Yes, yes, I know it’s not
Friday. But although this email was carefully prepared in our normal
laboratory and polished (as usual) by a Rotterdam jeweller prior to
dispatch, owing to human error the email ended up being locked away for
the weekend in a secure vault to which we had no access. We have now
managed to spring the email out. It has been given some restorative
care by a skilled acupuncturist specially flown in from Taipei and
given an intravenous shot of vitamins to ensure our usual standards of excellence
are met. Here’s that email now. It’s almost like Friday has come early
…
So: stories are made of scenes
strung together in a plot. Let’s just assume for now that your plot is
OK. In which case, the quality of your book is going to hang, to a very
large extent, on the quality of your scenes. What makes a scene work?
What are the tricks of the trade? What are the things you need to look
out for?
Well, the curious little secret
is that these things are (mostly) obvious and simple. They’re just hard
to do. So here are some rules:
- Jump to the
action as fast as you can
- If you
want, you can jump right into the action, even at the cost of not
quite making sense initially. You can then, 2-3 paragraphs in, go
and back-fill the information the reader needs to make sense of
things. So for example, you might start with dialogue, without the
reader knowing where the characters are situated. Once you’ve got
things going via dialogue, you can add the, “They were standing in
the middle of a …, etc”. That often gives you a stronger more
engaging start, than starting with a description could ever
deliver.
- Leave the
scene as fast as you can. You can always tie up any loose threads
in the next scene … and you probably need to tie fewer things up
than you might think.
- It’s often
said that every scene needs to have a kind of conflict. I don’t
think that’s quite right – or at least, it’s not the most helpful
way of describing things. What IS true is that there needs to be
something unsettled in the scene. Something mobile. A question
that needs an answer.
- Your
character’s emotions need to be engaged. If he/she doesn’t care,
your reader won’t care.
- In general,
but not always-always, you want a balance of scene description (so
your scene is physically realised), dialogue (because that’s the
most supple, alive element in any scene) and action (in the sense
that we know what your characters are doing.)
- There
should for preference be a useful reverberation between the action
that’s taking place and the physical atmosphere in the scene. That
can be obvious (a proposal in a rose garden) or contrasting (a
proposal in a butcher’s shop), but you want some alive,
interesting echo between action and place.
- And here’s
a biggie: you structure your scenes much as you structure a story.
You set up the question early on in the scene. You develop it. You
reach a climax. You resolve quickly and move on.
Now all that seems pretty
wholesome. A good, wholegrain style menu for writing a scene. But
because that kind of advice seems pretty damn bland taken on its own,
here’s a mini-scene of my own, with comments in italics added.
The situation here is that my
character, Fiona, has just escaped from a damaging and traumatising
situation. She has fled to a buddy of hers: a guy called Lev, who is
ex-Russian Special Forces and not exactly a run-of-the-mill character.
She trusts Lev to look after her, but Lev needs to find his range
first. Here’s how things go:
I park where Lev tells me to,
outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for
a door.
~ Very swift intro to the
physical location. So brief, it hardly interrupts things
‘Is here,’ says Lev.
The door is held by a crude
wooden catch. No lock.
~ Fiona’s observation this. By
noticing the crudity of the accommodation, she is letting you know, in
effect, what she’s thinking.
Lev opens the door for me –
there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.
I knew that Lev didn’t have a
permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in
his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing
those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.
But knowing that and being here:
two different things.
~ Again: Fiona isn’t saying, “I
feel X about this place.” But she’s letting us know all the same.
Indirect access to character emotions is just fine.
The downstairs room is
lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear.
There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on
their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but
I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.
~ More physical description. But
this isn’t done for its own sake. By now, it’s clear that the question
raised by this scene is roughly: “Is this horrible squat going to
satisfy Fiona’s needs for sanctuary? And how will her discomfort shift
her relationship with Lev?” Those aren’t huge questions in the context
of the story. But they don’t have to be. They just have to feel alive
and important for the duration of a (shortish) scene.
Lev says nothing. Just points me
upstairs.
Upstairs: two bedrooms, one
bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom
fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A
military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can
of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all
clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of
food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and
they stand leaning against the wall.
~ This is the first revelation
of the accommodation proper. In that sense, what’s gone before has been
just preamble. This is where the scene-question gets sharpened up
further.
Light enters the room in
silence. Leaves again the same way.
I don’t say anything.
Don’t even step into the room,
not really. Just stand there in the doorway.
~ So everything’s hanging. At
the moment, we’re reaching a moment of crisis in our mini-story. Will
this squat work for Fiona? It’s not looking good. Her hanging back in
the doorway (rather than stepping forward into the room) is as close as
she gets to actual conflict with Lev. And that’s not much conflict.
That’s why I don’t think focusing on conflict is especially helpful.
I am not what you would call a
girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t
revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or
follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other
hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near
Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than
this.
~ Fiona humour! And for the
first time really direct access to her thoughts / feelings. Again, this
is pushing us closer to the point of crisis/decision/resolution.
Lev stands behind me seeing the
room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled.
Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our
need for luxury.
~ More humour. But here we have
Lev’s position and Fiona’s. At the moment, these are two opposed,
unresolved forces. We don’t yet know how this is going to resolve.
He says nothing. Not straight
away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds
echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls
around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.
~ Tension ratchets up for a
couple of lines. Then …
Then Lev says, ‘Is not
suitable.’
That was halfway between a
question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.
Lev says, ‘We go somewhere
else.’
~ Boom! Done. We know that
Fiona’s opposition has won the day. As far as we can tell at this
stage, the Fiona / Lev relationship hasn’t been injured by that
micro-conflict. And of course a new story question is immediately
launched: Lev still seems willing to find sanctuary for Fiona, but what
is he going to offer? Will Fiona find her sanctuary? And will that be
enough to allow for her recovery? Those questions are immediately
tackled by the scenes that follow.
That’s it. As you can see, not a
lot of heavy-duty story-freight hangs on that scene. In a way, you
could cut it completely and the book would lose nothing much in terms
of plot. But from the reader’s perspective, the scene is funny. It’s
tense. And they learn something about Lev (the way he lives) that they
may have been curious about for the space of about 400,000 words (ie:
since the moment they first met him in book #1 of the series.)
And one other thing: the scene
is short. That whole thing notches up just 450 words, or about a page
and a half of a paperback. But that’s still long enough to launch a
question, develop it, build some tension round it, have plenty of
personality / emotion / humour in the situation, then resolve it and
move on. Do that enough times in the course of a properly plotted
story, and you have a book, my friend.
Happy New Year
Harry
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