to. Does it open? Of course not. He tries a second. Same result. He tries a third, this one opens—and he enters. That’s a micro-story that observes the rule of three. Third time lucky, and he’s in, after we’ve been kept in suspense along the way. But as he enters, he leaves open the door’s outer iron gate—and that begins the next micro-story:
1. A bully appears from camera left, not having run up the staircase to camera right like Little but one camera and entering frame left so that our anticipation of a bully appearing is met but not in the way we expected. 2. He runs to Little’s door, its gate swung open so that we expect to see him follow Little into the apartment. 3 He tries the door but finds it shut, unlike the outer gate, so that he can’t go in and can do nothing but bash his stick against it.
There… no dialogue but two micro-stories within a scene.
Say a character opens a drawer to look for something. Don’t have them find it immediately. Put something in the way. Put two somethings in the way. Only by sweeping aside one, then the next, do they get to find what they’re looking for. An action is rendered a story, a beat a narrative. Show this and you make the audience wait for the reveal too. Make them wait and you make them believe!
Micro-stories, the molecules that constitute the fabric of the scene…
Peter Markham September 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)