Make A Scene

by Jordan Rosenfeld

  • Function as a distraction. A minor character can be a red herring to distract the reader from a plot twist you plan to throw into an end scene. The serial killer might be someone the reader has come to think is a pretty nice guy, so you throw in a minor character who looks pretty bad—a history of drugs and violence, say, and lead the reader away from your true killer long enough to let the truth come as a surprise.

  As you might be able to tell from the above list, minor characters almost qualify more as a part of the setting than they do as characters. You don't need to develop them deeply; you simply need to make them useful.

  HOW TO KEEP YOUR CHARACTERS IN THEIR PLACES

  I'd like to mention that secondary and minor characters can be seductive. You can find them saying a bit too much or showing up in more scenes than is useful. Let's refer back to Harry Potter. Though Harry has many friends and comrades and meets many interesting wizards and creatures who are compelling (without whom he never would have made it through seven books worth of adventures), the reader is not going to waste much time worrying about what happens to Madam Rosmerta, the pub proprietor, or Argus Filch, the Hogwarts school caretaker. It's worth mentioning on this note that Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, Harry's two best friends, though they are strong and well developed, are still secondary characters. Ultimately it is Harry's journey and story, and he is the character who must undergo the dramatic transformation. As allies, Ron and Hermione exhibit courage and strength, sacrifice and support, but if one of them had been killed off (horror!) the story would have gone on. While your minor characters are important, remember that they will stay minor only as long as they:

  • Make infrequent appearances—they should not appear in every scene

  • Demonstrate little or no internal reflection

  •Are not emotionally complex

  • Demonstrate a behavior or personality that challenges or supports your character

  •Act as a catalyst to stimulate change or reaction in your protagonist in any scene

  If you've got a secondary or minor character present in nearly every scene, the reader will start to think that maybe this character isn't so minor anymore, and then she will begin to expect more out of that character—which means more out of you. Secondary characters can certainly show up in a number of scenes with your protagonist, but again, the focus must be on your protagonist, and these secondary characters must be there to serve, support, or thwart the protagonist in some way.

  Promoting Secondary Characters

  From time to time you may discover that someone you intended to be a secondary character is rich and vivid, and fits into your plot so well that you want to bump up his status to co-protagonist—which means that he now would get equal point of view time with any other protagonists currently in your narrative, or even replace your protagonist altogether. Pay attention to how you feel when writing a secondary character. If he fits most of the following criteria, he may be more major than you realized:

  •Appears in all or most scenes

  • Begins to undergo an emotional transformation separate from that of your existing protagonist

  • Becomes so integral to the plot that it falls apart or becomes confusing without him

  If he starts to take over the story, or you find that he is more compelling than you first thought, you might consider whether he's been given too low a status in your narrative and needs to be promoted in importance.

  Secondary characters thwart or support your main character: They are either allies or antagonists. They are memorable and vivid, but come with no imperative for dramatic transformation. Minor characters are almost a part of the scenery, just simple catalysts to get your protagonist moving on to the next aspect of his plot, and they don't even need to be well-drawn. These characters have no imperative to change whatsoever.

  Together, these kinds of characters will create a rich, vivid set of people you can call on in your scenes to provide many challenges and situations under which your protagonist can transform.

  So far we have talked about individual scene construction, which is the most important subject of this book, and which will more than prepare you to begin writing a manuscript. Yet a bunch of scenes stacked one after the other doesn't automatically equal a narrative. Now we'll look at ways to link individual scenes to one another to compose a strong, vivid storyline.

  It's useful to think of your scenes as the cells that compose a body. Each one is distinct and individual, achieving a different goal, but they all must work together or you won't have a cohesive narrative. The simplest and easiest way to link scenes is through transitions, passages of text at the beginning or ending of a scene, where you condense and shift time, space, point of view, and many other details to create a sense of flow and to bypass mundane or nondramatic moments in your characters' lives.

  That last point is very important: fiction is a simulation of real life; your goal is to offer only the most meaningful, relevant, and dramatic moments in your characters' lives, and to bypass the other moments that don't contribute to your narrative. Remember this!

  Transitions are most noticeable at the beginning of a scene—this is where the reader will make the mental leaps you need: "Oh, I see, he's not on the farm anymore, he's in an airplane! Oh, it's not early morning anymore;

  it's nighttime!" So we'll focus first on how to make your transitions clear at the beginning of a new scene, and then we'll talk briefly about how to set up the end of a scene with the next scene in mind.

  The reader doesn't like to be jarred every time you begin a new scene, and since a narrative is composed of sometimes hundreds of scenes, you'll need to make sure that each successive scene feels connected to or derived from the scene that preceded it. Chapters are also breaks in your story's action; you may have one or ten scenes within one chapter. Chapter transitions need to be smooth as well.

