A scene that goes nowhere usually isn't short on incident. Characters talk, someone walks in, a phone rings, information gets exchanged. The problem is rarely too little happening on the page. The problem is that nothing changes between the first line and the last one. The reader or viewer ends the scene in the same emotional and dramatic position they started in, just with more words behind them.
Below is a scene level checklist that catches this before a reader has to tell you. It works on any scene, in any genre, at any point in a script.
The four questions every scene has to answer
Test any scene against these four elements. If you can't answer all four in one sentence each, the scene is probably inert.
- Goal: What does the point of view character want in this specific scene, right now, not in the movie overall?
- Conflict: What or who is actively working against that want inside the scene?
- Turn: What shifts partway through so the scene doesn't just repeat its opening dynamic for three pages?
- Exit state: Does the character leave the scene better off, worse off, or holding new information that changes their next move?
Scenes fail when one of these is missing, but they fail in different ways depending on which one is absent. A missing goal produces a scene that feels like scenery. A missing conflict produces a scene that feels like a conversation you'd have with a friend, pleasant but dramatically inert. A missing turn produces a scene that says one thing for its full length. A missing exit state produces a scene that reads fine in isolation but leaves the next scene with nothing to react to.
Why 'nothing happens' is almost always 'nothing changed'
Writers often diagnose a flat scene as lacking action and respond by adding action: a car chase, an argument, a reveal. Sometimes that fixes it. More often it doesn't, because the underlying issue was never a shortage of events. It was a shortage of consequence. A scene with three plot events and no shift in the power balance between characters will still read as static, while a scene with one small exchange that changes what a character believes or wants will read as alive.
This is why dialogue heavy scenes, which look inert on the page compared to action scenes, can carry enormous dramatic weight, and why action heavy scenes can feel weightless. The test isn't how much happens. It's whether the state of the story is different at the end than it was at the beginning.
The quick version of the test
Cover the last third of the scene. Ask what you'd expect to happen next based on the setup alone. Then read the actual ending. If your prediction and the actual ending match closely, the scene likely didn't turn. If the ending surprises you in a way that still feels earned, the scene probably has real movement.
Common patterns behind scenes that don't move
The information dump disguised as a scene
Two characters exchange facts the audience needs. Nobody wants anything from the other person beyond delivering or receiving information. There's no resistance because nobody is resisting anything. This reads as flat no matter how well written the dialogue is, because the scene has no goal or conflict, only content.
The agreement scene
Both characters want the same thing and get it with minimal friction. This can work briefly for relief or bonding, but a script full of agreement scenes has nowhere to build tension. If two characters walk in wanting the same outcome and walk out having gotten it cleanly, ask whether the scene needed to exist at all, or whether it could be a single line in the next scene.
The flat exit
The scene has a goal and conflict, even a turn, but ends with the character in exactly the emotional and situational position they started in. This often happens in scenes that exist to reveal character rather than move plot; the writer assumes revealing character is enough. It can be, but only if the character themselves is changed by what's revealed, even slightly, so the next scene has something new to work with.
Applying the checklist to your own draft
Go scene by scene and fill out a version of this for each one. It's tedious the first pass through a full draft, but it surfaces problems faster than reading straight through, because reading straight through lets a writer's familiarity with their own intentions paper over gaps a stranger would notice immediately.
| Element | Scene with real movement | Scene that goes nowhere |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Specific and immediate to this scene | Vague, or borrowed from the overall plot rather than this moment |
| Conflict | Active resistance from another character, the environment, or an internal contradiction | Mild disagreement or none; characters cooperate too easily |
| Turn | A shift partway through that changes the dynamic | The scene restates its opening position until it ends |
| Exit state | Character leaves changed: new information, new stakes, new alliance, new wound | Character leaves in the same position they entered, just with more dialogue behind them |
Where outside feedback helps and where it doesn't
This checklist is something a writer can run alone, but self diagnosis has a ceiling. Writers tend to be blind to their own flat scenes precisely because they know the backstory, the intention, and the subtext that never made it onto the page, so the scene reads as full to them and empty to everyone else. This is where structured outside notes matter, whether from a writers group, a paid script coverage service like WeScreenplay or ScriptReaderPro, a specialist reader such as Script Angel, or an AI tool built for this kind of pass.
Movie Mentors is built specifically for this scene level diagnostic work, letting a writer paste in a scene and get goal, conflict, turn, and exit state notes from multiple filmmaker trained personas at once, including where those personas disagree about what the scene actually needs. That disagreement is useful precisely because a single reader's note can feel definitive when it's really just one perspective. But no text based tool, this one included, replaces hearing a scene read aloud or watching it performed, which is often where a flat exchange that reads fine on the page reveals itself as dead air in the room. Coverage services and AI tools both catch structural gaps; neither substitutes for a table read.
A last note on scale
This checklist works scene by scene, but a full script can pass every individual scene test and still feel like it goes nowhere overall, because the exit states of individual scenes don't add up to a rising line of stakes across the whole story. Scene level diagnosis catches local flatness. It doesn't by itself catch a script where every scene turns, but the turns cancel each other out instead of compounding. That's a separate, harder problem, and it's usually visible only once someone reads the whole draft in sequence, not one scene at a time.
Originally published at https://www.moviementors.ai/answers/scenes-go-nowhere.html.
Written by the team behind Movie Mentors.
