MAKING A SCENE – When and How

The ability to summarize comes in handy when a writer needs to move quickly over an unimportant expanse of time.  But summary can’t do justice to the crucial hotspots, those epicenters of tension when an old pattern is disturbed, a conflict surfaces, and/or something changes.

“She moved to Houston, and I didn’t see her or hear a word from her for ten years.”  That’s summary.  But when the narrator does meet up with “her” again after that long disappearance, the reader will expect more than, “I felt chilly toward her at first, but after a while I decided to let bygones be bygones.”  This event cries out for a fully developed scene, from first glimpse, through awkward conversation with hostile undertones, to blurted accusations, to tears or laughter.  Notice that with summary, years are made to pass for the reader in less than a second, whereas scenes often take as much time to read as they might to unfold in real life.  That’s because when we write a scene, we come down and ground ourselves in the world we’re creating.  We live it minute by minute with our five senses.

To begin making a scene, imagine yourself with a video camera and pan your remembered or imagined location—the layout and décor of a room, the buildings on a street, the weather.  Record the concrete details.  Place your characters on your “set” and get them speaking and reacting to each other’s words.  This process involves venturing guesses as to what they might say and building on them.  It’s a little like brainstorming—you accept uncritically whatever comes.  You write much more than you will finally use as you prod each character to reveal what s/he wants and how s/he’s going to get it.

Try writing in the present tense.  It may make it easier for you to stay inside the world you are creating.  It may help you let go of outcomes and be receptive to all the surprises in store.

Next time:  some principles of dialogue.

Since education is designed to produce members of society who will function logically and efficiently, most of us graduate from years of schooling with a brain imbalance: our linear, analytical left brains have been developed at the expense of our intuitive, spatial right brains.

That’s why we often feel so awkward and lost when we first sit down to try creative writing. For though the creative process makes use of left-brain reasoning, the left brain’s talents for making stories are limited. It prefers to abstract from data, draw conclusions, summarize events, reduce them to outlines, boil them down to their conceptual essence—when it’s that very data, those messy, sprawling events, that comprise the substance of juicy narrative.

A story is so much more than a sequence of causally-connected plot points, and that more emerges from a vigorous right brain process, which conjures an entire dimensional world, colorful and exciting, by thinking in pictures, free-associating, trusting wild guesswork and what-if’s.

How can we get the left brain, accustomed to being in charge of everything, to let go of control, and invite the under-appreciated right brain to assert itself with confidence? In other words, how can we nudge our minds away from “telling” (talking about) and towards “showing” (picturing)?

–Try writing your zero draft in the present tense. This will close the distance between you and your story, force you to (re)live it, rather than record happenings as if looking down from a mountaintop, or looking back from a spot where the outcome is known. You can always shift into past tense in a later draft, once the up-close and personal approach has opened your perspective.

–Develop a nose for abstractions, words that name emotional reactions—cautious, disapproving, anxious, indecisive, joyful—or words that name ideas–order, chaos, resilience, corruption, compassion. Notice these words are all conclusions we draw based on data. Question their necessity. Instead of their tidy pronouncements, should you be providing the specific data, the sensory facts, the concrete examples, the body language, then let the reader draw the conclusion on her own?

–Beware of summarizing actions. Sometimes summary is appropriate, but most often it indicates a left-brain takeover. Tell the left brain to back off, then invite the right brain to indulge in imagining, stretching out time by investigating every little grain of sand (see Time Management).

You feel moved to write about a particular subject, and soon you have some paragraphs, maybe even pages. They may recount an anecdote, or describe a particularly evocative setting, or profile a unique character. How do you develop this writing into a story? How do you begin your journey into the zero draft?

Take a close look at what you have written for evidence of tension. Can you find a hotspot in your paragraphs—the heat caused by the friction of forces working against each other? Any hints of opposing values, needs, perspectives? Conflict can be lurking in relationships between two people, in the behavior of a single individual, or in the divisions of your own mind. Poet W. H. Auden once defined poetry as the “clear expression of mixed feelings,” and stories emerge from similar uncertainties and tugs-of-war.

If your writing so far only recounts a pleasant vacation, or a happy memory of childhood, or the cuteness of puppies, invite yourself to give equal time to the other side. Vacations never go off without hitches; childhood is fraught with disappointments; and puppies poop where they shouldn’t. Tension is the truth.

Stories happen around hotspots, the point where flow meets resistance, where a pattern gets disturbed, differing needs meet head-on. These spots generate the energy to move narrative forward purposefully, either through external action or internal reflection. They make us ask the question, “What’s going to happen next?” Tension seeks resolution.

You wanted to lie on the beach; your partner wanted to be doing something strenuous every minute. Your mother always had to throw in a critical remark. No one could be counted on to take the puppy to obedience school. Once you’ve identified a hotspot in your initial writing, make it your focus, your touchstone, and begin again. It will guide you through the trackless middle to the reassuring, if provisional, end of your zero draft.

Stories are about time, about the interplay of past, present, and future. Characters come with past histories and future hopes. And the narrative convention of plot is based on the expectation that a chronological chain of events will be turned into a causal one.

