Dispatch #47: On Scene Writing

Where's the light coming from?

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Last week, working on a scene in my current novel-in-progress, I felt frustrated. These two characters were talking and talking…and saying nothing! I was so annoyed. I felt lost.

I wrote almost ten pages over four days, which is a lot for me, and yet I felt no closer to understanding the scene.

It reminded me of when, years ago, my friend Kristen emerged from a long day of work at our writing retreat. Bleary-eyed, she stumbled into my cottage.

“Is fiction…just…people…talking…in rooms?!” she asked, disturbed.

Yes, Kristen, it is.

And also: it isn’t.

Perhaps if we explore scenes a little more closely, it’ll help us (or: me) figure out how to write the ones troubling us.

Cue stock photo of “frustrated writer":

Photo by SEO Galaxy on Unsplash

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I define scene as the completion of an action in a specific time and place.

(I don’t know where I got this definition. If you wrote it, please let me know so I can give you proper credit.)

I like this definition because it highlights a few different, yet equally important, elements.

First, that a scene requires a time and place. The latter, place, is pretty obvious: you need a setting for the action to unfold. And why provide a bland setting, or one with totally expected details? Enough with the single potted plant or the anonymous cafe! In my creative writing classes, I call this “furniture catalogue fiction”: scenes that make me feel like I’m inside of a generic non-place, furnished with nameless, meaningless items.

Not all settings have to be groundbreaking, but all settings need details that evoke something specific in the reader’s mind.

I like to give my students a setting exercise where I ask them to list all the expected details of the place they’re writing about. After that, I ask them to add one or two unexpected details. Often, it’s in those unexpected details that story is found.

(A long time ago, I had a student who, during this exercise, put a sippy cup in a dive bar bathroom. She’s a legend. I talk about her every time I teach this exercise.)

I’m also reminded of what my reacher Marilynne Robinson used to say about dialogue: Put something in front of the reader’s face. Usually, it’s not enough to have two disembodied voices floating in a void. Beyond evocative character gestures (as in, more than various shrugging), embroider exchanges of dialogue with details of what’s surrounding these characters. What’s in front of them? What’s above them? What’s the ground or floor like? What’s the weather? What’s that tree over there? What’s that weird chair in the corner? What’s that stain on the wall? Who’s that elderly woman across the room? What’s that song playing?

I recently saw Dan Chaon speak about his wonderful new novel, One of Us, and he mentioned that when he’s building a scene, one of the questions he might ask himself is, “Where is the light coming from?”

The comic artist Lynda Barry asks exactly this in one of her great writing exercises. It’s such a useful question because it places you not only in a setting, but in a specific character’s body, with a specific perspective, experiencing this particular setting and this particular moment in time. Describing the light makes the scene feel alive.

Sometimes, when a scene feels lifeless, it’s simply a matter of adding more life. It’s through these details, emerging from the perspective and emotional landscape of the main character, that we, as writers (and readers) learn what matters. Developing setting helps sniff out the story.

As I write this, I realize there is a train track in my scene. I barely acknowledged it! Why didn’t I describe the rattle of a train flying by? Also, what is the weather like as these two people talk? They’re walking around a neighborhood. What time of day is it? What does my character see, smell, and hear?

Don’t get me wrong: no one wants a pile-up of random or arbitrary details; what is needed, instead, are details that my character, at this moment in the story, would notice. Which details help elucidate her point of view, and her problem?

Finding the right details will lead me closer to understanding the scene’s import and its impact on the character and the overall story.

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The “time” part of that definition—the completion of an action in a specific time and place—is a little trickier.

As my queen Joan Silber says in The Art of Time, “All fiction has to contend with the experience of time passing.”

One way we do this is by choosing which scenes to alight upon. When drafting a book or story, it might be useful to pose these questions:

1. How much time passes over the course of the narrative? Is it a week, or a few months, or, maybe, years?

2. What scenes are needed to show what happens? Which best elucidate these characters and their story? In other words, when you picture this story playing out, where (when) does your imagination linger?

At the beginning of a narrative, I might be looking for a couple of emblematic scenes, which serve as an example of how something is typically for my characters. Nevertheless, an emblematic scene should feel immersive and specific. As the story develops, I want scenes to show something shifting; the scenes should widen the story’s landscape, revealing a new path.

