I’ve been thinking a lot about making scenes.
Not that I do that in public often, but I sure do it a lot when I’m writing. So to clarify, I’m talking about the scenes writers craft when telling a story, not the fracas or tumult that can result when people behave badly in public, although , come to think of it, the latter often ends up the fodder for the former. No, I’ve been ruminating on the difference between scene and story, and how the fact that I sometimes confuse the two leads to endless problems with the internal workings of my stories.
Scenes are the building blocks of stories. Successful stories string together scenes that, when read in the order the writer delivers them on the page, build to deliver a certain effect in the reader. Sometimes the writer can mess with the order- that often happens- but the underlying effect is still the same. The problem is when one scene takes center stage and forgets that it is one of a chain of scenes working together. When a scene becomes a prima donna, well, the story ends up failing on some level.
I suffer from this malady. I’m pretty good at developing good, dramatic scenes. What I sometimes fail to do is recognize that one scene doth not a story make. Case in point: my story “Blackbird” was built around a central scene of a woman jumping off of a yacht and swimming in the ocean. Trust me, it was way more dramatic than that single sentence, but the truth is that I fell in love with that scene. The story progressed, but the central scene was still the most developed of all in the story, and that was a problem. The supporting scenes didn’t lead up to this climactic scene. In fact, the scene in question wasn’t even the climax of the story. It’s a problem I’m still working out, in fact, and I suspect that, until I do, “Blackbird” will not be published.
A success story. My story “What You Wish For” is a flash piece built around the central scene of the protagonist relieving himself in a bathroom after an ill thought out tryst. The bathroom scene is built up to with only one other scene to support it, that of the two lovers grabbing a beer in the dimly lit kitchen. The regret of the character tied in nicely with the fact that he could ruminate on the mistake he has just made as he urinates. Ruminates as he urinates. Ha. But the point is that the story was strengthened by the scene. It fit nicely into the structure of the piece. Flash pieces, by nature of their brevity, lend themselves to this foregrounding of scene. The scene may be the thing for flash fiction, but those scenes have the even greater task of carrying the whole, or nearly the whole, story within their parameters. Tricky business, that, and not everything I aspire to write is under 1,000 words.
Solutions aren’t easy. I’ve been trying to work more on outlining. I’ve been working on developing a process like the one Kris Loomis outlined in her Writing Cooperative article “Between Plotting and First Drafting.” I’ve looked into Scrivener’s cork board features. The bottom line, though, is that the process and the tools only matter if I can get my head around building a more complete story, which is where I’m struggling. And maybe the answer is just going back to the basics and really foregrounding what the story is about, taking time to think things through, and drafting the heck out of the story once it’s there. Which sounds pretty logical, right?
Writing is a process, after all. When I look at the stories that I have had published, I can see that I instinctually built scenes that added up to the whole. But there have been many more stories that didn’t get published- which is natural- and when I actually study them I can see that they lack the build up of scenes. So it all comes down to translating the instinct into the practice, creating the habit of foregrounding the effect of the story before writing it. And yes, once that is done, then revising the right scene or scenes so they add to the impact of the story can happen fluidly.
I’m banking on it. Tuesday starts a new school year, and, hopefully, a new writing habit for me. I’m ready to start making scenes.
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