For the writer of narrative, working with time can resemble the paradoxical task of measuring coastline. Because of the near-infinite irregularity of the boundary between earth and sea, the length of the measuring instrument will determine the final measurement: the shorter the instrument, the more it will register the smaller granulations, and thus the longer the coastline.

Now suppose we have a story to write about someone taking a life-changing journey. We have an intuition as to what the key stages of this journey will be. But in introducing our protagonist we find ourselves going into a brief biography. And then we might think it necessary to explain how this particular journey became possible. And then we might decide to watch her packing suitcases and saying good-bye to family members and setting the alarm clock the night before her flight and being too excited to eat breakfast. It may be we have rendered all of the above in vivid sensory images, but we feel trapped and unsatisfied nevertheless. Somewhere a strange and intriguing country glimmers ahead, but we are so tired of slogging through time that we’re ready to give up on ever getting there.

Here are two tips to keep in mind as you wrestle with time:

–You have no obligation to report on every minute that passes in the world of your story. A zero draft tends to cover more rather than less; later revisions trim away dead time as they pull plot to the foreground and begin to shape the action around causes and effects and direct it toward a point. The old theatre adage might come in handy: every line should either further the plot, develop a character, or get a laugh. If nothing fits these parameters during a particular hour, day, or week in your story, skip it.

When your writing seems to be simply filling in time, enabling transition from one event to the next, stop! Opt for white space, the narrative break. That empty band of white across the page is the most concise way to tell the reader to expect a passage of time and/or a change of place.
–You do have an obligation to cover the juicy events. As you make your way through time, follow intensity. Gravitate toward moments of physical action and emotional conflict. Seek out surprises. Scenes of crisis can be more challenging to recount than business as usual. You may have to resist the urge to invoke a narrative break to get past them! Remind yourself that important moments should not take place during the white space. In fact as time moves into a scene of intensity, writers pull out their smallest measuring rod and write around every individual pebble along the shore!

An earlier Muze Tap divided creative writing into two separate processes, tree shaking then jelly making: brainstorming material then selecting and arranging it; going with the flow and then building a channel for it. No matter what metaphor we use, it’s important to remember each mental process doesn’t happen just once. Writers move constantly back and forth between spontaneous outpouring and critical assessment, between imagination and craft, between the stuff they wanted to write and the stuff they have to write because the stuff they wanted to write is telling them to.

This writing and rewriting is almost like breathing, pulling new material into your text and expanding it, then cutting out material that has become extraneous and watching it contract. The basis for this enterprise of creative shaping is the zero draft, a draft so rough it doesn’t even qualify as first!

A zero draft springs largely from dedicated tree shaking but forays into jelly making may also contribute to it—the important requirement is that in this draft, you have written through to an end. The ending will undoubtedly change as you begin to shape your piece; you may even wind up rejecting it. But its provisional existence means that you have slogged through the terrifying middle, silenced the voices of doubt, and come out on the other side. It means you have the sketch of a world and a rudimentary arc of action. You’ve got something to work with.

Here are some tips about generating a zero draft:

–The importance of writing through to an end is worth repeating. Keep encouraging yourself to push forward, even if you’re feeling uninspired, uncertain, even foolish. This is the truth: there is little correlation between how we feel as we write and the quality of our writing! Words that seem to come like divine inspiration may read like sludge the morning after, whereas words squeezed like blood from a stone may shine like jewels over time.

–Begin anywhere. If the great American opening sentence doesn’t spill out, opt for something banal and clumsy. Chances are the sentence that starts you writing won’t start your writing in its final form anyway.

–Follow impulses—the pull of a character, image, or anecdote–even when they seem to take you in a direction you didn’t intend to go. If you hit a dead end, you can always double back and resume your course. The zero draft is supposed to contain too much. It’s much easier to trim excess than create from scratch, so write knowing there will be waste.

–Let go of perfection in the zero draft. Completing one usually takes many sittings, and when you begin, it’s useful to look back over what you created during the session before. A little tweaking is allowed, but try to resist the obsessive polishing of one part—long word searches, reframing individual sentences until they sound just right. What you lose in perfection, you gain in spontaneity and propulsion, energizers for getting through the zero draft.

Creative writers share one goal:  to capture life on the page.

It’s a goal we can never reach.  For how can we possibly build a living, breathing, dimensional world out of insubstantial, dimensionless bits of language?  Yet the power of the imagination can carry us pretty close.

To imagine is quite simply to think in images, not only visual images, but those of sound, smell, taste, and touch.  Strong writing moves from one sensory image to the next, each one an exotic island in the narrative flow, describing the journey as accurately as possible.  Later these images will trigger the reader’s senses, creating the illusion of concrete experience.

Here are some tips for writers for enticing the reader’s senses to invest in your story:

–Write with conviction!  The imagination must be bold and assertive rather than timid and vague.  Your imagination, after all, is god of the world you’ve created and should know every detail:  the proper names of things, the furnishings of every interior, the contours and weather conditions of every exterior, the backstory of every character.  Get those specifics onto the page.

–Give everyone a body.  A specific, unique body.  Watch out for generic images:  tall, dark, handsome men; women with blond hair and blue eyes.  Sit in a public place with your Writer’s Notebook and try to transcribe the facial and physical idiosyncrasies you notice.

