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

  Everyone and everything is in the scene for a reason, and everyone in the scene has his own agenda. There's a good reason why Harry is in the florist shop on Thursday afternoon: He always buys flowers for his wife when he visits her in the hospital. But this time, the time that appears in your story, it's because of something more important than that. He has to somehow tell her that the bank is going to foreclose on their house tomorrow and the bailiffs are going to throw them out into the street because they are destitute.

  GEORGE'S STORY: THE IMPORTANCE OF CONFLICT

  George's ultimate goal in your novel is to be the head of a big corporation (such as Microsoft or Exxon). Within the scene you're writing, George's immediate goal is to get a promotion and a raise.

  If you write the scene so that George goes into his boss's office and says, "I want a promotion," and his boss says, "Hey, that's great, George, here you go. Here's your promotion, and while you're at it, here's a raise, too," you don't have much conflict or drama and you have absolutely no emotional content. In fact, there's no scene.

  What if, instead, George goes into his boss's office and the boss says, "I absolutely cannot give you a promotion." George says, "Oh, I'm sorry I bothered you," and leaves. Again, no conflict, no scene.

  But if George's boss says, "We can't give you a promotion, and before you ask, we don't have enough money to give you a raise," and George says, "Well, that may be true, but what we do have is a result of all the work I did last year. I deserve a promotion,'' and the boss says, "Well, your work wasn't that good," and George says, "What are you talking about? I won all kinds of awards ..."

  Now, you have conflict. The characters are going back and forth, and you have a scene because George is trying to attain a goal, in this case a promotion and a raise, and someone is trying to stop him.

  What has to happen in the scene is that either George achieves his immediate goal against all odds or he doesn't. The important thing, though, is that when the scene is over, George has changed his relationship to his overall goal. There's been some sort of movement in the story development. It might be forward movement or it might be backward movement, but it's not static. If George leaves that office in exactly the same place he came in, in effect nothing has happened, so don't bother to write the scene. Don't fool yourself into thinking that if nothing plotwise happens in a scene, but it nevertheless shows character development, that's enough. It isn't. Scenes need to show both character development and plot development to be effective.

  On a larger scale, the "promotion scene" fits structurally into George's overall goal this way: He either gets his promotion or he doesn't. If he gets his promotion, that's obviously a step up in the corporation. So he's closer to reaching his goal. If he doesn't get his promotion, he's been humiliated, he's been told he's not good enough, he might even quit the job. It's hard to become the head of a company if you quit it halfway through your first year there. But perhaps this setback is just what George needs to finally galvanize him into taking the kind of ruthless actions necessary to become the CEO of the company. Whatever the outcome of the scene, George has changed his relationship to the ultimate goal by the end of the scene. That's the important thing.

  THE FOUR MAIN ELEMENTS OF A GOOD SCENE

  1. Cause and effect relationships exist all the way along. Each scene should cause a subsequent scene to occur.

  2. A scene has a goal. An example is the scene in which

  George wants a promotion. The scene is important and relevant because it's driven by the character's needs and wants. He's trying to get something; there's a reason he came to that room on that particular day.

  3. Each main character in a scene has a strategy. That strategy is what the character says and does, in terms of drama-tizable actions, in order to get what he wants. Within that scene, a character may try a number of strategies to get what he wants before he succeeds—or fails.

  4. The ending of the scene must move us forward in some way. The movement of the scene is important; the character must have changed his position, relative to the end of the story, for the scene to be worthwhile.

  Even though a scene has its own plot list, its own inciting incident, its own goal, and its own strategy, it's important to remember that each scene links to the next.

  Let's look at the inciting incident. What has caused the events in the scene? If you've been sending your manuscripts out, perhaps an editor or agent has commented that your work is episodic. What that means is that the inciting incident in your scene is occurring too often within each scene without real regard for the scenes that have happened before or will happen next.

  Ideally, when you write a scene, the inciting incident—that is, the thing that propelled your character into the florist's shop on a Thursday afternoon, for example—happened in a previous scene. It can be one scene ago, perhaps it was several scenes before. (What we're touching on here is the importance of foreshadowing, which we'll look at in more detail in chapter eleven on pacing. It's enough to know here, however, that foreshadowing is not just a way of familiarizing a reader with what is to come, but it acts as a spur to future action in the story.)

  If you go through your manuscript and analyze the scenes in it, you may notice that the inciting incident for a scene occurs within the scene rather than before it. If so, this inciting incident is also independent of other scenes and is not really linked, in any material or emotionally charged way, with any other scene in the story. In effect, at best you've written a series of barely related short stories.

  SARA AND ALISON, PART 1: EPISODIC AND NONEPISODIC NARRATIVES

  This story illustrates the problem of unrelated, or independent, scenes. Although this is fiction, it could just as easily be nonfiction, as episodic writing is one of the primary problems for the unwary and inexperienced narrative nonfiction writer:

  Sara, a mother, and her daughter Alison learn that Rick, the divorced father who lives in California, has died, leaving them a house. So the women decide to drive from New Jersey to California in order to sell Rick's house and use the money to fix up their own house back on the East Coast.

