Don't Mistake an Episode for a Scene

One of my closest friends has really been making strides lately in his acting career. We were going over all of the things he has been doing that have really been helping move his career forward and were brainstorming about the next step when he said that he believed his next step is to get a manager.

At that moment, alarm bells went off in my head. He’s confusing an episode for a scene.

There’s an interesting quirk about the way that television narratives are organized. The narratives are broken up into seasons, which have numbers, season one, season two, etc. The seasons are broken up into episodes. Every episode of television has a name. Episodes are broken down into acts, which are numbered. Acts are broken down into scenes which are numbered and finally pages, which are numbered.

Episodes have names, everything else is just numbered. Why?

I think this tells us something about how we organize stories in our minds. Events happen sequentially. Then we take individual events (pages) and add them up to bigger events (scenes). We then add those scenes up to complete narratives, self-contained stories, which we name (episodes), and then move on to the next episode.

Whether it’s chapters in books, or classes in a college major, or the stories we tell about our own lives we see this kind of structure appearing everywhere we organize our thoughts into continuing narratives. At some point, you have to give up the granularity of individual events and package a whole bunch of them up into a single story that you can recall with a short title. “I went on vacation to Hawaii.” “I got a new job.”

As a result of this narrative compression, we often forget how many little steps there were to get from point A to point B in our lives. So, we often underestimate the number of scenes we are going to have to live out before we get to the next episode. And even worse, this compression often makes us confuse an episode for a scene. We compress an entire narrative into a single event.

A scene is something that happens, a singular event. An episode is not an event, but rather the outcome of a series of events. Your next step can’t be an entire episode, it has to be the next scene.

This is a trap that I have fallen into many times in my life. Confusing an episode for a scene can paralyze you and make it impossible to move forward because you just can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do next.

There is a test you can apply to make sure that the next step you are imagining in your story is a scene and not an episode.

Tell yourself the story of your next step.

When you tell the story of a scene it requires no further explanation. You simply say what happened.

“I researched online and made a list of potential managers and spoke to an actor I respect about how to approach them.” That’s a scene. That’s what happened. A series of actions taken by a character. No further explanation needed.

When you tell the story of an episode, it is not a series of actions. “I got a manager!” is an episode. Notice there’s no action. There’s no doing of specific tasks by specific characters. There’s just an outcome that demands you tell me more.

Your next step can’t be “getting a bigger client” or “finding a girlfriend”. Those are outcomes. Your next step has to be a scene, a series of actions taken by you and other characters in your life story.

Sometimes confusing an episode for a scene can be more than just a mistake. I have come to realize that mistaking a goal for a task is a subconscious trick I use to put a wall in front of myself when I am afraid. It’s a hiding place. It’s a way to stop moving forward. I can’t take the next step without a bigger movie, a longer running series or some other goal that’s outside of my control that I’ve convinced myself is the next scene.

Yes, you may need a manager, or an investor or a partner or a slew of other hurdles you must overcome to make it to the next season, but you also need to be able to keep moving forward until you land one. You also have to be able to tell a believable success story to yourself made up of all the scenes between now and the happy ending…even if one never shows up. Because all you ever really need is a next step forward.