C No woman in Yellow Falls, and probably anywhere, talked about what it felt like to be pregnant other than to say it was the Lord’s miracle, so Eveline didn’t know to expect the cramping and expanding, the tenderness of her breasts and hips.
Of course scenes vary in length (as they vary in importance), and sometimes there is the need for only a moment of a scene, and it can be embedded in summary. But I strongly assert that you should know which strategy you are using: full (“kernel,” or “major”) scene, little (“minor”) scene, or scene fragment. And the most important scenes in a novel, what I later discuss as “core scenes,” should function with the integrity of small stories. Get your colored markers and find your scene blocks. They are the lifeblood of your story.
EXERCISES
For each of the suggestions, turn to your manuscript and ask if you have accomplished them. Look at one of your major scenes right now.
Think of scenes as mini stories.
If it is a mini story, you will be able to identify the beginning, middle, and end. Mark your scene into three blocks of text. Your scene will have a resolution that leaves things different from how they were when the scene began. Write a statement about the beginning that says “how it was,” and another about the end that says “how it is now.” Are they truly different? Did the scene really make that difference? Did something happen?
Write scenes about moments that matter.
If the scene is important enough to take up space in the novel, what happens in it matters. What is the particular “something that matters” in your scene? State it in a sentence. Why does it matter? In the excerpt above from Evergreen, the scene seems uneventful, but it is early in the story, and the young woman is just learning what she has got herself into in the wilderness. She’s just learning who her husband is in this new setting, and what being pregnant means. Those few lines tell us a lot about the situation and the relationship of the characters. They may be in love, but they aren’t entirely comfortable with one another; there’s a lot to learn about living together.
Know the boundaries of your scene.
If your scene stands alone (i.e., it is not immediately followed by another scene), you can put your finger on the line where it begins, and then on the line where it ends. Everything between is the scene: action, response. Draw heavy double lines at the beginning and end of the scene; now underline the sentence that comes before the scene starts, and the one that comes after the scene ends. Those are your transition sentences. (You may have made a “jump” into the scene after white space—a different strategy.) The scene may be “nested” in exposition or commentary, but it has its own structure. Employ parts of scenes—compressions, fragments—in summaries and transitions.
If one scene follows another, identify the way that you have bridged the story between scenes, especially if time has passed between them. There’s a good chance you used (or should use) summary as your transition. If you need to review the two sections on summary, which follow, you can come back to this exercise later. The sections are “Scene summary” and “Narrative summary.”
Scene summary and scene sequence
If there is a lot of action in your novel, especially if it covers a broad scope of time, you won’t be able to develop all of it in scenes. Yet there will be places where you are reluctant to let go of scene elements: the feeling for setting, moments of action or emotion, something to allow an economical flow of story while also creating the sense of having participated in an event. Often, you want a sequence of scenes, one thing happening after another, but you don’t want all of them to take the same space on the page. You want variety and emphasis in scenes, just as you do in sentences, and of course you don’t want unnecessary length. You can link scenes in a sequence by summarizing some of them. It’s like stringing a necklace with some large stones and some small ones.
It is possible to convey a scene in a compressed fashion, not taking the time to develop all the moments in the event (the “beats,” or steps of action), but telling enough that the reader could describe the scene himself, from his imagination. The scene is there, behind the summary. The reader could stop and imagine a filled-out version, but he doesn’t have to, because you have given him the sense of what happened and how it felt. If the summarized scene is part of a sequence, this keeps the movement of actions connected, while allowing for the greater accent on the more important ones. Dialogue is mostly reduced to indirect discourse. (So instead of writing, He said, “I can’t go right now,” you write, He said he couldn’t go.) The key is for the scene summary in a sequence, like the scene, to cover a short period of time. It is about something contained enough that you could have written it as a full scene, with details about setting and movements, but you decided that you couldn’t devote the space to it, or you wanted to present it as an auxiliary to a more important scene. In a novel, you are always balancing economy and elaboration, plot and character, meaning and action.
Here is an example from Walking Dunes:
They ate in the dining room, served by a maid. He said thank you when she ladled soup into his bowl, but the Kimbroughs did not acknowledge the service, and he decided to do only what he first observed. He ate lightly, for him, out of self-consciousness. There were certain obligatory questions about his family, which he answered with a briskly polite brevity. His father was a tailor, his mother a nurse. There was the sister, married to a “radio executive.” The answers seemed to satisfy; he was not required to elaborate. There was of course no way for him to ask the things he wanted to know, details about Hayden’s role on the bank board, the nature of his law practice. It was like dining with Africans and never mentioning the home country; not having traveled, he did not know enough to formulate inquiry. Beth and her mother moved their food around on their plates, eating little, and though the maid said there was a cobbler, they declined dessert. Hayden said, wouldn’t that make a good snack later? and David of course claimed to be altogether too satisfied with the meal to have another bite.
