Make A Scene

by Jordan Rosenfeld

  "Gloria," I repeated.

  Suddenly, as though I'd been physically struck, I realized what my father was saying. "What do you mean?"

  His fingers rubbed the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, lifting them till I thought they would fall off, but they stayed. He dropped his hands to his lap.

  "Gloria and I," he said softly.

  My stomach quivered, as though the low, rolling thunder outside had slipped in through the screen and become particles of air. My mouth grew watery, a sign I was going to vomit. I moved to lean toward the sink and as I did, sugar spilled out of the torn packet, pouring across one of my father's shoes. .

  "Amanda," he began, reaching his hand around to my forehead. I slipped away from him.

  "It's the tea," I said without looking at him. "The acid."

  My father retreated toward the table and sat back in his chair. He began again. "Your mother and I never discussed Gloria," he said, picking up his spoon and dropping it into his empty mug. "Not in any rational way."

  I recalled my mother's accusations. Gloria was her enemy, trying to harm her, trying to steal her children: all said to be hallucinations, all dismissed as evidence of illness. Now it turned out my mother had been right after all. She'd been right and she'd been ill, both at the same time.

  No one had believed her.

  The revelation of her father's affair is doubly devastating as Amanda realizes that, due to her mother's illness, they thought she was just being paranoid. There are a number of elements in this revelation scene that any writer can learn from. First, Stahl starts the scene with her protagonist caught in an unbalanced situation: Amanda is reluctantly spending time with her father, when her lover comes to the door. She uses subtext to create foreshadowing: The lover's appearance points toward the other affair—her father's—that the scene reveals. Then, she uses segues, small transitions between related topics, to create a sense of conversation and a realistically measured pace. The conversation feels natural, like how people really talk. She uses her setting very well too: Two family members jammed into a small space creates a sense of tension, of something waiting to explode. And then there is the weather. In the opening pages of the scene, Amanda's lover says to her, "Feels like a storm," and the author continues to pepper in details about the weather. (Of course, the real storm coming is an emotional one.) Then there's the element of opposition: Amanda has a feeling that her father wants to talk, but she doesn't want to, so she tries a few unsuccessful strategies to urge her father to go to bed so they won't have to, building a tense atmosphere. And then—yes, there's more—the author shows how this information affects the protagonist: Not only does Amanda become physically ill, she curses at her father and then walks down the hallway, where she kicks his shoe in anger.

  Revelations are best when they are complex and slowly built toward— so that they are not just two people standing in a room shouting words at each other. Use as many of the core scene elements as you can. Once the revelation comes, it should alter your protagonist in some way; whether her plot changes, or just her feelings, revelations should lead to some kind of shift.

  INFUSING YOUR DIALOGUE SCENES WITH TENSION AND SUBTEXT

  Now that we've looked at how to use a dialogue scene to reveal important character and plot information, let's look at how to build tension through opposition in an exchange and how to use subtext to keep even your most heated exchanges from turning into meaningless shouting matches. No matter what you want to reveal through your dialogue, infusing it with additional elements ensures a richer, more layered scene.

  Creating Tension Through Tug-of-War Exchanges

  In a strong fiction narrative, characters should want things from each other— information, affection, favors, material goods, and so on. The act of wanting powers both conflict and drama. When there's something desired, there is the potential for loss and gain—the essence of good drama. Dialogue should be, on some level, an act of bartering in order to keep tension alive during the course of the dialogue. I call this technique tug-of-war. To use this approach in dialogue, it works best to think of each character as both asking for something and withholding something at the same time. Use dialogue tug-of-war when you need to demonstrate differing points of view or illustrate the dynamics of a relationship. This approach also works when your characters are:

  • Exchanging insults or arguing over something

  •Trying to manipulate another character

  •Trying to seduce another character, or resist seduction themselves

  •Attempting to convince another character of a painful truth

  • Fending off untrue or unjust accusations

  Here's an example from Alice Hoffman's novel The Ice Queen, in which the unnamed narrator is weighing whether or not to tell her brother Ned a shocking secret she has turned up about his wife. What the conversation reveals is that Ned has a secret too, but in order to learn each other's secrets, they would have to give up their own first, and neither character is willing to do that yet:

  "So are you sure you don't want to know any secrets?"

  "Do you?"

  "You have secrets?" I was surprised. ...

  "Unknown truths," my brother joked. "At least to you. Known to me, of course. At least in theory. What I know and what I don't know, I'm not sure I can be the judge of that."

  "Oh forget it." I was annoyed.

  The tug-of-war style of conversation delays the reader's access to Ned's secret (a piece of plot information, incidentally), thus building tension. Then the tension mounts even more when the narrator keeps her secret a little longer. The scene shows the reader that both characters have an investment in keeping secrets, but the reader has to keep going to find out how these secrets will converge, and what effect they'll have when brought to light.

