If you do your job well, your reader lives through the battle with your story people.
And believe it or not, that’s all there is to it!—Though the specific points that follow may also prove helpful, by steering you away from common pitfalls.
Herewith, three do’s:
(1) Do establish time, place, circumstance, and viewpoint at the very start of each and every scene.
Confusion infuriates your reader. To avoid it, keep him properly informed.
Especially is this necessary where changes in situation are concerned: “The sky to the east was gray and the street lights had gone out before Greer left the apartment.” “The Three Brothers was a squat adobe building, huddled in a wild crook of the hills half a mile beyond the town.” “It was too dark to see the man who shook him awake.” “The Murderer never knew quite when it was he made that final, awful, inevitable decision to kill.”
(2) Do demonstrate quickly that some character has a scene goal.
The first half-page of a scene should make it clear that somebody has a goal.
To this end, let that somebody show purpose—preferably, urgent purpose. Make him act as if he had a goal . . . as if he were out to do something specific and important right now: “He clung to the shadows, studying the place for the space of a cigarette.” “She came in the night, long after he’d given her up.” “The lawyer called at nine-forty. He said he represented Daniel O’Connor, and that in the interests of justice, culture, and peace on earth, it was vital that he see me right away.”
Ideally, make your character’s goal clear-cut and explicit from the beginning: “Very coolly, very carefully, he raised the rifle and drew a bead on the back of Sortino’s neck: one dead dictator, coming up.” “Cox said, ’I want some facts, Heffner. All the facts about what happened on Calisto.’ ” “One thing was certain: Charlene was going to leave this house. Tonight. He’d see to that for sure.” But if you have trouble pinning the goal down that tightly right at the start, the impression of purpose alone will carry the ball for a while.
Remember, too, that like everything else in fiction, a goal is better shown than told. The things your character does, a demonstration, will come through stronger than mere words.
Why make such a big thing of introducing goal so quickly?
(a) Interest rides with purpose.
The sooner you introduce the idea that somebody’s traveling toward a given destination, the sooner your reader will become intrigued with wondering what will come of the journey.
(b) Goal often represents only the start of scene.
In other words, goal is primarily a springboard to plunge your character into conflict. Once he’s caught up in such, the situation will change on him, likely as not. So the more quickly you establish goal, the more quickly you can move on to the meat of action and unanticipated development that your reader loves.
Thus, maybe your hero wants to punch the villain in the nose, or to obtain an answer to one pointed question. But bug-eyed monsters are waiting for him in the cellar, or the heroine has disappeared, or the houseboat on the Styx has sunk. By the time the disaster is reached, in fact, no one even remembers the initial goal. Yet that goal is still infinitely important, for without it the scene itself would have had no excuse for coming into being.
Must the goal always be that of your focal character?
Not necessarily. Perhaps his role, in this particular instance, is less to achieve than to resist. But try to avoid having him merely acted upon too much of the time. In most scenes, he should be the aggressor—active, dynamic, driving forward.
So much for scene goals. Whether they come forth on the printed page as implicit or explicit, all must be ever so sharp in your own thinking. Each should be epitomized into some single act so pertinent and urgent that a character could believably aspire to perform it—and so concrete and specific that you the writer could snap a picture of that performance!
(3) Do build to a curtain line.
Some scenes have punch and some don’t.
The ones that do have been written so that the disaster comes suddenly and in unanticipated form—a shock, focused needle-sharp in a curtain line: “’Congratulations, Mr. Goss,’ the alien said. ’With you, your race comes to an end.’ ” “But dead Wang’s fingers still clung to a tuft of Clare Kennedy’s shimmering auburn hair.” “He shoved the white-hot iron between Will Evans’ toes.”
Now I grant you that this sort of thing can easily be overdone. Also that there are indeed a host of other factors that go to create punch. But when all the critical smirks have faded, and all the intellectual laughter has died down, ordinary readers will still be reading—avidly, enthusiastically—stories that cap off their scenes with curtain lines.
And now, three don’ts:
(1) Don’t write too small.
There are those who’ll tell you a scene can’t be developed satisfactorily in less than four pages—a thousand words.
They just might be right, too.
Why?
(a) Because scenes constitute the most important portions of your story, and it takes space to impress your reader with the importance of anything.
(b) Because most of us need space, if we’re to build to any kind of emotional peak.
(c) Because—in brief, fragmentary scenes—you’re hard put to offer enough of the kind of color, characterization, conflict, complication, maneuvering, punch-and-counterpunch, and unanticipated development that it takes to hold reader interest.
Four pages, then?
No, let’s not make it anything arbitrary or resembling a rule. But on the other hand, let’s not try to put across a climax in a paragraph either! A John Collier can get away with it. The rest of us don’t dare to write too small.