  The end of a scene or chapter is a note to the reader that you are concluding something, taking a break from the preceding events in order to change, refresh, or throw a twist into character or plot details. You might change something basic, such as physical location, or the next scene might take place years down the road. Either way, at the beginning of a scene you are, first and foremost, signaling that changes have taken place since the last scene.

  SIGNALING A SCENE CHANGE

  When you open a new scene, your first job is to orient the reader as to where the protagonist and other characters are in relationship to the scene (or scenes) before. You start, as the writer, by asking: What has changed? Where and when are my characters now? How can I make this clear to the reader?

  Time of Day, or Day of the Week, Month, Year

  At the beginning of a scene, it's likely you'll have to somehow make clear to the reader that time—minutes or years—has passed. Condensing time is a handy trick for moving on to only the interesting points of a character's life and story. Here are different examples of leaps in time. The first is from Chris Bohjalian's Midwives, and the second is from Caleb Carr's The Alienist. Notice how they both rely upon simple expository descriptions, which I've italicized to make them obvious:

  At some point soon after my mother started to speak, Corporal Richard

  Tilley began taking notes. He wrote fast to keep up with my mother, and

  the few questions his partner asked usually began, "Could you repeat that please, Mrs. Danforth?"

  What has been condensed is the time between Mrs. Danforth's arrest, and the time when she is questioned.

  I got to Kreizler's house, at 283 East Seventeenth Street, a few minutes early, white-tied and caped and not at all sure of the conspiracy I'd entered into with Sara — a conspiracy that for better or worse would now play out.

  Here, Carr condenses a few hours, and he also condenses the journey from point A to point B. The reader doesn't see the character's entire walk from his office up to East Seventeenth Street, because there is nothing significant to the plot in that journey. Carr simply gets his cha
racter to the next place with a few words: "I got to Kreizler's house." When you want to condense time you can:

  • Use narrative summary. "Sixteen years later, they stood on the same stoop where they had first met."

  • Use dialogue. "I can't believe it's been a year since we saw each other."

  • Use setting. "The young sapling she had planted when she left was now a full-grown tree."

  I do want to add a note of caution here. You should only condense time when you need to condense short periods of time, and then only specifically to bypass mundane and irrelevant information. Be aware that large leaps—like many years, or from one plot event to another—undertaken without doing any of the necessary scene work in between to make such a leap plausible, will only get you into trouble with your the reader. If you feel the need to condense large periods of time, or find you jump too freely from one event to another, you may need to renegotiate your plot and figure out how to make events take place in a more plausible timeline.

  Location/Setting

  Many times the reason for breaking a scene is to move the characters to a new location, whether this is just down the street, or involves putting the character on a steamship to a new country. If you have changed the setting from the last scene, you want to make this clear fairly quickly. Here is an excerpt from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Vine of Desire in which the introduction of a new setting is used to launch the scene:

  Chopra's house is huge and pink, like a giant, lighted cake plopped down on a bald stretch of hillside. There's a uniformed white guard at the gate, to whom Sunil has to show his invitation, then a circular driveway with an illuminated fountain and Grecian-style statuary, mostly nymphs at various stages of undress, or plump, peeing cherubs.

  This setting is most definitely not the "tiny apartment" that protagonist Anju and her husband, Sunil, live in, nor is it the university where Anju takes classes. The reader knows right away these characters are not in any of their familiar locales. When making a setting shift:

  • Select details carefully so that the setting description is engaging

  •Allow your protagonist to interact with the setting when possible

  •Allow your protagonist to have opinions about the setting

  •Allow the setting to reflect your protagonist's mood, feelings, or inner world in some way

  Ambiance and Atmosphere (Mood, Tone, and Weather Changes)

  Not all scenes will require a shift in setting, so if your protagonist is in the same location he was in during the previous scene, but you want to demonstrate that something is different—that a new plot twist is coming, or that the character's attitude has changed—you can change the atmosphere or mood. Here's an example from Jean Hegland's novel Windfalls, about a struggling single mother, Cerise, who endures a terrible loss. Many of the scenes starring Cerise take place in her small trailer, where she lives with her teenage daughter and young son. The reader is alerted by a literal change in atmosphere that this scene is going to be different from others:

  When the smoke first filtered into her sleep, her dreams recognized it. It was a nasty smoke, the smell of cheap things burning, and for awhile her dreams

  engulfed it, offering weird dream-reasons to explain its presence. It was an explosion that finally woke her, a blast that left her unmoored in the darkness, adrenaline prickling her flesh, dread clinging to her bones. A bad dream, she told herself, as she struggled to find a way out of its grip.

  The smell of smoke and the loud explosion are not normal occurrences in Cerise's trailer—the reader immediately knows something is wrong (and different from the last scene). These details pique the reader's curiosity and excite anxiety for the welfare of the characters while also suggesting that something has changed from the last time the reader saw Cerise.

