Writing My Short: Old Habits

Old Habits

by Matthew R. Paden

Thursday, October 15th 2026

Writing My Short: Old Habits

A missing suitcase is useful because it lets everyone lie about the same thing.

That was the first real discovery I made while writing Old Habits, my latest short crime drama.

The premise came to me in pieces: half a million dollars, a body in the Missouri River, four mobsters in a Kansas City pizza parlor, and one clue that turns a routine Tuesday into a test of loyalty.

On paper, that sounds like a setup built on plot. Who took the money? Who killed the guy? Who knows more than they admit?

But the longer I wrote, the more I realized the short was really about behavior. Rituals. Wisecracks. Old rules that once kept people alive, then start getting them killed.

That is what kept the script alive for me. Old Habits was not just a crime story. It became a story about men who think they know the code, then discover the code may no longer protect them.

The Suitcase Gave Me a Clean Engine

Short screenplays need pressure fast. There is no room to warm up for twenty pages. The audience has to understand the central problem almost immediately, even if they do not yet understand what it means.

For Old Habits, the missing suitcase became the engine.

A suitcase full of cash is a simple object. It is visual. It is portable. It can be hidden, stolen, recovered, or used as bait.

Hitchcock famously used the term “MacGuffin” for the thing everyone in the story wants, even when the deeper drama is happening somewhere else. The suitcase in Old Habits works in that tradition.

The money matters, of course. Half a million dollars is enough to make anyone nervous. But the suitcase matters more because of what it reveals.

Each character reacts to its absence differently.

One tries to joke through it.

One tries to control the room.

One starts measuring everyone’s words.

One knows something, or seems to.

That is the value of a strong dramatic object in a short. It does not need to carry the whole meaning of the film. It needs to make people show themselves.

Pizza parlor as Pressure Cooker

I set the central action in a Kansas City pizza parlor because I wanted the contrast.

Crime stories often benefit from ordinary spaces. A booth. A back room. A vinyl tablecloth. A half-eaten slice. The more familiar the room feels, the more unsettling the danger becomes.

That choice also helped the short stay contained. The Academy defines a short film as one with a running time of 40 minutes or less, including credits.

Most short scripts live under much tighter limits than that, especially if they are meant to be producible. A contained location helps control scope, but it also creates dramatic focus.

In Old Habits, the pizza parlor is not just a budget-friendly choice. It is a trap.

Once the four mobsters gather there, the room starts doing work:

• It limits escape.

• It forces eye contact.

• It turns silence into evidence.

• It makes every entrance and exit matter.

  
  

I like contained crime scenes because they turn dialogue into action. A look across the table can land like a threat.

A man reaching for a napkin can feel suspicious. When nobody can leave without making a statement, the room becomes part of the story.

Comedy Makes the Danger Sharper

The wisecracks were there from the beginning.

I did not want Old Habits to be grim from the first line to the last.

Mob stories often use humor as camouflage. People joke because they are scared, because they are performing toughness, or because they have spent so long around violence that it has become part of the background noise.

That kind of humor works best when it does not deflate the stakes.

For example, a character can complain about the quality of the pizza while a dead body is being discussed. The joke is not there to tell the audience, “This is not serious.” It tells us something stranger: these men have built a life where death and lunch can share the same table.

That is character information.

The trick was making sure the jokes did not become decoration. Every line had to move one of three things:

Suspicion

Who is shifting blame without admitting it?

Status

Who still commands respect, and who only thinks they do?

Fear

Who laughs too long, too loudly, or at the wrong moment?

When I revised the script, I cut lines that were only funny. If the joke did not reveal pressure, it had to go.

When Loyalty Became the Real Question

At first, I thought I was writing a whodunit in miniature.

Then the better question showed up: what does loyalty mean inside a family built on fear?

That word, “family,” carries weight in mob stories. It suggests protection, history, and belonging. It also suggests obligation. In a crime drama, family can be the thing that saves you or the thing that demands your silence.

That tension helped me shape the middle of the short.

The missing suitcase starts as a business problem. The body in the Missouri River raises the stakes. The clue changes the temperature in the room.

But the real turn happens when the men begin to understand that betrayal may not come from an enemy. It may come from inside the circle.

That is where the title earned its place.

Old Habits points to rituals, but it also points to reflexes. The old habit of lying. The old habit of testing loyalty. The old habit of answering fear with violence before asking the right question.

In a short screenplay, the title has to work hard. There is less time for theme to announce itself. A good title should become clearer after the final scene than it was before the first one.

What This Short Taught Me

Writing Old Habits reminded me that crime drama is not powered by crime alone. It is powered by consequence.

The body matters because someone will have to answer for it. The suitcase matters because someone risked everything to move it.

The clue matters because it changes how everyone reads the past.

For short screenwriting, that is a useful lesson. The plot should be simple enough to track in one sitting, but loaded enough to keep shifting under the surface.

The structure I kept coming back to was this:

1. Give the audience a clear problem.

2. Put characters in a room where they cannot avoid it.

3. Let each new detail change the meaning of what came before.

4. End at the point where the old rules finally fail.

   
   

That last part mattered most to me. I did not want Old Habits to feel like a scene cut out of a larger feature. I wanted it to feel complete, like one sharp turn in a dangerous life.

This Thursday Script Notes: Writing Old Habits is really a reminder to myself: if a short keeps the writer guessing, there is a good chance it will keep the audience leaning in too. The key is not to hide everything.

The key is to reveal just enough, at the exact moment when the truth can do the most damage.