(2) Don’t go into flashback.
Flashback is somebody remembering in the present what happened in the past. It brings your story, your present action, to a dead halt for the duration.
Now there’s a place for this kind of thing, upon occasion. But that place is not within a scene.
Why not?
(a) It’s essentially unrealistic.
Most of us, when we’re in conflict, are far too involved with keeping our heads above water to indulge in any great amount of reverie.
(b) It strains reader patience badly.
When you write a story, you try to sweep your reader along with you on a rising wave of tension. Particularly is this true in those units of struggle we call scenes.
Go into flashback, and tension tends to drop to zero.
Why?
Because you’ve halted forward movement and present action, and your reader knows that what’s already past just can’t be changed.
Then, when you return to the present, you have to start building excitement again from scratch.
Are these grounds enough to warrant your keeping past history out of your scenes?
For my money, yes—especially since flashbacks fit more neatly into sequel anyhow.
(3) Don’t accidentally summarize.
Actually, you do summarize even in scene, of course. The fact that your heroine absent-mindedly picks her nose in an embrace doesn’t necessarily demand mention, nor is its exclusion missed.
On the other hand, there are certain slips that sneak into everyone’s copy, at one time or another. They’re dangerous. They jar readers. They crack or shatter story illusion.
No one can ever hope to make a complete list of such, of course. But here are a few samples of the kind of thing to watch out for:
(a) “He told her that—”
This is indirect discourse—a paraphrasing and summarizing of the actual words spoken. Run from it! What you want is speech—the genuine article, down to the last slur and contraction.
(b) “He hunted for the elevator without success.”
That’s what you tell me, anyhow. But I’d rather see what happened:
Definitely hurrying now, he loped down the corridor to the left.
&n
bsp; Still no elevator. Not even a fire stairs . . .
. . . and so on. Step by step and blow by blow. After all, that’s how your character lived it.
(c) “Time passed.”
Then skip to where things start to happen.
(d) “They had a couple of drinks.”
Why not
“Beer here,” grunted Paul.
Laird considered for a moment. “Make mine rye and water,” he said finally.
The thing to bear in mind is that nothing ever really comes alive in summary. Life is lived moment by moment, in Technicolor detail. To capture it on paper, you have to break behavior down into precise and pertinent fragments of motivation and response.
And that’s enough instruction. If not too much. Once you understand the fundamentals, the way to learn to write scenes is to write scenes.
While you’re practicing, though, you might like to consider a few thoughts on . . .
Writing the sequel
When you sit down to write a sequel, you’re faced with problems in three major areas:
a. Compression.
b. Transition.
c. Credibility.
Consider your focal character. Time: post-disaster. He’s lost his girl. His job’s no more. The friend he trusted has betrayed him.
Now, he tries to decide what to do; how to readjust to his changed circumstances.
To that end, he must pace the floor and walk the streets and face the disdain of a dozen different people.
How do you squeeze it all into a paragraph or a page?
Similarly, a week may pass between the time he’s struck down and the time he starts toward a new goal. In that week, he may travel from Milwaukee to Madagascar; from bruises to blooming health; from black gloom to wild elation.
How do you make the jump from time to time and place to place and state to state and mood to mood?
Disaster tends to paralyze a man. Beaten down, he finds it hard to rally. Yet only a few lines after the blow descends, story requirements demand that he charge into the fray anew, undaunted.
How do you make it believable?
You already know the answer to all three of these questions. Where time unifies the scene, topic unifies the sequel. In the process, it also gives you the essential tool you need to handle compression, transition, and credibility properly.
How does topic do this?
To be preoccupied with a topic is actually to be preoccupied with a particular set of feelings. If your girl runs out on you, in all likelihood you feel hurt and angry. If your boss fires you, you feel angry and panicky. If your friend betrays you, you feel grieved and confused.
Or, perhaps, your own feelings are different. That doesn’t matter.
What does is that until you decide what to do about the situation, your feelings can’t help but be the thing uppermost in your mind.
Therefore, in writing sequel, you act on the assumption that feeling is the common denominator that unites all other elements.
Then, you move from one such element to another across what might be termed an emotional bridge . . . subordinating facts; emphasizing feeling.
Take compression, for example. You skip or summarize the emotionally non-significant or non-pertinent, as pointed out in The Problem of Proportion in Chapter 3. If what’s needed is a picture of Lisa, and the process of portraiture isn’t itself devastatingly important, we very well might end up with some such abridgment as “Now the sketch took form. In a few deft lines, Lisa stood re-created there on paper.”
