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by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)

  GOALS IN THE SCENE

  Sometimes a scene that isn't working can be fixed easily by putting the goal in the right place. Here's an example. It is the kind of thing writers of narrative nonfiction have to tackle.

  Let's treat this example as though it were a piece of nonfiction. You've done the research and spoken to the principal characters and witnesses, so you know all of the events, however trivial, actually happened. The reason you're writing a book about two boys is that they will ultimately get together to murder their parents. You are reconstructing for the reader the days and hours the boys spent together before the crime.

  Here's the scene as it's originally written: There are two teenage boys, Bobby and Timmy. Timmy is the younger brother and shares a room with Bobby.

  One night Timmy stays out late. He comes home, walks in the front door, walks up the stairs, walks into the bedroom, slowly undresses, and gets into bed. At the end of the scene, you write a paragraph that says, "Timmy was glad that Bobby hadn't woken up, because he would have been mad at him for staying out late and would have started punching him."

  The problem is, readers don't understand what the point of this particular scene is. What was Timmy's goal?

  Now, let's turn the structure of the scene around.

  Take the last sentence, "Timmy was glad that Bobby hadn't woken up, because he would have been mad at him for staying out late and would have started punching him."

  Rewrite it to read something like, "Timmy hoped his brother Bobby wouldn't wake up and beat him up for coming home late." Put this sentence pretty close to the beginning of the scene.

  Now, readers view the scene quite differently.

  Look how much more interested the reader is in what is going to happen as Timmy slips the key in the lock, as he climbs the creaking stairs and makes what seem to be intolerably loud noises. Will they wake Bobby? Timmy reaches the bedroom. He opens the door and stumbles in the dark. Bobby turns over. Has Timmy woken him? Will Bobby give him a beating after all? Painstakingly quietly Timmy undresses. The loud rustling as he unfastens buttons, the noise of metal zippers unpeeling—are these going to disturb his brother?

  Timmy walks across the floor to the bed. Does the floor creak? Does he trip over something unseen in the darkness? Will Bobby wake up and beat the hell out of him? Timmy climbs into bed. Ah, this time he's gotten away with it.

  By writing the scene this way, you've shown not just the immediate goal of how Timmy evades a beating, but how the scene is a part of the overall goal of the narrative, how Bobby was able to terrorize his younger brother into helping him commit this awful crime.

  It's worth recalling that the central question, the goal for most readers of narrative nonfiction, is, How could this event have happened? How could these boys have done this terrible thing?

  Now, in your scene, either Bobby wakes up or he doesn't, but readers are compelled to read the scene because they have a question. Timmy has a goal: get into bed without waking Bobby. As a result, readers understood how to keep score. If Bobby awakens, Timmy loses the tennis match. If Bobby stays asleep, Timmy wins. Either way, it all becomes more compelling.

  THE NARRATIVE QUESTION

  Remember, we're talking about structure, about how things are put together.

  Throughout your book your characters have a steady stream of goals. At any given point in your narrative, there's something they want. It may be a big thing; it may be a small thing. That goal becomes what Gary called "the narrative question."

  The narrative question throughout your book is usually, "Will he get this? Will she get that? Will they ever get what they want?"

  Try this tip to strengthen your writing.

  Make a sign in large letters to put over your desk. The sign says two things:

  Why? and

  What does my character want?

  Whenever you're writing, look at that sign and ask yourself those two questions. Then you will understand not only what your character will do next, but also some kind of motivation for that action.

  You'll know how to keep score in your story and what your character is trying to achieve.

  TYPES OF GOALS

  Goals can take a number of forms. A goal in a scene could be an object, such as he's trying to get the diamonds that she keeps in the safe in the bedroom.

  A goal could be a more abstract idea: He's trying to get cooperation to put together a deal of some sort to raise money.

  It could be an internal goal: A character is trying to come to some understanding or knowledge of himself.

  A student of Gary's once wrote a scene in which a character was going along, driving into a city, looking at this place and that, and at the end of the scene, she realizes that her father's death has changed her. Having reached that point, the writer understood she had to go back to the beginning of the scene and plant that as the goal: In this case, the character was trying to come to some new understanding.

  The goal for a scene may occur in the scene, or it may be obvious from some previous scene.

  Consider the Bobby and Timmy scene. Maybe in a previous scene, when Timmy was hanging out with his girlfriend (the one who will ultimately sit on the witness stand for the prosecution and tell the jury what Timmy confessed to her about his role in this double murder), he said to her, "I'd better be quiet when I get home, because if Bobby hears me he'll beat the crap out of me for being so late."

  So now, when Timmy gets home and puts the key in the lock, walks across the creaking floor, etc., readers understand the goal of keeping quiet. You no longer have to write it into the scene at the beginning. If the goal is not clear, of course, then you have to put it in the scene, as we did in our first example of Bobby and Timmy.

  A goal can be stated in a lot of ways. It might be a question. Remember the TV show Twin Peaks? The question driving it was, Who killed Laura Palmer? The goal was to reveal the murderer.

