Your hand was on your hat. "We are strangers, Asgar. There's nothing
to say."
While Greer's dramatic scene opens slowly with seemingly benign details, such as Alice's clothing, there is a definite sense of foreboding and tension. Quickly the reader realizes that the details add up to something being not right—the empty glasses, and his lack of memory, suggest he's been heavily drinking; the way Alice is dressed as if she "spent the day out"—these details establish that drama is coming.
Dramatic tension, remember, is the potential for things to go wrong and the feeling that conflict is still to come in a scene. A dramatic scene, therefore, should achieve a lessening of one kind of tension as the drama plays out, while also creating new tension that comes as a result of new consequences.
When Max finally tells Alice the truth about his condition, it comes with a kind of relief—the reader has been waiting a long time for him to confess. But now a new set of circumstances has evolved: Alice thinks he's crazy and wants nothing more to do with him, provoking him to desperation and despair—here comes the new tension. Ultimately, in trying to keep her from leaving him, he forces himself upon her—and ultimately fathers their only child in the act.
In a dramatic scene, you want to conclude the tension set up by earlier scenes and establish new tension for future scenes. When you open a dramatic scene you are setting the stage for an emotional interaction to follow. Therefore, you want to narrow the focus down to the characters. It's hard to pull off emotional drama if the scene has a lot of background actions or descriptions of scenery, for instance. Dramatic scenes should open with:
• Small actions
•A sense of foreboding
•An emotional intention for your protagonist—remember that drama is about feelings
•An interaction between your protagonist and at least one other character
•An interaction between your protagonist and a larger force of opposition that threatens her intentions
DRIVING YOUR PROTAGONIST (AND THE PLOT) TOWARD CHANGE
After you've opened a dramatic scene, the rest of the scene should involve a series of escalating events and interactions that intensify your protagonist's feelings through emotional complications, thus driving your character toward change. Dramatic scenes put the pressure on your character to transform so that your plot can move forward.
You can create emotional complications in a number of ways, but here are some sure-fire examples:
• Confrontations. Many dramatic scenes revolve around a confrontation of some kind. The abused child confronts the parent; the betrayed lover confronts the mistress; the activist confronts the politician.
• Reunions. Drama doesn't always have to revolve around conflict, but it should include a quality of tension. When people who have been kept apart (long-lost siblings, lovers) come together again, there is great potential for high emotion.
• Borrowed time. When characters have a limited amount of time together, they often react differently—say what they really feel; act more impulsively—thus creating more drama.
• Crushed expectations. More often than not, a character's emotional intensity comes from not getting what she wanted or expected.
•Threat of bodily harm or death. The specter of intense pain or death has an uncanny way of forcing characters to change, and to have emotional reactions.
Sometimes the change your protagonist undergoes is good for him—the old adage that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Other times, the emotional drama that led your character to this moment of change might also equal his destruction—your particular writing style and your story's theme will dictate which kind of change your protagonist makes. One of the greatest examples of tragic character change brought on by emotional drama comes from Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary.
Fanciful and petulant Emma Bovary is a romantic with a wild fantasy life and a penchant for the finer things in life. She is never satisfied with what she has—she is always striving after something better. She marries Charles Bovary, a doctor, but quickly becomes bored by him and takes a lover named Rodolphe. Their affair is tempestuous, and Rodolphe is arrogant and impatient. He strings Emma along. Meanwhile, in order to cater to her image of how her life should be, Emma gets herself (and her unwitting husband) into deep debt by buying fancy clothing and fine furniture. When her creditors come calling and she cannot pay, she turns to Rodolphe to save her, and the scene that follows, which is full of hot emotional drama, drives her toward a devastating change:
"You have been crying," he said. "Why is that?"
She broke into sobs.
Rodolphe interpreted the spasm as one of love that could no longer be controlled. She made no answer to his question and he took her silence for modesty entrenched within its last defenses.
"Forgive me!" he exclaimed. "No other woman can delight me as you do! I have been a fool, a villain! I love you, and will love you for ever. What is the matter? Tell me!"
He fell on his knees.
"It's just ... that I am facing ruin, Rodolphe. You will lend me three thousand francs, won't you?"
"But ... but ..." he said slowly, getting to his feet, while his face assumed a serious expression.
"You know," she hurried on, "that my husband had entrusted the whole of his fortune to a lawyer. Well, the lawyer has run away. We've borrowed. The patients weren't paying up and we haven't been able to realize all our property. ..."
Ah, thought Rodolphe, who had suddenly gone very pale. So that's the reason for this visit.
Without the slightest show of emotion, he said: "Dear lady, I haven't got such a sum."
He wasn't lying. Had the money been at hand, he would doubtless have given it to her, unpleasant though such fine gestures usually are. ...
For a moment or two she just looked at him.
"You haven't got it?"
Several times she repeated the same words.
"You haven't got it! ... I might have spared myself this final humiliation.
