In “Rock Dreams”, there is one scene that caused me more headaches than any other during the editing process: Tom is sitting on a park bench after the concert. He has just been humiliated on stage, is wearing a collar he cannot open, and is completely devastated. It is when everything falls apart.
My first instinct? Dialogue. Inner monologue. Tom should think, analyze, explain himself. Page after page about what he feels and why. It felt like work, like substance. But it didn’t work.
The problem wasn’t that too much was being said, the problem was that I, as the writer, was running away from the real challenge. Instead of showing how a person breaks down, I had him think about breaking down. That’s convenient. Dialogue and inner monologues make you, as a writer, feel you’re digging deep. You’re staying on the surface.
The scene needed something else: Tom sits down on the bench. His hands protect his face; his arms are pressed tightly against his body. He stares blurrily into the night. Then he picks up his cell phone, scrolls through his contacts, types several times, then deletes it again. Who do you call when you don’t know who’s still there for you?
Not a word about what he’s feeling. But everyone who reads it feels it.
That’s the frustrating thing about these moments: they need less text, not more. But they need more precise observation. How does someone who has just lost everything move? How do they breathe? What small, concrete action shows his helplessness? It’s damn hard to find that if you haven’t sat on a park bench yourself.
I still catch myself doing it. A character faces tough decisions, and I let them think about it. Three paragraphs of inner monologue later, I realize: this is laziness. The scene needs a glance, a hesitant movement, maybe a single word that they don’t finish saying.
The silence between the words is often louder than the dialogue itself. But writing it is hell because you can’t hide behind explanations. Either the scene carries itself, or it doesn’t.
In the end, I reduced the park bench scene to a minimum. Tom’s breakdown, his loneliness, his despair — none of that is in the text. It’s in what he does. And in what he doesn’t do.
Does it work? That’s for others to decide. But I now know that the most difficult scenes aren’t the ones with the big confrontations. It’s the quiet moments afterward. When someone just sits there and must move on without knowing how.