  There are many ways of achieving a goal, and you try to do it in both subtle and graceful ways. Primarily, however, make sure that from the outset of the scene your reader understands how to read the scene, in other words, how to keep score by understanding what the character's goal is in that scene.

  SEEK—AND MAYBE YOU'LL FIND

  Writing students used to come up to Gary and say things like, "Gary, I've written a lot of scenes, and it's true they have no goal, but the writing is fantastic. Some of the best I've ever done. I just can't cut them out of the book. What can I do?" Does this sound at all familiar?

  Gary's answer used to be: "Doesn't matter. You're going to have to throw those scenes away, because a scene without a goal is like a tennis match without points being scored."

  The student would look dejected, and Gary would give a little chuckle and add, "But, don't go throwing those scenes away just yet. It may be they have a goal after all, and you just haven't found it yet.

  "Tell you how to find out. Here's the situation: You've written a scene, but you don't completely understand what the main character's goal is? When you get to the end of the scene, ask yourself, What does the character have now that he didn't have at the beginning of the scene? and then, How does he feel about that?"

  Here's an example of what Gary was talking about.

  You write a scene, and at the end of your scene, your hero gets to kiss Jennifer. How does he feel about that? Well, he probably feels pretty good about that. So his goal was to get a kiss from Jennifer.

  What if he feels bad about what happened? Then maybe his goal was to break up with Jennifer.

  Early on in Gary's last book, Baffled in Boston, the hero, Scotty, is talking to a friend about Molly, who died, and how he feels about that. Scotty ends up confessing that he suspects

  Molly was murdered. So what was the point? What did Scotty want?

  Let Gary tell you the rest of the story:

  "That means his goal in the scene was to announce to somebody that he believed Molly had been murdered, and that's exactly what he does in the scene.
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  "So, by the end of the scene, I understood the goal. Having figured that out, I went back in the second draft of the manuscript, and in the beginning of the scene, I said something like: 'I had gone to the funeral, and I needed to share my secret belief with somebody, but I didn't know who.' "

  EVERYONE WANTS SOMETHING

  Keep in mind that all your characters have goals, no matter how obscure the characters may seem. Characters without goals, however minor, disrupt the flow of the narrative, forcing the audience's attention away from what is important.

  Here's an example. You're writing a narrative nonfiction account about your mother, Harriet, and the extraordinary life she led. She goes off to Los Angeles to visit her father, a blue-collar immigrant from Poland. They have a huge fight in which each's resentment of the other comes pouring out. She rushes upstairs, packs a suitcase, walks out of the house. There, in front of the house, is a taxi. Harriet takes the taxi to the airport and goes back home to New York City.

  Readers say to themselves: "Wait a minute. That seems a little contrived, doesn't it? A taxi, in LA, that just happens to be outside the house when Harriet needs it most. What's going on here?"

  And the readers would be right. You have jerked them from what John Gardner used to call the "continuous dream" of your narrative. (Gardner was a well-respected novelist and teacher of creative writing whose book The Art of Fiction is one of the most thought-provoking books on writing fiction ever published.)

  It is contrived that a taxi just happens to be there when it's needed, and it appears contrived because readers don't understand what the taxi driver's goal is. Why is he there? Is there a hidden significance?

  Imagine instead that Harriet rushes into the street with her suitcase and realizes it's almost impossible to hail a cab in LA from the street. She finds a telephone and calls for a taxi, which then arrives and takes her to the airport.

  Now, there is no problem believing what happened because the audience understands that the taxi driver, as minor as he is in the story (he'll probably never be seen again), has a goal. What is it? To find passengers to transport from one place to another so he can make a living. It all makes sense because readers understand his goal, even though it's implicit in the scene, not explicit.

  BE BLATANT, THEN GET SUBTLE

  You may find it useful in your first drafts to be blatant about a scene's goal. Try to state the goal in the first sentence. For example, "Jack wanted to meet Greta Garbo. Even though she was famed for her reclusiveness, every day he would wait in the street outside her Manhattan home, hoping for a chance to introduce himself."

  After you write that scene, it's possible you can remove that overt statement and make the scene subtler.

  By the time you get to your final draft, your characters will have goals in all of your scenes.

  EXERCISES

  1. Go through your book manuscript and choose five scenes. Identify the goal in each scene.

  2. If you haven't completed five scenes yet, take five scenes from a published novel and identify the goals.

  3. Watch the movies The Fugitive, Thelma and Louise, Unforgiven, and Tootsie (or use any movie you like!) and analyze the scenes for their goals.

  Chapter Seven

  Writing in Scenes

  Having talked in general about scenes as the basic structural unit and characters needing a goal, let's talk about scenes and goals more specifically.

  Writing a book can seem a daunting task. So many pages to fill, so many words to come up with. At times it can seem as though you're faced with a huge brick wall, impossible to climb over.

  But a book is really a cumulative thing. Bit by bit, piece by piece, scene by scene, it all comes together, sometimes before you're even completely aware of what is happening. If you write one page a day, every day for a year, you'll end up with 365 pages—a book-length manuscript. Suddenly, that image of a huge wall fades away and is replaced by a far less daunting image, one of a house being constructed a piece at a time. And the "bricks" that build your "house" are not chapters, but scenes.