You never really loved me. You are just like all the others!"
All of Emma's hopes are dashed. She is finally confronted with the truth— she has gotten herself into a trouble so deep that none of her usual saviors can get her out. This scene is the pivotal moment in her storyline—she marches straight for her husband's pharmacy and eats a handful of arsenic powder, effectively committing suicide. Tragedy at its finest, heightened by drama along the way.
While drama often comes with negative emotional consequences— someone gets hurt, another gets betrayed or abandoned—your protagonist may also change for the better. When faced with the painful truth, a character may finally let go of an unhealthy relationship, or fit the missing piece into the puzzle of her tragic history. Drama can force a character to exhibit bravery and selflessness and a host of other positive qualities. What matters most is that at the end of a dramatic scene, your protagonist has had a new or enlightening emotional experience that causes her to behave, think, or feel differently.
By keeping in mind that character and plot are indelibly linked, when you drive your character toward change in a dramatic scene, you can also drive your plot to its next step. Dramatic scenes should never be gratuitous—the reason for intense emotional conflicts that change your character is to push the story forward, and get on to the next event and set of consequences.
So, when you write a dramatic scene, you also want to consider the plot consequences that will result. What will happen after a stunning revelation that your protagonist is not who he thinks he is? Where will he go when, after a dramatic fight, his mother kicks him out of the house? Remember: The emotional intensity you establish in your dramatic scene must lead to change, and thus consequences for your plot.
CLOSING A DRAMATIC SCENE
Because the nature of drama is to elicit emotional intensity, you don't need to end a dramatic scene with a pulse-pounding cliffhanger. You want to leave your protagonist in a sort of daze or moment
of reflection. A lot has just happened to him—now he needs a beat to reflect or just pause, and so does the reader.
The scene in Madame Bovary that reaches such a dramatic crescendo that Emma is driven to eat arsenic powder ends like this:
She went home in a mood of sudden peace, almost like somebody with a calm sense of duty done.
And the dramatic scene where Max Tivoli reveals himself and forces himself upon Alice ends like this:
She simply stood there facing the door. In my nightmares, I work endlessly on a statue of my wife in just that pose, her back to me. I will never get to carve her face. Then, without turning, she walked out the door to meet her new life, and I had lost her forever this time.
Both scenes end with exposition, which distances the reader from the intensity. Unless your plan is to keep the drama high for more than one scene in a row (in which case you'll end the scene before the drama has concluded), you will want to cool down the intensity. To do this you can use exposition, as above, or end with a character's interior monologue about what has just happened, or employ scenic description of the setting that metaphorically or thematically addresses the content of the scene.
Dramatic scenes are also great precursors to epiphany scenes, for now your protagonist will need to assess what has just happened to her, or because of her.
MELODRAMA
Now let's take a look at where you don't want your dramatic scenes to go— into the territory of melodrama. Author Charles Baxter writes in his book of essays, Burning Down the House, that melodramatic writing enacts a kind of "emotional violence against the reader." He goes on to say, "One often feels bullied in its presence, pushed around."
The reason for this bullied feeling is that melodrama contains over-the-top or excessive emotional intensity, or it shifts too quickly to be plausible. You'll recognize melodrama when the emotional content of a scene is so hot it is almost embarrassing, or so hollowly sentimental that the reader feels his intelligence has been insulted. Melodrama lacks nuance. It slams a feeling or a weak character or a theme into the reader's face without doing any deep, foundational work. In essence, melodrama tells—loudly, with explosions and screaming ladies—it does not show.
Less Is More: The Art of Subtlety
Have you ever seen a real gross-out, gory horror movie like A Nightmare on Elm Street or one of the new slasher films that seem to come out every year? The drama is all very in-your-face, with pretty young victims screaming bloody murder as they're sawed in half (for no apparent reason), and the mangled villain jumping out of the shadows with tools of violence (with no apparent motive). There is nothing subtle about that kind of horror. Subtlety—or cool emotions—goes a long way toward building drama.
In Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, protagonist Clarissa has undertaken a search for her mother, Olivia, who left her fourteen years before. In a powerful moment, shown in the scene below, Clarissa finally makes contact with her mother. There's plenty of opportunity for melodrama—an abandoned daughter has a lot to be angry about. But with so much at stake for the protagonist, Vida takes the quieter path:
"I have something to tell you," I said.
"Yes I know," she said. "You're my daughter."
I nodded.
"I knew the second you walked in the door," she said. The corners of her mouth turned upward. I believed she might hug me.
"I knew this might happen one day ... I thought it was Richard who would track me down. ..."
She traced a flower, transforming the line into a stem. "I don't have anything to say to him, and I don't have anything to say to you. If I had, I could have written you a letter."