Since few details can be included, when you’re trying to keep wordage down, the selection of those you use becomes a matter of major concern. Frequently, the bit that serves you best is the symbolic fragment—the tear blinked back, the buffalo skull bleaching on the prairie, the bedbug crawling along a pillow. A whole frame of mind may be summed up in a mockingbird’s song; a way of life in the fact that the plumbing has been stolen out of a vacant house.
The trick is to find the single feature that captures the essence of what you want to say. You need the lone item which, brought into close-up, speaks volumes about your character’s state of mind.
Link enough such details into an impressionistic montage and there’s virtually no limit as to how much ground you can make a sentence cover:
Fog and smog and soot-streaked snow. Steaming summer nights in New Orleans; the parched miles going across Wyoming. He knew them all, in the months that followed; knew them, and ignored them, because there was no room in him for anything but hate.
Transition offers much the same situation. You need to bridge time or space or mood or circumstance or what have you.
To that end, you spotlight your focal character’s dominant feeling: Is it depression? Rage? Passion? Fear?
Emphasize that feeling immediately before the lapse in time or space or action or whatever begins . . . and then again immediately after said lapse ends.
In other words, set up your material so that the chosen feeling is the element the “before” and “after” situations have in common.
Let’s say, for instance, that the feeling is guilt. Our technical problem, in turn, is that we need to jump from Friday night in New York City to Monday morning in Tulsa.
Sleep came quickly, easily, to his surprise.
Only then he wished it hadn’t, because it brought strange, dark, half-nightmares with it . . . weird dreams in which Irene somehow always stood beside him, mute, dark eyes accusing.
The sense of guilt those images engendered still nagged at him when he deplaned in Tulsa Monday morning. . . .
Because feeling is the dominant factor in your story, it’s also the most favored bridge. But you can, upon occasion, use well-nigh anything as a device—weather, for instance:
“I hate it when it drizzles on and on this way,” she sighed. “I hope it clears before we leave.”
But the rain was still coming down when Sid’s car swung into the drive. . . .
Credibility? It’s the element you need most when you set about translating disaster into goal.
To achieve it:
(1) Set your focal character against a backdrop of realistic detail.
Though he be dropped down on Arcturus, a hero needs to eat sometimes, and sleep, and perhaps even bathe.
All about him, too, life drifts along. People chat and haggle, love and laze, laugh, grumble, gamble.
For the sake of credibility, your reader needs to find these elements of the familiar in your story. High adventure is fine, but too much of it all at once smacks of the comic book, and it’s nice occasionally to have relief from tension.
Such lulls are developed best in sequel: the transition between dramatic scenes.
(2) Push your focal character in the right direction.
You want your hero, defeated, to go after a job out of town. But if he leaves the moment the villain triumphs, your reader will sneer. So, you follow up the initial disaster by having Our Boy’s boss fire him. His landlady tells him she’s got to have his room for someone else. The P.T.A. protests that he’s a bad influence on the young.
Now, if your character takes off the way you want him to—though vowing to return, of course—Reader will class it as understandable behavior.
Why?
Because you gave him proper motivation in the sequel.
(3) Let your reader see the focal character’s chain of logic.
This is the reaction side of the motivation coin set up in (2), above. In large measure, it means simply that you give your character a chance to think things through. Because he’s between scenes, he isn’t under immediate attack; isn’t locked in conflict. So, what with more time and solitude, it’s plausible that he should here think as well as act. We might even drop into flashback with him . . . appraise those experiences in his past which influence his attitudes where the present and future are concerned.
Again, in sequel as in scene, you learn to write by writing. Get busy!
Integrating scene and sequel<
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Up to this point, we’ve treated scene and sequel almost as if they were separate entities. Actually, of course, they must complement each other . . . link together smoothly into that unified, cohesive whole that’s known as story.
Are there any problems involved in thus melding the two together? What points should you bear in mind as you combine them?
Herewith, a few observations on the subject which it might pay you to consider:
a. You control story pacing by the way you proportion scene to sequel.
As a general rule, big scenes equal big interest.
Long sequels, in turn, tend to indicate strong plausibility.
So, in writing, you must decide which element is most important to you at each given point. Thud-and-blunder melodrama may jump from death threat to fist-fight to rape to ambush, virtually without sequel. It’s all conflict; no transition.
Some of the more precious literary pieces, on the other hand, offer endless discussion of the protagonist’s psychic turmoil as he tries to decide whether he should order ice cream tonight, or sherbet. The only hint of strife is a warming of his cheeks as he observes the waiter’s raised eyebrow.
All of which gives us a few practical hints:
(1) If your story tends to drag or grow boring, strengthen and enlarge the scenes. Build up the conflict.
(2) If an air of improbability pervades your masterpiece, lengthen your sequels. Follow your character step by step, in detail, as he moves logically from disaster to decision.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 12