  They get in the car and get just past Philadelphia when they find themselves in a snowstorm—a major snowstorm with ten-foot drifts and high winds, the kind of storm where people walk six feet outside their front doors and get lost because visibility is next to zero. Well, amazingly they survive that storm and get to Chicago where they pick up a female hitchhiker. Next thing they know, the hitchhiker pulls out a gun and robs them of just about everything they have. Luckily, most of their money was in traveler's checks, so after reporting what happened to the police, they get American Express to reimburse them. The police recover the women's car, which has been abandoned after it ran out of gas, and return it.

  The two women go on. They reach Denver. In the diner they stop at for a meal, Alison falls in love with the short-order cook, who is a real good-looking guy, and she has a romance that lasts about a week. Lo and behold, he turns out to be a scoundrel, and he takes off with all her money. She's heartbroken, but mother and daughter go on. Finally they get to California, they get to the house and they manage to sell it.

  This story is episodic, and the reason it's episodic is that there's no linkage between one event and the next. Any one of these incidents could have happened without the others happening. They all have their own internal inciting incidents. They are separate; they are not cause and effect.

  If you write this way, all you do is write a bunch of stuff that happens haphazardly to some people. It is not a story, and an editor or an agent may well say to you, "You write well, but structurally your story is off."

  This is one of the major problems of writing narrative non-fiction. How do you take a bunch of incidents that might all be true and part of the story you've been told or researched and turn them into a coherent story? What you need to do is find some way of pinning all the incidents together.

  In fiction, you might do it as shown in the second part o
f Sara and Alison's story. In nonfiction, you would pore through the story searching for some inciting incident that has echoes throughout the rest of the story.

  SARA AND ALISON, PART 2: CAUSE AND EFFECT

  Let's say that during the snowstorm in Philadelphia, Sara and Alison pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a runaway prostitute. Her pimp is chasing her, and if he catches up to her, he will kill the hooker and the mother and daughter as well.

  Well, in Chicago he catches up with the three women and hijacks their car, forcing them to drive to a remote area. However, through a combination of daring, intelligence, and courage the women manage to overpower him long enough to escape.

  When they get to Denver, though, the three women are pulled over by the cops and arrested, because the pimp has made a complaint to the cops, saying the women robbed him and stole his car. Well, finally they get out of that situation and manage to continue their journey to California.

  That is a story. Why? Because even though it's terribly melodramatic and cliched, everything that happens to these women is related to the fact that they picked up this hitchhiker. That key scene is the inciting incident for most of the story that follows.

  THE SCENE THAT ISN'T

  Let's look at an example of what can happen when you write a scene that really isn't a scene. You've written something that's kind of moody, and you think it's rather pretty, but it doesn't contain the four main elements of a good scene.

  Suppose a young girl named Melanie is wandering through a field, picking flowers and just feeling happy. She's dreamy and observing the world around her in glorious detail: The reds are a wonderfully deep vermilion, the oranges a glowing sun color, the grass a rich green, the air thick with floating blossoms and the heady scent of a myriad of flowers, and so forth. Melanie is thinking about romance, but not with any particular person, just "Wouldn't it be nice ..." thoughts, and you end up writing something pretty, but not exciting. You say to yourself, How can I save this section? It's the best thing I've ever written. How can I make it into a scene?

  The answer is to go back and look at the items on your plot list and see how each applies.

  What's the goal in the scene? What's Melanie's prize? Perhaps, under all this joy and light, Melanie is an abused child. She wants her mother's love, somebody's love, so she's picking flowers in the hopes they'll please her mother. (Already, we've added the element of conflict and darkness, you may notice. Now the scene has a shape and direction. The scene— and the story—will take a variety of different directions and outcomes depending on who we decide Melanie really is. Characters in conflict lead to plot development.)

  What's the inciting incident? Perhaps before this scene mother and daughter had yet another fight.

  What's the strategy? What's the movement? Melanie is going to deliver those flowers, and one of two things is going to happen: Her mother's going to be very touched or . . . You figure it out for yourself.

  Whatever the result is, you can look at the scene you've written, go through the plot list and make up things that fit and you'll have a scene.

  LINKING SCENES

  If a scene introduces important new information, it should be dramatized as direct narrative.

  Passages of time or events of secondary importance to the story's movement can be written as narrative bridges or transitional passages (indirect narrative), in the same way that dialogue can be written as direct or indirect speech.

  Let's assume, in the following example, we have a lot of new and important information the reader hasn't seen before. The scene is written in a dramatized or direct narrative form.

