A metaphor for a scene.
An audience doesn’t like to see you work. They don’t like watching you struggle. You struggling to figure out what’s going on in a scene is off-putting. The audience checks out. You’ve lost them. They’re not coming back.
You struggling is like drowning in a river. Sputtering to keep your head above water, splashing around in panic trying to gain purchase.
Let’s bring the metaphor further.
It’s not that you don’t know how to swim. You do. But you’ve insisted on swimming against the current. Your insistence far outpowers your senses; that you are somehow stronger than the current and so you refuse to give up. You push harder and inevitably you tire out only to see you’ve made backwards progress and you’re gasping for air, doing all you can to stay composed but the inevitable errant wave pushes water in your mouth anyways and you cough and choke. And you struggle. Even though you know how to swim.
But you chose to swim against the current.
Let’s bring the metaphor further.
The river is a scene. A river has a current and it flows relentlessly in one direction. It will not change for you. A scene has a current, it has a direction that it is going and it is just as relentless. It too will not change for you. When you try swimming against the current you, at the best of times, make backwards progress and at the worst of times, sputter out and drown. When you attempt to make the scene go in a different direction, something similar happens; the scene falls flat. It becomes full of panic, invention and random craziness. You sputter out and drown in your scene.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is jump into the river, float on your back and let the current take you for a ride. Jump into your scene, relax and just follow it where it’s going.
And when a big rock comes, have fun navigating around it, just like in a scene when something impedes your path, embrace it and have fun justifying an absurdity, or exploring a game, figuring out what else is true and why.
Post script
There is the question of how one can initiate a scene with clarity and specificity so it goes somewhere while still giving into the scene and giving up control. Does this go against the idea that either you start your scene in a direction and thus are forcing it to go somewhere or you start tabula rasa and just let what may happen happen? No (I’ve committed myself to this idea so I have to say that). The metaphor of the river suggests that you are jumping into the river. If you aren't clear or specific with your initiation and you start a scene with vagueness, you aren't jumping into a river. You've missed the river completely.
In order to give up control you need to go somewhere.