What unifies the scene, holds it together?
Time. You live through a scene, and there are no breaks in the flow of life. Once the bell rings, there’s no surcease for the fighter. Until the bell rings again, he has to stand and take his lumps—moment by moment, blow by blow.
Scene structure is as simple as a-b-c:
a. Goal.
b. Conflict.
c. Disaster.
Just to see how this works, let’s build a scene or two or three.
Take our boxer. His goal is to knock out his opponent.
His opponent has a goal too: to knock him out.
Warily, they circle . . . feinting, punching, counterpunching.
Conflict.
Now Our Boy lands a solid blow. His adversary lurches—staggers—goes down.
Our man steps back. Triumphantly, he sweeps the arena with his glance.
Only then, incredibly, in that tiny moment of distraction, the other fighter comes up from the canvas. He throws a wild haymaker.
It connects. Our man falls.
Desperately, he tries to rally. But his muscles have turned to water. Numbly, he hears the referee count: “. . . eight . . . nine . . . ten!”
A knockout.
Disaster.
Goal . . . conflict . . . disaster. All the parts are there. It’s a scene.
Let’s try it again, with something not quite so neatly structured.
Start with a character, any character—John Jones, say.
We zero in on John as he sits down beside cute Suzy Smith at the campus malt shop.
Why’s John there? What does he want?
Enter goal: Ever and always, in scene, John must want something.
In case classification systems intrigue you, “something” always falls into one of three categories:
(1) Possession of something . . . a girl, a job, a jewel; you name it.
(2) Relief from something . . . blackmail, domination, fear.
(3) Revenge for something . . . a slight, a loss, betrayal.
Here, this time, we’ll be arbitrary: John wants Suzy.
But what does he propose to do about it?
Axiom: A goal is not a goal until it’s specific and concrete and immediate enough for you to take some sort of action toward achieving it. The essence of goal choice is decision to act. Your character’s decision.
Ideally, this decision should focus on a target so explicit that you might photograph your hero performing the act to which he aspires. If you can’t, the goal isn’t yet specific and concrete enough. “To win love,” as a goal, is weak. “To get Letitia into bed”? Stronger!
Maybe John’s goal at the malt shop is to persuade Suzy to go to the prom with him tomorrow night. There, helped along by a pale moon, soft music and spiked punch, he hopes to convince her that she should marry him.
Enter conflict.
Conflict is another name for opposition: a man trying to walk through a locked door. It’s irresistible force meeting immovable object . . . two entities striving to attain mutually incompatible goals. For one to win, the other must lose.
Readers like conflict. It creates and heightens tensions in them, as we’ll see later. Thus, it enables them to vent repressed feelings of aggression and hostility vicariously, without damage to themselves or others.
Back to John and Suzy: He wants her to go to the prom.
To that end, he gets together with her.
Conflict presupposes meeting. A fighter can’t fight if his opponent doesn’t show.
Then, he states his case.
Your reader needs to know what your hero proposes to attempt. Or at least that he proposes to attempt something. For if no attempt is made, how can there be struggle?
If Suzy is as eager for the date as John is, in turn, you have no conflict; no reader-intriguing, interest-provoking question of who wins and who loses; no scene.
So we make Suzy hesitate. It seems she’s already tentatively agreed to go to the prom with George Garvey, the school’s star halfback.
This means that John’s going to have to fight if he’s to get his way, achieve his goal.
If he takes no for an answer easily, we can assume one of two things:
(1) He didn’t really want the date very much after all; or,
(2) He lacks the strength of character to fight for what he wants . . . hence is weak and ineffectual and why should anyone—least of all your reader—give a damn what happens to him?
But let’s assume that John is strong, and does want the date and Suzy. So he fights, via anything from blandishments to persuasion to blackmail.
Finally Suzy agrees. O.K.?
No.
Why not?
Because we’ve made it too easy for John. The conflict is too limited, the scene too soon played out.
Maybe the two of them can debate at greater length?
No. The endless rehashing of a single issue soon grows dreary.
Is there a remedy?
Yes: Bring in additional external difficulties related to the situation. Offer new developments: more hindrances, more obstacles, more complications.
In a word, make it harder for your character to win his goal. Treat him rough. Throw roadblocks at him.
How can you do this?
Emphasize the strength of the opposition. Build up the forces that block John.
This is another way of saying, let John receive new and unanticipated information that makes his situation worse.
This information may be received verbally, or it may come visually, or via any of his other senses. Information is still information, even though you acquire it by opening a door and discovering your bride’s stark, mutilated corpse; or by catching a scent of violets and thus learning that your husband still has contact with his mistress; or by noting the bitterness of your drink and realizing that Uncle Alph is trying to poison you again.
Like maybe, here, John successfully brushes off Suzy’s date with George. Whereupon she brings up another matter:
“What about Cecile?”