This passage is followed by another scene summary, moving David through his first visit to his girlfriend’s home, establishing his sense of awkwardness, a poor boy out of place in the company of the rich. Many chapters in the novel are developed in this way: A scene sequence presents events that accrue, allied in time, moving the protagonist on his trajectory from a promising but poor high school boy to a young man facing moral decisions he may not have the wisdom or strength of character to manage.
EXERCISES
Choose a scene from a novel you know—the scene should be at least a page and a half long, but not much longer—and then compress it to a half page of manuscript. (You are looking at a published book, then producing around 150 words.) You want to tell what happened without all the details. When you feel comfortable doing this, go to a longer scene; your summary will also be longer, about a page. (Repeat this exercise to get good at summarizing. I have my students do it dozens of times.)
Now browse through a chapter and see if you can identify short passages that summarize action as a way to get from one scene to another when the second scene doesn’t follow immediately in time. You know you are reading summary if you can imagine expanding the text to a longer passage with more details.
Scene fragments
One of the most common ways scene fragments are used is when a character reflects about something that happened in the past, and a flash of memory is called up. It’s a little like looking at a snapshot that captures a moment of time in something that was ongoing. In my novel Plain Seeing, the protagonist, Lucy, is remembering what it has been like since she had a bad accident. (She was struck by a car while walking across an intersection.) She “had been as helpless as a torn bag for weeks.” The ordeal of the accident and of the care that has been required are described in summary, and then there is this short paragraph:
In the ambulance, she had seen Andy. His camera was swinging from his nec
k; she looked straight into the uncapped lens. “It’s my fault,” she remembered hearing him say.
Note the detail about Andy’s camera—the stuff of a scene—and of course the dialogue. Then Lucy’s memories return in summary to memories further in the past, when, if she had not made regrettable mistakes, her life could have taken a different turn. One of the ways that a scene fragment works well is for it to be taken from a full scene that occurred earlier, or for it to expand an earlier scene in some way. In this case, Lucy’s accident was described in a previous chapter, but the fragment presented here adds to the event in the later moment when she sees her lover. When the scene was happening, this moment wasn’t significant. Now, looking back, it is.
Sometimes a novel will have a memory that is so important that it comes up again and again, each time calling up an image that becomes an echo, or what I call a “ghost,” because it is like a hovering memory. The effect should be to touch the reader emotionally by reminding her, as the character is reminded, of the prior dramatic event. The trick is to not take a dramatic moment and beat it to death, a fairly common ploy in sloppy popular fiction.
Scene fragments are usually embedded in narrative summary or in character interiority. Sometimes they recur like the ghosts I just spoke of, when a character least expects them, casting a shadow over the present event. The reader may not even realize how significant they are, and how much they are affecting her feelings as she reads.
Narrative summary
I know I said writing a scene is the most important skill, but now I must say summary is undervalued. The word sounds so perfunctory, as if one is writing something to get it out of the way. But summary simply means compression, as paper is made from pulp. All the grit is pressed out, and we are left with the flow of story, transporting the reader through time (a day, a week, a year) in a way that conveys the drama of events and sets up the readiness and the hunger for the next passage that enters the story scenically. Information (exposition) is relayed so that what follows will have context. Writers of historical fiction, of pageantry, of sagas, have to be very good at this. I think of Amitav Ghosh, Dickens, Edward Rutherfurd, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, Paulette Jiles’s News of the World. But any book-length work of fiction sometimes needs to move things along economically, and besides, the well-written summary can be a beautiful piece of prose indeed. Jim Harrison used big chunks of narrative summary to push time forward in his novels. Summary has a sense of movement and a rhythm and a long view, and those things are pleasurable. When you catch yourself as you are reading a novel, stopping to read a passage again, I bet it is often because you have just read a beautifully composed narrative summary and have been caught up in its cadence and imagery. I hasten to emphasize that summary works when it is deliberate, designed, composed, and polished. It shouldn’t be strung through in broken segments at points when the writer happened to remember something the reader needs to know.
As I mentioned earlier, in Walking Dunes I used narrative summary as a major structural strategy. Chapters cover whole swaths of time. Chapter 3 covers an entire summer of David’s life, just prior to the events in the “now” of the novel. It begins like this:
David Puckett had lived much of that summer of 1958 in an old beauty parlor in Fort Stockton. His father had rented the building as a store for the third year in a row, but this time he hired his son to spend half of each summer month there alone, doing business with the local people, both Anglo and Mexican. David sold yard goods (mill ends and damaged fabrics), clothing (discontinued or imperfect), and some Army surplus goods. Four or five days a month he traveled to outlying towns like Iraan and Rankin, sleeping at night in the station wagon and setting up sales tables wherever he could. He liked being out from under his father’s eye. He liked feeling he was on his own. And he told himself, as his father had told him, that he was doing a service to these communities, selling cheap goods nobody else wanted to people who needed them, for bargain prices they could barely afford.