  Here's another tug-of-war example, from J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Disgrace. In apartheid-fueled South Africa, white professor David Lurie has come to stay with his slightly estranged daughter Lucy to flee scrutiny after a scandal involving an affair with one of his college students. In trying to escape one terrible event, he becomes a part of another, when his daughter and he are attacked by black men in her home as a territorial act. David is badly burned, and Lucy is ostensibly raped—but David doesn't know for sure, since he was not in the room with her and she won't tell him what happened. However, he quickly urges Lucy to press charges against the boy. Lucy has her own political and personal reasons for not wanting to do so. And there is the other, unspoken subtext, that if not for his own bad deeds, he wouldn't even have been there for her at all. Notice the feeling of tug-of-war between them—how they both want something and are resisting something at the same time:

  Sitting across the table from him, Lucy draws a deep breath, gathers herself, then breathes out again and shakes her head.

  "Can I guess?" he says. "Are you trying to remind me of something?"

  "Am I trying to remind you of what?"

  "Of what women undergo at the hands of men?"

  "Nothing could be farther from my thoughts. This has nothing to do with you, David. You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police? I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone."

  "This place being what?"

  "This place being South Africa."

  "I don't agree. I don't agree with what you are doing. Do you think that by meekly accepting what happened to you, you can set yourself apart from farmers like Ettinger? Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets."

  "Stop
it, David! I don't want to hear this talk of plagues and fires. I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely."

  Notice in both of the previous examples, there's a sense of movement, of action, even though the authors don't provide the reader with any actual physical movements. This has to do with the pace of conversations—the tug-of-war approach gives the exchanges a quality of movement by infusing them with emotional energy. The respective conversations bounce back and forth between characters, and carry with them a sense of change.

  Playing Up Subtext

  While the tug-of-war technique is excellent for increasing the tension in a dialogue scene, you don't want your exchanges to become a meaningless volley of words. The key to keeping that from happening? Subtext. People don't always say what they really mean; they withhold information and feelings, use language to manipulate and barter and hint at things. Because of this, you have a lot of opportunity to play with your subtext.

  Here's an example of a powerful subtext at work in a conversation from David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars. Ishmael Chambers grew up on San Piedro Island, Washington, and as a young teenager had a brief love affair with a Japanese girl named Hatsue. Their relationship was cut short, however, when Hatsue and her family and many more Japanese residents of the island were moved to the internment camp Manzanar after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Now, years later, Ishmael is back in town to write about a trial in which Hatsue's husband is accused of murdering a local fisherman. Hatsue and Ishmael have not spoken in all these years, and there is lingering resentment and desire between them. In this instance, the subtext comes from their history, which is shown in flashback scenes throughout the book. That history informs every scene in the present moment:

  "It's all unfair," she told him bitterly. "Kabuo didn't kill anyone. It isn't in his heart to kill anyone. They brought in that sergeant to say he's a killer—that was just prejudice. Did you hear the things that man was saying? How Kabuo had it in his heart to kill? How horrible he is, a killer? Put it in your paper, about that man's testimony, how all of it was unfair. How the whole trial is unfair."

  "I understand what you mean," answered Ishmael. "But I'm not a legal expert. I don't know if the judge should have suppressed Sergeant Maples' testimony. But I hope the jury comes in with the right verdict. I could write a column about that, maybe. How we all hope the justice system does its job. How we hope for an honest result."

  "There shouldn't even be a trial," said Hatsue. "The whole thing is wrong, it's wrong."

  "I'm bothered, too, when things are unfair," Ishmael said to her. "But sometimes I wonder if unfairness isn't ... part of things. I wonder if we should even expect fairness, if we should assume we have some sort of right to it. Or if—"

  "I'm not talking about the whole universe," cut in Hatsue. "I'm talking about people—the sheriff, that prosecutor, that judge, you. People who can do things because they run newspapers or arrest people or convict them or decide about their lives."

  There is no way to talk about unfairness without conjuring the fact that Ishmael—who is white—has had a much easier life than Hatsue, who was punished merely for being Japanese. Yet Ishmael suffered too, because he lost her love, and so both characters feel that they have been unfairly treated. This subtext makes their dialogue that much more charged and interesting than it would otherwise be.

  When trying to play up subtext in your dialogue scene, you can draw upon historical events as in the example we just saw, or you might try one of these techniques:

  • Use body language to say what isn't being spoken in words.

  • Use setting details and objects to elicit references to past events.

  •Zoom in on symbolic or suggestive objects in the setting.

  • Let the conversation dance around an unspoken topic.