John shifts uncomfortably. “Please, Suzy. You know that’s all over.”
“George doesn’t think so.”
It’s a new tack, but John rallies to it: Who, he wants to know, is Suzy going to believe: him, or George?
Suzy shakes her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, John. But it isn’t a question of me believing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. It isn’t me; it’s father.”
“Your father! What about him?”
“He believes George.”
Again, a twist: new information received; a new complication, new trouble.
“He’s forbidden me to date you,” Suzy confesses.
“What’s that got to do with it? You’re a big girl now!”
“Not that big.”
More groping on John’s part. More fumbling for an angle. “Suppose I can get him to change his mind?” he asks at last.
That would indeed solve the problem, Suzy agrees. And so it’s settled: If John can persuade her father to O.K. the date, she’ll go with John to the prom.
Do you see how much more meat this scene now holds, even telescoped as here? Thanks to new developments, new complications, action and interest continually rise. John, stimulated by the seeming progress of the opposition, puts forth renewed effort. And this in turn intensifies reader excitement over which side ultimately will win or lose.
Finally, as we’ve seen, he persuades Suzy. But even this victory has consequences projected into the future, for it commits him to changing her father’s attitude . . . a chore which, viewed objectively, may prove to take a bit of doing.
For the moment, however, everything is sprigged with roses.
Enter disaster.
What is disaster?
Disaster is a hook.
What’s a hook?
A hook is a device for catching, holding, sustaining, or pulling anything—in this case, a reader.
; To this end, disaster (as we use the term) offers a logical yet unanticipated development that throws your focal character for a loss. It puts him behind the eight-ball but completely—“Sudden and extraordinary misfortune; a calamity,” in the words of Mr. Webster.
Such a development upsets your reader as well as your hero. Instantly, it raises a new question to hold him fast on the tenter-hooks of suspense: What oh what will the focal character do now?
Disaster comes in the form of new information received—like the unanticipated arrival of George Garvey at the malt shop, to illustrate the principle in terms of our example.
George is outraged to discover that John is attempting to beat his time. He swears that if Our Boy ever again so much as looks at Suzy, there’ll be mayhem.
To emphasize his point, he throws John bodily from the shop.
Time out for a few objections:
(1) “But suppose my hero doesn’t have a goal when the scene starts?”
Goals are of two kinds: goals of achievement, and goals of resistance. The first is explicit, as in our examples; the second, implicit.
Let’s illustrate: This time, pretend that John already has his date with Suzy scheduled. She’s agreed to it delightedly.
Enter George. He announces that he’s taking over, and that he’ll rend John limb from limb if there’s any further talk of dating Suzy.
Observe: Though John had no goal when this action started, now, abruptly, he acquires one: to resist George.
In other words, the goal of achievement is George’s; that of John, counterpoint.
So, John resists. George promptly turns to violence. The malt shop’s proprietor threatens to call the police. Panicked, Suzy tells John to forget the prom.
John refuses. Whereupon—disaster. For George throws him out, precisely as in the original version.
(2) “I want to write about life, not artificial, contrived conflicts.”
Pardon me, but you don’t want to write about life; not if you’d eschew conflict.
For again, what is conflict?
It’s opposition. It’s two forces striving to achieve mutually incompatible goals.
To describe conflicts as artificial or contrived is merely to damn yourself for your own ineptitude in the handling of them.
There’s conflict in birth, and in life, and in death; in an ax murder and, equally, in the softly whispered words of a seduction. Conflict is in the plight of the refugee who seeks a path across a hostile border, and in that of the stepmother who strives to break through the sullen silence of her husband’s children. It engulfs the old man thrust from his job by retirement rules, and the public-health nurse who tries to bring solace to the parents of a malformed child. Wherever you find him, man stands in conflict with other men, with nature, and with himself. He can clash with a mountain, an animal, a robot, a dollar, a germ, a neurosis, a theory. A touching scene can be built around the stubbornness of a drinking glass opposed to a child too retarded to feed himself, or a grain of sand wearing at a pump valve.
True, man against man, human opponents, are most easily handled while you’re learning. But that only makes the challenge of less obvious struggles all the more intriguing.
You want to write about life? By all means.
But don’t confuse life with mere word photography. It’s not a cruise through the alimentary canal with gun and camera, nor the sterile, egocentric thought-spirals of the immobilized neurotic brooding over his plight.
Life is conflict. If you deny it, the scene indeed isn’t for you. But neither is commercial fiction.
(3) “But must a scene always end in disaster?”
It must raise an intriguing question for the future—a question designed to keep your reader reading.
To that end, no better device has ever been conceived than the confrontation of your focal character with disaster. That’s the reason the old movie serials always ended with a cliff-hanger—Pearl White tied to the railroad tracks and the five-fifteen roaring round the curve.