  Direct Narrative

  Harry examined the carnations. As he reached toward a bunch of mixed pink and red, he noted, almost with detachment, that his hand was shaking. The events of the last week or so were so overwhelming he could feel nothing yet—a numbness possessed him like an anesthetic he dreaded wearing off. It was all falling apart, like petals from one of the blooms in front of him. His right hand brushed past a bunch of flowers as he stretched toward those at the back, and a pink petal floated to the floor—there went his job; another petal peeled away—there went his home. Even as he examined the delicate stems of the flowers looking for imperfections, weeding out those with blooms past their prime, petals continued to drop away—his bank account, his car, his home ...

  At the cash register, Harry reached for his credit card to pay for the flowers—carnations were Julie's favorites and he always took them to her, carefully arranging them with some spindly looking green ferns in a vase he had brought from home and placed beside her bed— then realized he no longer had it. The waiter in the restaurant last week, with what Harry considered a malevolent flourish, had cut it up in front of him and his guest. Harry pulled several crumpled bills from his pocket and smoothed them out, intently examining each for the correct change while the store owner waited patiently.

  What have you learned? Harry is in trouble, he's stressed out, his wife is in need of cheering up, and so forth.

  Indirect Narrative

  If this same passage is written as a link or bridging section between two scenes, however, we can assume all of the above information has already been conveyed to the reader. So we can make the passage much shorter and less cinematic. All we are really trying to accomplish in the example below is to get the characters from scene A, Harry buying flowers, to scene B, Harry's visit with his wife in the hospital. We might be able to simply write it this way:

  That afternoon, Harry bought a bunch of carnations and busied himself arranging them in a vase as he waited for her to wake up.

  It's pretty basic, but it does the job, and it may well be all we need in the circumstances.

  Transitions of Time

  A commonly used bridging technique between scenes is simply to leave a white space between one scene and the next. It's the equivalent of a jump cut in a movie.

  Sometimes scenes that could be separated by a white space could be linked by a simple, brief bridging passage so the narrative prose flows better.

  For example, if a reader needs to be told how much time has passed between scene A and scene B, we can add a bridging link:

  Two days later, George again found himself in his boss's office preparing to fight for his promotion,

  or,

  It had been two weeks since Harry had last heard from the bank...

  The deftness with which you construct the narrative journey you're going to take the reader on, through foreshadowing, character motivation, and the artistic striptease of revealing just the right amount of narrative detail, takes real skill.

  It's really only the second or third time we read a well-crafted piece, when we know where we are going, that we can really appreciate the technical excellence of how the writer got us there.

  The key to layering a scene, that is, having more than one thing happening, is to give the reader a sense of the story before the story becomes more and more complicated. Eventually, these complications will be resolved. In the case of narrative nonfiction, an episodic construction can be seen as a narrative that brings in new information and new time frames without warning, only to make the same points already made in the story.

  EXERCISES

  1. Consider the following situation: A woman is trying to get a set of keys from her husband.

  Now, examine it for an inciting incident, a goal or prize, a strategy, and a resolution.

  Before you start to write the exercise above, ask yourself: Is this taking place in a definite place? At a specific time? Is it a good scene, and if not, what's wrong? If there's no conflict, it's not good drama, and therefore it's not a good scene. With opposition, you have a story, because a story is about characters overcoming obstacles and opposition.

  2. Here's another example to use to repeat the previous exercise: A man has to baby-sit a headstrong five-year-old.

  3. Train yourself to ask questions of your plot and your characters: Who is he? What does he want? Why is h
e there? What is the child's problem? Now try writing the scene.

  4. Some advice worth considering: The actor Christopher Walken says that when he considers how best to act a role, he first "works out" all the obvious stuff about his character, and then "flips it" doing something else, something unexpected.

  With this advice in mind, completely rewrite the above scenes from memory.

  Chapter Eight

  Systems and the Status Quo

  Imagine a row of dominoes standing next to each other. If you hit the first domino, it will strike the next domino, and that in turn strikes a third and so on, until a chain reaction has taken hold. Cause and effect relationships exist all the way to the end.

  Similarly, your story is not just a series of events that have something in common, such as they all occurred on Monday or they all happened to a man named Marvin; they are events that are interrelated. A affects B, which affects C and so on.

  Remember we talked about two basic story types: Someone goes on a journey, and someone knocks on the door.

  If you think about these two story types, it's easy to see that both need the stimulation of an inciting incident to upset the existing system, or status quo, and launch the story.

  STATUS QUO

  The status quo exists when everything is humming along without conflict and everyone is more or less content. It is when a system is functioning normally, in other words, the state of affairs at the start of your story.

  Suppose you have a father, mother, son, and daughter. They're all connected. They are a family—a system. They are also a story system because they are main actors in your book and what one does affects the lives of the others. At first everything is going along fine. As in a well-tuned electrical system,

  the current is flowing nicely and there are no problems. You have a status quo.

  But, when you introduce an inciting incident, something new enters the system and changes and upsets this status quo.