The characters don't cry and fight and yell at each other. There is a delicate pause after the sentence "I believed she might hug me" in which no hug follows, and the reader suddenly knows what's going to come. Olivia is not about to stand up and become a loving mother. Clarissa is devastated, and the reader feels this devastation for her without any need for Clarissa to get emotionally loud. Her pain is evident in the silence, in the lack of tenderness from her mother. The reader can feel her grief in the previous paragraph, and in her actions that follow, without any need for melodrama.
With subtlety, you let the reader figure certain things out for himself. You let the impact of information hit in its own time, without ramming it down the reader's throat. You deliver hints and images, rather than swooning ladies and strutting saviors.
The Traits of Melodrama
Believe it or not, you can still have wild situations with large and exciting actions and not go sliding off into melodrama. The most common traits of melodrama are:
• Sentimentality. Think of the kinds of sentiments written in greeting cards for lovers. Think of cliche, trite, or corny dialogue. "'You are my everything,' he said passionately to her." "'The Earth wouldn't turn if I couldn't be with you,' she said to him."
• Hysterics. Think crying, screaming, arguing that gets too loud, too emotional, or too angry. Allowing hysterics to go on for too long is a sure-fire way to lose your readers.
• Grand or unrealistic gestures. These are often found at the end of sappy romance movies, in which the changed man arranges for something utterly implausible, like hiring a famous football team to serenade his love. Big gestures may work for Hollywood, but they rarely fly in writing.
• Affected speech. Be careful that your characters don't sound like divas and English barons (unless they are), dropping phrases that real people wouldn't likely utter. Often what seems melodramatic in a character is just a bad affectation, or poorly crafted dialogue.
• Knee-jerk reactions. When a character changes his mind or behavior too suddenly, flip-flopping from meek to brave, from kind to villainous, the scene can read as melodrama.
• Descriptor overload. On the technical level, remember that an overuse of adverbs or adjectives can often lead to a feeling of melodrama. Often just cutting them away will solve the problem.
How to Cut Melodrama
The kindest thing you can do for your writing—and the reader—is to cut the heart right out of your melodramatic passages using these techniques:
• Check the emotional intensity. Your first order of business is to go through your scenes looking specifically at the emotional content. Are people fist-fighting and launching soap-opera style accusations at each other? Are lovers a little too profuse in their expressions? Are your characters saying too much about their feelings rather than demonstrating them? Try to take the temperature of the emotional content of a scene. If it feels too hot, bring it down.
• Retool dialogue. Go over your dialogue with the finest-tooth comb around, read it aloud—heck, read it to someone else—until it sounds like things people might actually say to each other (dialogue can still be stylized, but it should not make the reader want to gag or feel insulted).
• Smooth out character behavior. Take the diva or the preening prince out of your characters. Get to know who they really are so that their behavior stems from true motivations, not affected or empty behavior.
• Ground gestures in reality. Your characters can be bold and passionate, but think twice about having them do things that are too implausible or over the top if you want them to be believed.
• Equalize characters. Try not to make one character so much larger than life that he seems out of proportion to the others. Villains often get very colorful in first drafts, since villainy is so much fun to write. But if your bad guy outshines your good guy in his speech and behavior, the scene will feel off kilter, and the reader will become confused about which character to pledge allegiance to.
DRAMATIC SCENE MUSE POINTS_
• Dramatic scenes should focus on characters' feelings.
• Drama should reach an emotional climax and drive the protagonist toward change.
•The focus should be on character relationships and interactions.
• Character reactions should be intense, but not melodramatic.
Contemplation—the act of careful consideration or examination of thoughts and feelings and smaller details—is the antithesis of action. When a character contemplates, time slows down, or even disappears, and the scene zooms in tightly and intimately onto the character's perceptions. Outside of traditional literary fiction, contemplative scenes tend to be used sparingly. However, as you'll see throughout this chapter, for some genres and styles contemplative scenes play a crucial role.
A well-crafted contemplative scene typically:
• Has a higher percentage of interior monologue (thought) than action or dialogue
• Moves at a slower pace to allow the reader to get a deeper, more intimate look into the protagonist's inner life
• Shows the protagonist interacting with himself and the setting more than with other characters
•Allows the protagonist time to digest actions, events, and epiphanies that have come before, and to decide how to act next
• Gives pause before or after an intense scene so that the character can reflect and the reader can catch her breath
A contemplative scene rarely acts as an opening scene. Such scenes also tend not to appear too soon in a narrative, as they work best following plot events and dramatic interactions that are worthy of being digested or reflected upon. Too many of these scenes in a row create a sense of drag, and so scenes that involve some action should be interspersed among contemplative scenes. Contemplative scenes contain more thoughts, considerations, and reflections on events than actions.
INTERIOR MONOLOGUE
The defining characteristic of a contemplative scene is that your character spends more time thinking than he does in action or speech. These passages of thought are referred to as interior monologue (since they happen inside the character's mind), and are meant to reveal something to the reader. These thoughts will be overheard by the reader, and therefore have bearing on plot and character development in each scene.
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