  To the last point, let's look at an example from Ernest Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants." The story takes place in a bar and features two characters who don't ever leave their seats. Through the course of the conversation, the reader develops a slow, painful realization of what the couple is discussing. Without the dialogue, the story has almost no action.

  Hemingway opens with a quick brush of setting describing the hills of the valley, as well as the American and the girl sitting at the bar. Then, within a few more lines, the dialogue begins. Notice how the conversation feels like action because it moves quickly back and forth between these two characters:

  "And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"

  "I love you now. You know I love you."

  "I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

  "I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry."

  "If I do it you won't ever worry?"

  "I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple."

  Even though 99 percent of this story is dialogue, the subtext-laden nature of this tug-of-war exchange creates a sense of movement, of action throughout, allowing the reader to feel as though he is experiencing the events of a narrative himself, while the swiftness of the exchanges allows for emotional distance from the heavy topic of abortion. And even though the characters aren't engaged in a loud argument, even though there is no hot emotional intensity, the tension is palpable. There's real energy here as the reader sees the dynamics of the couple through their strained dance around a topic neither wishes to say outright.

  ENDING A DIALOGUE SCENE

  A strong dialogue scene includes information that either deepens the reader's understanding of the characters or explains a plot element (thus the big reveals we talked about earlier). In one way or another, dialogue scenes should offer characters a chance to reveal things. These revelations must be well timed. If you give away too much information at the beginning of the scene—say one character tells her married boyfriend that she's pregnant— in the rest of the scene you will use the dialogue to work out their feelings, motivations, fears, and reactions to that information.

  But a particularly effective technique is to drop a revelation toward the end of the chapter. This will either force the reader to keep going on to the next chapter, or it will leave the reader with a powerful experience to mull over.

  Here's an example of a revelation that comes at the end of a dialogue scene from Richard Russo's novel Empire Falls. In this exchange between protagonist Miles and his curmudgeonly screw-up of a father, Max, a piece of information is revealed that tells the reader a lot about the characters and affects the plot.

  Miles has never understood why his father never protested his mother's affair with one of the town's wealthy founders, Charlie Whiting—whose family Miles is still in service to as a result. Max has gone missing, disappearing from town with a mentally addled priest and some church funds, and he calls his son on the phone from Florida to let him know he's okay. Max and Miles quickly get into one of their customary arguments, but this time, the argument comes with a revelation:

  Why shouldn't he have a little fun? was what Max wanted to know, since they were asking questions. "Old men like to have fun too, you know. Down here, people like old men."

  "Why?"

  "They don't say," Max admitted. "Tom hears confessions every afternoon at the end of the bar. You should see it."

  "That's terrible, Dad."

  "Why? Think about it."

  "It's sacrilegious."

  "Your mother really messed you up, you know that?"

  And that was all it took, just the one mention of Grace, and suddenly the question was out before Miles could consider the wisdom of asking it.

  "How come you never told me about Mom and Charlie Whiting, Dad?"

  Max reacted as if he'd been expecting the question for years. "How come you never told me, son?"

  The spoken revelation here is that not only did Max know about his wife'
s affair, he knew that Miles also knew. The implications, however, are far greater than a simple revelation of information. Miles has always blamed his father and held a grudge against him for being gone more than he was around. Yet here the reader learns that Miles took his mother's side against his father all those years ago, even knowing his mother was cheating. This exchange helps Miles realize that he has blamed the wrong parent, in essence, thus consigning himself to his fate: running the Empire Grill under the iron fist of Mrs. Whiting.

  By letting this come at the end of the scene, not only does Russo catch the reader off-guard, he creates a powerful resting place. The next scene picks up in another character's point of view (the novel is co-narrated by multiple protagonists), so the reader is left mulling over how this information is going to sink in for Miles, and if it will help him to change his behavior and stop the cycle of guilt his mother started, binding her family to the Whiting family.

  Some dialogue scenes will end just like that, on a kerplunk, with the final spoken word in the scene. If the revelation came earlier, however, such as at the beginning or middle of the scene, then the ending should reflect whatever took place in the scene: The revelation should have a visible, dramatic impact on the character.

  In the scene from Disgrace, the tug-of-war conversation reveals that Lucy, despite being raped, doesn't see herself as a victim; and yet David— who elected to have an affair with his student—does see himself as a victim. Coetzee ends the scene with one reflective line of David's thoughts:

  Never yet have they been so far and so bitterly apart. He is shaken.

  This is a good, destabilized place to leave David in. Since David hasn't been terribly shaken by anything he's done yet, this signals to the reader that he may be able to change after all.

  When it comes time to end a dialogue scene, you'll want to leave your protagonist in one of the following places:

  • On the final words of a spoken revelation

  • Emotionally, mentally, or spiritually destabilized in some way