Once you’ve gained sufficient skill, however, you can make the disaster potential and not actual. Thus, George might not throw John out, literally. Maybe he just hints darkly at trouble to come, all the more menacing because it remains not quite specific.
Similarly, you can reverse the disaster, as it were. Instead of ending your scene on a down-beat note, with the focal character sucked into a bottomless whirlpool of trouble, you play the other side of the record and set him up to ride for a fall.
For example, you might let him launch some diabolically clever scheme to do in his foes.
This gives you some devastating question “hooks” to pull along your audience: Are things really going to work out this well, this easily, for Hero? Will Villain fall for such a stunt? Or, has he some trick up his sleeve with which to turn the tables?
(I must add that though this “reversed disaster” system sounds fine in the abstract, it’s harder to make work than appears at first glance.
For one thing, it takes the initiative away from your focal character and gives it to the opposition. This forces your hero to wait more or less passively to see how said opposition is going to react. And that’s a dangerous situation, always, where you the writer are concerned.)
In any event, you do have a choice as to how to end a scene. So take whatever path you prefer, so long as you conclude with your story pointed into the future: some issue raised that will keep your reader turning pages, ever on the edge of his chair as he wonders just what’s going to happen now!
(4) “The scenes you build are rude and crude—not at all the kind of thing I want to write.”
Please, please, friend! Never confuse example with principle, or demonstration with device. All the illustrations in this book are painted in bright colors and splashed on with a barn brush. Subtlety too often defeats itself if you try to use it to make a point.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t apply principle in a subtle manner. There, the issue is always you: the way you see your world; the kind of story you want to tell.
Thus, your particular scene may involve neither fighting nor young love. The pattern works just as effectively when you use it to develop the plight of a fat, aging recluse as he tries to circumvent efforts to evict him. And you can write it on any level, including stark understatement, or pathos, or drab tones of gray and beige.
(5) “Scene format as you describe it is rigid; mechanical.”
May I plead guilty to oversimplification?
What I offer here is merely a beginning. It’s a basic approach; a springboard to help launch you into fiction.
Once you’ve mastered the elements of the form, experience and study of published copy will teach you how to vary it in terms of your own taste and judgment.
Remember just one thing: As a tool, the scene is designed to make the most of conflict. To that end, it organizes conflict elements. It telescopes them. It intensifies them.
Without such a tool, even your best material may come forth diffuse and devoid of impact.
(6) “But surely not everything in story is scene?”
True enough. What’s left is sequel.—But more of that later.
Where is scene planning most likely to break down?
Some thousands of student manuscripts convince me that key errors are relatively few in number:
(1) Orientation is muddled.
Your reader’s got to know where he stands. That means he needs a character to serve as compass.
Therefore, even if your story’s focal character isn’t on stage in a given scene, that scene still must have a focal character.
Pick this character by whatever standard you choose; but do pick him! Then, hold him in the spotlight. See that motivating stimuli motivate and stimulate him. Make him react to them.
Whereupon, your reader can use him as a yardstick with which to measure and evaluate what happens.
(2) The focal character’s goal is weak and/or diffuse.
That is, it�
�s not sufficiently specific, concrete, and explicit.
The remedy?
(a) Keep the goal a short-range proposition.
Make it something that the focal character can logically strive to achieve in a relatively limited, time-unified, face-to-face encounter.
(b) Be ruthless in forcing yourself to reduce said goal to a single, photographable act.
A goal, remember, is the target your character shoots for in order to unify a particular scene. Therefore, keep it dominant—the center of attention, like the duck at which you aim as the flock passes overhead.
Other targets may present themselves to your character in the course of a scene; granted.—Here’s a girl to flirt with him. There, a chance to pick up a sorely-needed dollar.
Temporarily, such may attract him. But you must hold them to a subordinate level or your scene will veer off like a car in a skid.
(3) The character himself is weak.
“Why doesn’t he quit?” is the key phrase here. If enough is at stake for him, he’ll fight!
(4) The scene lacks urgency.
What is urgency?
Time pressure.
That means, there must be some reason for John to act to attain his goal right now. Always, force him to take immediate action. If he can postpone his efforts without loss; if he can date Suzy as well next week or next month or next year, then urgency will vanish.
On the other hand, suppose that John learns that the day after the prom Suzy leaves on a European tour. It’s a graduation present from her Aunt Hephzibah. George, a favored suitor, will accompany the party. John envisions a jet-speed romance between the two, complete with marriage at the nearest American consulate.
Result: time pressure on John to line up Suzy now.—Plus a feeling of urgency that won’t stop, for your reader.
(5) The opposition is diffuse.
A swarm of anopheles mosquitoes can very well prove more dangerous than a Bengal tiger. But the big cat offers unified and obvious menace, and that’s why a good many more people come down with malaria than are eaten by tigers.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 10