I’m not an outliner, and I do this scene-finding work as I draft the book, lining up the narrative one scene or part at a time.

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Another time-related question I ask myself is: How much time passes in this individual scene?

If it’s a short conversation, for instance, the pacing will likely be quicker, with more immediate dramatization. If it’s a long scene that’s, in effect, a few shorter scenes strung together, then there will be more room for (and an expectation of) connective summary, including exposition and character interiority.

Writing this, I realize the scene I wrote is too long for what needs to happen. Pacing-wise, I want it to feel more bam-bam-bam exciting, more full of revelation.

Here’s where I admit to you that I actually don’t know the big thing that happens in the scene. I know that it begins with suspicion and fear, and ends with unification and motivation. I know that one character gives my main character some important thing, some pivotal information. In my head the unknown is a blank spot that looks like this: [ something ]

I just haven’t yet figured out what that [ something ] is.

You might say, “What the hell?! Edan! This is why you’re having trouble!”

You’re right.

Then again, I’m not going to discover this [ something ] by taking copious notes or banging my head against the wall.

(Believe, me, I’ve already tried those tactics.)

I’m going to find the answer by writing the scene itself—and rewriting it. I need to deeply imagine and depict my way toward the answer.

When I return to the scene, I plan to embroider it with more setting and sensory details that get at my character’s emotional state and show it shifting. I am going to cut the reams of dialogue: I need to lean toward my ideal pacing. I’m going to focus on how my character feels at different points in the scene.

And, of course, I’m going to describe where the light is coming from.

It’s often through this kind of writing that plot emerges. The [ something ] I need will be revealed. Writing is spooky like that!

Then again, if it doesn’t show up (ugh), I will at least have an arc in place, and the armature of scene. This will be sufficient for me to move onto the next chapter, where I do, in fact, know what’s going to happen.

The hope is that by the time I finish the first draft I will have solved the problems, answered the questions, articulated all the pesky [somethings], so that I can go back into this scene and plug in the answers.

If, by then, I realize the sound of the train barreling by, or the description of the light, doesn’t matter, it’ll feel right to cut them.

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Our definition of scene—the completion of an action in a specific time and place—hinges on that first phrase: “the completion of an action.” It means not only that something has to occur, that people have to act, but also that this action must begin, progress, and finish before the scene ends. That is, the scene contains, inside of it, its own story arc.

In the creative nonfiction class I’m currently teaching, we’ve discussed how moments of dramatization should, ideally, include a “change in understanding.” This can mean all sorts of things: something in the scene changes for the people in it, or the events or information in the scene change a reader’s understanding. Maybe you’re writing a different kind of narrative and it’s the imagery that changes.

This change in understanding can be literal (I learned the narrator has a brother who went to prison, for instance), or more abstract (I learned, say, about the burden of silence on a family). In creative nonfiction, or a retrospective first person fictional narrative, this change in understanding can be the narrator’s too; it’s the writing or the narration that enables this revelation. Sometimes it’s all three of these possible understandings happening at once.

One way to make sure a change happens, and to ensure that you’re completing the action of a scene, is to articulate the following:

1. What is different at the beginning of the scene v. the end of the scene?

2. What questions are raised by the scene?

3. What questions are answered by the end of the scene?

4. What questions persist into the next scene?

I haven’t done this exercise for my struggling scene yet, but I will. Ideally, there should be literal/concrete changes in a scene, as well as abstract or emotional ones. If things are only literal, no meaning gets made. If everything is a feeling, we have nothing to anchor ourselves, and everything floats away or dissolves.

Since I’m still solving my [ something ] I can’t totally answer that third question: What questions are answered by the end of the scene? But I can articulate the other answers, and doing that might help me inch closer to what is concretely revealed/answered in the scene.

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Okay, well: we solved it! Now we can go back into our troublesome scenes and make them better. Right?

Right?!

It’s going to be great.

(Perhaps next time I’ll tell you about my other love: summary.)

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Remember, if you’re a paying subscriber, I’ll be hosting a chat this Thursday, November 20th, to talk all about writing. Join me to share writing issues, ask me questions, swap writing advice, share battle scars, and more. I hope to see you there!