–Beware of summary.  How many sensory details are being glossed over in the following?  “He followed the man and the teen-aged girl for an hour, snapping pictures.”  Chapter 26 in Satan’s Chamber illustrates the suspense and atmosphere created by expanding that summary and being more specific!

Molly co-authored The Creative Process (St. Martin’s Press) and has taught writing workshops for twenty years. For more advice from the Muze, visit our blog: http://www.fuzepublishing.com/blog

Creative writing starts with creative perception:  it’s a mantra worth repeating.  A special alertness to the information coming in through the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—will help you texture your imagined world.

Molly co-authored The Creative Process (St. Martin’s Press) and has taught writing workshops for twenty years. For more advice from the Muze, visit our blog: http://www.fuzepublishing.com/blog

Of all parts of speech, verbs carry the greatest potential to energize sentences. The more we load meaning into them, the stronger our writing.

The last Muze Tap suggested one way to identify lazy verbs in a first draft: follow the adverbs. With their tell-tale –ly endings, adverbs represent an attempt to clarify and intensify the action: ate hungrily; looked carefully. Why not load the clarity and intensity into the verb itself: devoured; studied?*

Here’s another way to enhance your verbs: go over a piece of writing-in-process and circle forms of to be—is, was, are, were. Challenge yourself to rewrite their sentences in a way that will eliminate these inert place-holders.

(1) There were three men in the room sprawled on the easy chairs.
(2) The easy chairs in the room had been claimed by sprawling bodies.
(3) Three men sprawled on easy chairs around the room.

Notice that in (2) the to be form, had been, signals the passive voice, which drains energy from the verb. And the verb sprawl in (1) and (2) is showing up as a weaker participle—sprawled and sprawling–in other words it’s been demoted in status to an adjective.

Raise your verb consciousness by keeping lists of strong verbs. (See Tapping the Muze: The Writer’s Notebook) They needn’t be five-dollar verbs with Latin roots; they need only conjure concrete action. Try a list of verbs associated with sports, from kick and wrestle, to bunt and parry. Or a list of verbs associated with eating and food preparation, from sip and mince to gorge and flay. How about verbs that capture varieties of locomotion—saunter, slide, stumble, and trudge? Slot them into your sentences and watch your writing snap, crackle, and pop.

The Muze welcomes examples of before/after sentence pairs that illustrate verb enhancement! Just click Reply.

*One reader of the last Muze Tap, Pete, has correctly pointed out that when enlisted to nail down vague verbs, prepositions “become” adverbs: as in put down, make over, play around. Thanks, Pete!

Molly co-authored The Creative Process (St. Martin’s Press) and has taught writing workshops for twenty years. For more advice from the Muze, visit our blog: http://www.fuzepublishing.com/blog

We learned in elementary school to build sentences out of five different types of words.  Verbs generate action; nouns flesh it out, providing the verb’s energy with mass and shape.  Adjectives further define nouns; adverbs do the same for verbs, while low-profile prepositions whisper directions.

Writers soon sense that one of these parts of speech pack the biggest punch:  the verb.  It is, after all, the only one with the strength to stand alone as a (commanding) sentence.  Verbs are the source of life in our writing, and we must seek to maximize their potential by asking them to carry as much meaning as possible.

When revising an early draft, for example, we might replace the phrase “move slowly” with a single verb: “creep” or “inch.”  “Sit clumsily” might become “flop”; “eat greedily,” “devour.”  In each case, instead of relying on the relatively weak adverb to convey our specific meaning, we load it into the verb.  “Creep” implies slowness, “flop,” clumsiness.

Similarly, why trust lowly prepositions to make our points?  That’s what happens when we choose “put down” over “insult” or “kill” or “release.”  Or “put out” instead of “perturb” or “extinguish” or “banish.”  Notice that in using the more specific verbs, which imply the preposition, we eliminate the chance of ambiguity.  And whenever we find one word that can do the work of two or three, we concentrate our style.

Next time you’re about to send a long email, take a moment to study your verbs.  Are a few of them being shored up by unwieldy adverbs or weak prepositions?  Can you think of stronger, more focused, more vivid replacements?

More in two weeks.

Molly co-authored The Creative Process (St. Martin’s Press) and has taught writing workshops for twenty years. Please comment and ask questions about this article at our blog, http://www.fuzepublishing.com/blog.

Have you ever been told that some particular experience of yours would make a good story?  Have you ever thought yourself that you ought to write an account of something you’ve lived through?  You may have only written memos or grocery lists up till now, but that doesn’t mean that Molly Best Tinsley can’t be of help to you. Have you ever wondered where authors get their ideas for a novel?  How they determine the best point of view?  How they create texture?  Or even those more basic questions so easy to forget, such as the rules for punctuating quotations? Give yourself a treat and ask a source that’s more reliable than Google. E-mail your questions about writing narratives—anecdotes, memoirs, stories–to Molly Best Tinsley at fuzepublishing@gmail.com today.

Molly co-authored The Creative Process (St. Martin’s Press) and has taught writing workshops for twenty years.