BUT here was the other great thing: I didn’t have to get it right the first time. If in writing a scene I realized it didn’t make sense or didn’t fit in that spot, I’d pull the card out (saving the scene for later) or shift it and make another card for the scene that did. I went into this “Glove or Glass Slipper” style of writing with my scene cards. Now you might be asking yourself: “WTF is he talking about?”
Let me explain, and it will (hopefully) make sense.
Some of of you reading this are probably too young to remember the OJ Simpson murder trial, but starting the fall of 1994 and spanning over a year, that was pretty much the thing to watch and follow on television. There was a famous line from OJ’s Defense Attorney, Johnnie Cochran: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” referring to the glove found at the crime scene, saying that if the glove didn’t fit on OJ’s hand, then he couldn’t have possibly been the one to commit the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. As asinine as that logic is, it’s what returned a not-guilty verdict from the jury, which meant that whomever’s hand fit that glove must be the murderer. Right?
Here’s the issue. Gloves are made to fit more hands than just one person. You know, something something capitalism. In fact, all apparel on the market is generally mass constructed so that it fits multiple buyers and increases profits. Unless it’s custom, like a Glass Slipper, which fits only the person it was designed for. Yes, yes, I am sure you could argue that someone with an identical foot could slide on into it, but those would be few and far between.
Sometimes scenes are Glass Slippers—they fit the gap between their bordering scenes with the precision of footwear formed by a fairy godmother; but other times, a scene can fit like a generic glove—too loosely that the scenes around it seem disconnected, as if it belonged somewhere else, or even too tightly, and leaving it in place would be almost criminal, like getting away with murder.