Wordcraft – Don’t be afraid to make a scene

A fellow critique partner writing a novel asked, why do we have to write in scenes? After all, as long as the information is on the page, why does it matter whether it’s in a “scene”, with characters thinking, speaking, acting in a particular place and time, or in paragraphs of straight prose. Taken aback, I gave her a short and truthful, if silly answer: because it’s a convention of English language fiction.

A short and truthful answer, because writing in scenes has been a convention of English language fiction, actually, almost any long-form prose such as novels, memoirs and creative nonfiction, for at least the past couple of centuries. But a silly answer because it didn’t address why the convention arose in the first place. Or why it really matters, whether it results in publication or not.

A story written in scenes is the closest we can humanly get to being inside the mind of another person. And longing to know how others, other human beings, feel and think and why they do the things they do, goes to the core of being human. Living as a human being means living in a particular place, with particular people, particular actions, particular thoughts, in real time. We don’t live in, can’t live in, whether we’d like to or not, an exposition-only world.

Given the importance of scenes, I was surprised when I reviewed my bookshelves without finding any books dedicated to writing scenes. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of discussion about scenes deep inside books about writing the things scenes comprise – novels and screenplays.

“A good plot is about disturbance to characters’ inner and outer lives. Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances,” novelist/writing instructor James Scott Bell writes in his Plot & Fiction. “Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot.”

Like the plot that they’re a subunit of, scenes need at least one character, a setting (time and place), and a disturbance. To paraphrase Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, scenes as well as novels have a protagonist, an ordinary world, and an inciting incident. What they lack, at least until the novel nears its conclusion is, well, a conclusion. And very often, the disturbance or inciting incident of one scene will have occurred in the previous scene, so that scene after scene links together, each depending on, but deepening what has gone before.

I’ve found that I learn as much from reading books I love – and looking more closely at why I love them – than from reading about them. So I looked at an early scene from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, with neighborhood gossip Rachel Lynde at her window, spying reclusive neighbor Matthew Cuthbert, who had earlier expressed his intention of planning his turnip seed that afternoon, instead “placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill. . . . Now where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?”

Mrs. Lynde devotes the remainder of the scene (indeed, the entire chapter) to solving the riddle of Matthew’s strange behavior, only to learn things that will astonish her still further, continuing until the book’s end.

That opening scene ends with Rachel Lynde, having teased out the reason for Matthew’s journey, to bring home an orphan to help with his farm work, and asserting “I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything.” And so the story goes.

For more suggestions about scenes and their structure, I like “How to Write a Scene” by John August, posted September 21, 2015, on The Writer’s Circle magazine’s Facebook page, and “Make Your Scenes Earn Their Way” by Brooke Warner on SheWrites. I’ve posted both of these on my own Facebook page as well as Writer’s Circle’s September 15, 2015, Facebook post entitled, “Chapter Breaks,” for suggestions on scene endings.

Wordcraft -- Where did I park my plot?

Reading an overflowing inbox of stories for back to back writing workshops left me with an overriding question. Too often, after reading five, ten, even twenty pages of a novel, I had no idea where the story was going.

And these aren’t the only writers suffering from missing plot syndrome. The fearsome gong show at this spring’s DFW Writers Conference included more than one opening page that left agents asking, but what’s it about?

I think it’s a symptom of a deeper problem -- fear of foundering under all the freight the opening of a story must carry. In his guide to writing, Plot & Structure, suspense writer James Scott Bell tells us the beginning of a novel must “get the reader hooked.” Oh, and establish a sympathetic lead character, provide setting and context, set the story‘s tone, provide compelling reasons for the reader to keep reading, and introduce the opposition. No wonder we freeze.

Screenwriting guru Dan Decker complained in his Anatomy of a Screenplay that “novelists can write and write and write” while screenwriters are bound by predetermined lengths, and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! guide to screenwriting insisted on setting, theme, and character within the first ten pages (translating to the first ten minutes of screen time). But even though books have longer page counts than screenplays, I’ve heard the same ten page limit mentioned by agents looking for novels. If they don’t say: first page.

Here’s a suggestion to get that plot moving -- open with the main character. Then add the problem she must solve. Practice to see how close you can get the two together.

Remember the character’s problem is not that she’s in a new school or at a new job or on a battlefield. Her problem is not that she’s unhappy or has a crazy family. It’s not even the antagonist, although he’s important, too. The problem is something specific and concrete, something potentially solvable, with enough power to draw her through an entire story.

Want an example? “Elizabeth Ferguson looked around at the Saturday-morning comings and goings of townspeople, and saw parents who had lost or were losing their kids, kids who had lost or were losing their minds.” That’s on the first page of Anne LaMott’s Imperfect Birds. Who it’s about -- Elizabeth -- and what it’s about -- the drug problems preying on her community’s children.

But you’re writing genre fiction, you say, and your critique group tells you to start with immediate, violent action. How about this: “I knocked on the green door and knew that in the next five minutes I’d either be dead or I’d have the truth I needed.”

That’s the first sentence of Jeff Abbott’s thriller, The Last Minute. The violent action hasn’t happened yet, although we know it’s coming. But violence is not the character’s real problem. His problem -- what the book will be about -- is his search for a particular truth, a truth he’s willing to knock on the door for, a truth he’s willing to die for.

A final example, this one from Linda Castillo’s mystery, Gone Missing. “My mamm once me that some places are too beautiful for anything bad to happen. . . I had no way of knowing that some predators come from within and beauty has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes men commit.” Now you know the essence of the entire book about crime within the Amish community.

  

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Next Monday, guest blogger Julianne McCullagh brings news from this year’s Mayborn Conference sponsored by the school of journalism at the University of North Texas. Her writing has appeared in Loyola Press and the Mayborn’s Best of the West anthology.

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Looking for a small press? After two years of publishing only nonfiction, Arizona press Moonlight Mesa Associates will start accepting fiction manuscripts this fall, probably in September, publisher Becky Coffield reports. See www.moonlightmesaassociates.com/ for details.