  THINKING IN SCENES

  Structurally, a chapter can be one scene or several scenes, and the scene can be two pages long or twenty pages long. There is no definite length for either. Broadly, the scene should begin as close to the "meat" of the action in the scene as possible; and it should end when that action has concluded. Write as little setup, explanation, description, etc., as possible:

  In—Action/Conflict—Out.

  By thinking in scenes, you are focusing on the nitty-gritty of the emotional drama that is pulling along your story's plot, infusing it, through the depiction of conflict and character development, with emotional power.

  When you start out with your book idea, you need to develop a growing awareness of your characters' feelings and needs. The scene translates the emotional life of those characters into visually powerful, engaging, and dramatic material— in other words, into scenes that work the same way in your book as they would in a film.

  In the movie The Fugitive, for example, the inexperienced writer would think that the important powerful scenes in the movie are the murder of Dr. Richard Kimble's wife at the beginning, Dr. Kimble's fight with the one-armed man, and then the subsequent train crash that provides Kimble's escape and propels the movie into the major conflict of the story, the clash of goals between Kimble and U.S. Marshal Gerard, who is determined to recapture him.

  While these scenes are important, actually, the most pivotal scene structurally, at the start of the film, is the confrontation in the culvert above the waterfall, where Kimble shouts at Gerard in pleading desperation, "I didn't kill my wife!" and the marshal says, "I don't care!" That scene not only works on a powerful emotional level, it also redefines the goals for the characters for the rest of the movie.

  HARRY'S TALE: GOALS AND STRUCTURE

  Here's another example: Say you're working on your book, and you reach a section where you think, Harry needs money. He's in debt. How best do you dramatize that piece of plot information?

  You don't have him come right out and say, "I'm broke, I need money." That's emotionally weak, and plotwise it's boring. What would you do in Harry's situation? Who would you go to for $10?

  Well, $ 10 isn't a dramatic sum to begin with. The stakes for the action in the story aren't high enough to really engage us emotionally. But what if Harry needs $500,000, instead? And if he doesn't come up with it the kidnappers will kill his daughter or his wife will die because she won't be able to pay for the medical treatment she so desperately needs.

  Try to envision the scene in which Harry goes to the bank to get a loan. If that doesn't work, you can envision the scene in which Harry goes to the bank with a gun to commit a robbery. You can also have a scene where perhaps Harry goes to his cousin Arnold to beg and borrow money. Maybe Harry goes to the racetrack and plunks down two hundred bucks on a horse in the eighth race.

  All of those are scenes that show Harry's need for money.

  With all these options, you need some guiding principle to choose which is the best dramatization to go with. That is often dictated by what you decide the book is going to be about thematically, what is the most emotionally powerful choice, who this character is and how far he will go to achieve his goal, in this case getting $500,000. What is Harry's state of mind?

  JUST WHAT IS A SCENE, ANYWAY?

  Before starting to write your scene, ask yourself two questions:

  • Does this scene advance the story in some way?

  • What is this scene about?

  Although it's not obvious, these questions are almost synonymous.

  Within the scene, the dynamic should always be the same. So when you ask yourself what the scene is about, your answer should almost always take into account your main character. Does the scene move the readers closer to learning something important about that character? Do the dramatized events ultimately move her toward her long-term goal or prize? Your character should encounter opposi
tion and obstacles that create conflict, and often moral or ethical dilemmas the character must resolve in order to move forward.

  Having roughly figured that out, you can start to frame the scene.

  A scene occurs at a set time and place. If events don't happen at a specific time and in a definite place, you're not writing a scene, you're writing an abstract narrative.

  Here are some examples of scenes:

  • a week from today in the dentist's office

  • the first of March in a casino

  • Thursday afternoon in a florist's shop

  Each of the above examples contains the basic building blocks of a scene: They all contain a definite and recognizable place and a time.

  Let's take Harry's story and develop it.

  It is Thursday afternoon in a florist's shop near the hospital. Harry is buying flowers on his way to the hospital to visit his wife, Julie, who is undergoing another series of difficult medical treatments. She is very sick. What we don't yet know is that Harry has lost his job, his medical insurance has run out and he desperately needs $500,000 to pay Julie's medical treatment.

  If you cross the "timeline" and go, say from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, you've left the scene. If you cross the "placeline," it might be the same day but you're no longer in the flower shop; instead you're down at the corner church or at the hospital reception desk. Again, you've changed the scene. Whenever you change the time or the place of a scene, you create another scene.

  Leave Nothing to Chance

  So you can envision the basic structure of your scene this way: Here's a character, here's his prize, and here's what's trying to stop him from achieving that prize.

  If nothing is getting in your character's way, the scene won't work. If your character doesn't want something badly enough, again, the scene won't work because there will be no emotional power driving it. The reader has no real reason to be interested in the outcome of the scene (or, ultimately, the story) because the character doesn't really care enough about what is happening. There's a direct relationship between a character's emotional need to achieve a particular goal and the reader's active interest and involvement in the narrative. If the character doesn't care what's going to happen in the narrative, neither will the reader.