  Here's another example, from G.K. Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday, a sort of philosophical mystery. One night, the poet Gabriel Syme meets up with a mysterious stranger. Gregory, who initiates a debate about art and anarchy, and gets Syme to agree to come along with him for a "very interesting evening." Syme is unwittingly drawn into a secret society and a mystery that will challenge his view of himself. From the pub—which has a kind of upbeat, jolly energy—where Gregory brought Syme, he is taken by boat on the English Channel to a new location. Notice how the mood immediately begins to turn mysterious and suspenseful with just a few details:

  At first the stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid; but before he reached the top he had realized that there was a man leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and frock coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him, he did not even move a hair. ...

  There are many ways to signal shifts in mood or atmosphere:

  • Through weather. Weather can be used to show that the scene opens in a different season or time of year, but can also reflect and mirror the changed inner world of your characters, or the tone of the new scene. If the scene needs to feel eerie or suspenseful, dark clouds, low light, and other symbols of moodiness can convey this tone to the reader.

  • Through sensory details. Changes in the way things smell, sound, or feel are giveaways for scene changes. Sounds, for example, can be misconstrued; what sounds like a scream might turn out to be a laugh. A character may step in a puddle of something sticky that wasn't in the house when they were there last, and, in the dark, fear it is blood.

  • Through unusual juxtapositions. In the Chesterton example, the strange sight of a man dressed in silk and frock coat on a parapet overlooking the embankment signals a new mood. You can use jarring or unusual or just dissimilar images placed side by side to signal that the tone is now ready to shift. The new mood doesn't have to be eerie; you can create comic, romantic, and happy juxtapositions, too.

  A Shift in Point of View

  Many narratives have co-protagonists who each get their own point-of-view scenes or chapters. In order to show that you've moved into a new character's POV, you may need to use a few simple transitions.

  Many authors dedicate an entire chapter to one character at a time, which is a very simple, direct way to communicate whose point of view the scene is in (see chapter twenty-two). To keep the reader oriented, authors use a header below the chapter title that gives the character's name, as in:

  However, if you don't want to use the character's name as a header, you must be sure to drop the character's name or some obvious detail about him into the opening couple of sentences in each scene or chapter devoted to that character, as in these examples from Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

  Josef Kavalier's determination to storm the exclusive Hofzinser Club had reached its height one day back in 1935, over breakfast, when he choked on a mouthful of omelet with apricot preserves.

  In a chapter that follows, he shifts to another point of view:

  When the alarm clock went off at six-thirty that Friday, Sammy awoke to find that Sky City, a chromium cocktail tray stocked with moderne bottles, shakers, and swizzle sticks, was under massive attack.

  In both cases, it's obvious whose point of view the reader is entering, and there's no room for confusion. Don't make the reader wait for a page to figure out whose eyes he is looking through!

  SIGNALING PLOT AND CHARACTER TRANSITIONS

  Consider your character and his plot as you start each new scene. You do not need to drop the scene's new piece of plot information into the very opening of that scene. Your protagonist or another character could also use words (dialogue or written text) to express that a transition has taken place. "You're not so powerful now," the villain might say to the superhero. Or a character might find a letter in place of his wife that reads, "I've left you."

  Sometimes the shift in location or mood is enough to signal that, later in the scene, something is coming. But you do want
to be sure that the opening sets up the scene for whatever you have in mind. So consider the following:

  •If your plot is event based, and an important event happened in the prior scene. Maybe a building exploded—where is your protagonist in relationship to that event now? On the phone with the cops, for instance, or hunting down the arsonist?

  • Is your character picking up from a cliffhanger? Perhaps your character is beginning an action after an epiphany ending? Don't forget to conclude that action.

  • Does your character need to express feelings (interior monologue) related to the plot in the scene after an event? Is he afraid for his life,

  or refreshed after a long vacation? You might launch the next scene with a line of interior monologue that tells the reader how your protagonist's feelings are different from, or related to, the previous scene.

  Transitions are the way you speed past the dull and the mundane, and condense time and space so that your characters can get right to the important work of the plot. What has taken place in the scenes before is your clue to effectively linking the next scene.

  So there you are, with a finished draft or even just a finished scene still smoking from the sheer effort of your labor. First, put it aside. In a couple of weeks (or more), when your work is cool to the touch and you've had enough of a break that you're ready to tackle revising, there are many ways you can approach the process. A scene-by-scene revision approach is a good place to start—it's a bit like unpacking the boxes full of interesting, but not necessarily organized, stuff in your garage and putting everything in order.

  IDENTIFYING VIGNETTES

  Anyone can learn to dance by following the footwork, but not everyone who learns to tango can actually perform for an audience with any grace or dramatic effect. This is true of scene writing. You can learn how to write a basic scene, and still write scenes that just don't do anything for your plot. This assessment chapter hopefully will prevent you from becoming a very competent vignette writer—that is to say, someone who is very good at writing scenes that don't add up to much.