The function of this chapter is to give the reader a portrait of the boy at the point where he becomes a young man, faced with choices about what kind of person he wants to be and what kind of life he wants to live. It begins by talking about his summer work, but one of the things that characterized that summer for him was that, being so much alone, he became deeply introspective. He thought about who he was and how he had become himself. So the chapter soon continues:
He had been listing the events of his life. It was merely a way to combat boredom. He had thought of the list as an inventory, and he had been amazed at the ways he could vary it. It gave him an odd sense of power to realize that what he left off and what he put on the list changed the quality of his history.
So he thinks about childhood illnesses and family history, about school and the books he loved. He thinks of his parents as characters with fascinating stories—he sees that their marriage has turned bitter, and that his home life is stagnant, sloppy, pathological. How he envies the lives of ordinary families!
David has been much influenced by a favorite teacher and the literature she had him read, especially Fitzgerald and Hardy. He has a kind of writerly mind, seeing the story in real events, wondering about meaning, admiring writers for the “largeness of their visions.” The chapter tells about a girl he meets during that summer, and about what she might have meant to him. His deep introspection is intelligent but naive, a good description of who he is. All of this history and information (exposition and reflection and interrogation) could be conveyed only through summary, but the summary leaves the reader with a good idea of what David’s life has been like and how he got to the place he is at age eighteen, in his senior year of high school.
Scene summaries like this are often—get ready—embedded in a dramatic scene, part of the laying out of history and character. In other words, interrupting the ongoing action. This architecture is something the novel can embrace—the reader can embrace—as long as the interrupting summary is tied to the dramatic scene and there is clarity for the reader regarding just which scene she is reading. If a character is remembering something and going over her feelings about it while she is walking through a park, for example, you could insert a line or two that places her in that setting, perhaps something that catches her attention, and then go back to her thoughts. This is exactly the strategy used by Dominic Smith in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos when he portrays the protagonist walking Manhattan’s streets, brooding about the theft of his painting and his obsession with finding the person who has kept the painting and forged it. For him to think while he is walking specific streets grounds the character. It keeps the reader’s interest. What apprentice novelists often do instead is simply to introduce a kind of free-floating cloud of feelings and thoughts, without establishing that the character is in a physical setting. Worse, this often happens in a way that interrupts or muddily ends a scene that had a different purpose and action. On the other hand, an experienced writer (or just a careful one) can “stop action” for thought, if the transition into and out of the musing is carefully handled.
I want to emphasize that you must know what you are doing when you interrupt a scene. If you are deliberate about it (perhaps in revision), it’s much more likely to accomplish what you hoped for.
The parts of narrative that seem to “meander” must have a clear purpose, like one of these:
To illuminate what has happened.
To prepare the reader for what is coming.
To cover events economically so that there is a “past” to the present of the novel.
To show the character engaged in conflicted feelings.
Many novels are written with more narrative summary and scene summary than outright scenes; sometimes the scene is the “interruption” in the flow of narrative, rather than the other way around. It’s a matter of style and also of the story. Jim Harri
son was a master summarizer. Reading him, I would sometimes realize that the action I’d been reading—and had been engrossed in—wasn’t developed in scenes. His scenes, unsurprisingly, are dense and taut, too; the main difference between his summary and scene is how much time is covered.
If your natural instinct is to write in summary, to muse, to describe, I urge you to know the novel’s sequence of major scenes as clearly as stepping-stones across an expanse of garden, and to weigh the distance and the “stuff” that comes between them so that you keep the reader aware of the forward movement of story, even when he is enjoying the deep ruminations of character or narrator. The Good Mother, by Sue Miller, is an example of a book with a lot of commentary and summary that never loses sight of what is happening, so the novel’s tension doesn’t go lax. One of my favorite writers of what I call “intellectually elaborated scenes” is Mavis Gallant, whose long stories have the heft of novellas.
The roaming narrative can enrich and deepen the experience of a novel, and for me, a novel without it is shallow. But if you find it difficult to control the progress of scenes nested in expansive commentary, I suggest you strengthen the scene sequences first. That’s where the drama is.
EXERCISES
Think of something that happened to you on one day in your life. It can be a big or small event: You bought your first car. You proposed to your future wife. You had a fender bender. You moved out of a house.
Now tell what happened in no more than fifty words. That is narrative summary.
Find a passage in your manuscript that summarizes an event or the progress of events across time without elaborating in scenes.
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