Lectute 20: Building Scenes

When approach the day-to-day process of composition in many ways, and of course, what you do as a writer each day depends on the overall shape of your narrative and on the purpose of the particular passage you're working on. Writers also differ on what they consider the fundamentals of writing fiction: the plot, character development, ideas to be conveyed, the crafting of elegant sentences, and so on. In the end, no matter how you approach the day-to-day process, every writer is faced with the prospect of making the whole thing hang together. We'll talk about that in our next two lectures, but in this lecture, we'll discuss what a writer does each day, that is, creating individual scenes.

Defining Scenes
In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner defines a scene as everything "that is included in an unbroken flow of action from one incident in time to another." For Gardner, this unbroken flow can include movement through space from one place to another, as long as there isn't a big jump in time. In other words, a scene shows more or less everything that happens to a character, or between two or more characters, during a particular, discrete span of time, without any interruptions in the flow of that time, except for flashbacks or brief passages of exposition.

There are, of course, many types of scenes, ranging from brief scenes featuring only a few characters in a narrowly defined setting to epic scenes that show many characters in a vast setting. There are scenes that are merely transitional, scenes that are pivotal moments in the plot, scenes where we learn the thoughts of only a single character, scenes in which the only action is conversation among the characters, and scenes full of violent, thrilling action.

Deciding what you make into a scene as opposed to what you choose to reveal through exposition in other words, what you choose to dramatize rather than summarize is generally fairly easy. You usually want to dramatize the most important or interesting parts of the story, while relying on exposition to get across essential but less interesting information.

Requirements of Scenes

An individual scene must meet at least two requirements at the same time: It must advance the larger narrative, or at least fit into it, and it must be interesting in its own right. In other words, a writer needs to balance the scene's position in the whole story with its own inherent drama. The way to achieve this balance is to remember that a scene should be no longer than it needs to be for its purpose within the story as a whole.
—James Hynes.
(2nd reason is easier for most writers to do. —Lumna10.)

These two balanced requirements—the intent of the narrative and the inherent interest of the scene can vary enormously from one narrative to another.

George Pelecanos's hard-boiled detective novel The Cut is a fast-paced narrative, written with efficiency and economy. Its young detective, Spero Lucas, occasionally takes time out from the case he's working on to have an erotic interlude with a young woman. Such scenes move at the same brisk pace as the rest of the book, and they serve to tell us something we wouldn't otherwise know about Spero, but because they aren't central to the story, they tend to be much shorter and more expository than the scenes that advance Spero's investigations.

In a more expansive narrative, such as Ulysses or Moby-Dick, a scene can go on for pages simply because the author thinks it is inherently interesting. Melville, for example, devotes long passages or even whole chapters to describing the work of a Whaling vessel, the natural history of whales, and other topics. These scenes advance the overall purpose of the book, which is to evoke a way of life in as much detail as possible, but they aren't necessarily concerned with advancing the plot.

And with some books, the point of the novel isn't the plot at all but the individual scenes that make up the plot. Even though The Lecturer's Tale has a plot, the true purpose of the book is to make fun of the excesses of modem literary theory. For this reason, the book is basically a series of satirical set pieces. These set pieces aren't entirely self-contained each pushes the plot a little further along— but each chapter or scene is mainly intended to be amusing for its own sake.

Again, how long a scene goes on and whether it should be included at all depends on the intent of the narrative as a whole.

A crime novel, such as The Cut, needs to move quickly; if it slows down, it dies. Trying to squeeze in a long chapter about the history of detective work would throw off the whole story.

The Lecturer's Tale, however, has a different metabolism. The reader is not meant to race through it but to enjoy each scene as it comes. The scenes in each book have a different pace and structure because the intent of each book is different.

The Lecturer's Tale satirizes academics who put literary criticism above actual works of above actual works of art; its scenes are more focused on amusing the reader than advancing the plot.

Scene Transitions

Transitioning into and out of scenes can vex even experienced writers. Such transitions can vary enormously, depending on the intent of the scene, its length, its importance in the narrative, and so on.

Scenes that take place early in the narrative need more setup, on the whole, than scenes that appear later. When you're introducing characters, situations, or settings for the first time, you need to spend more time describing them than you do later on, when the reader already knows who the character is or what the setting looks like. You can often take your time in these early scenes, describing the setting and characters in some detail and letting the characters talk a bit more digressively than they might in later scenes.

Short scenes tend to need less introduction than longer, more dramatic scenes. You can signal the start of a new scene with something as simple as a space break in the text or, if time has passed since the last section, with a simple phrase, such as "The next day..." or "A few hours later ...." Scenes that are longer, more important, or more dramatic require more buildup at the start.

For example, in "The Beggar Maid," Alice Munro begins the scene in which Rose breaks up with Patrick with a brief description of Rose's walk from her room to Patrick's apartment. This description slows down the narrative and lets us know that something important is about to happen, providing a bumper between the fast-paced mix of exposition and miniature scenes that came immediately before it and the slower and more dramatic scene that's about to start.

Munro then ends the scene abruptly and dramatically, befitting the emotionally turbulent nature of the encounter, as Rose storms out of Patrick's apartment: '"I don't want to see you, ever!' she said viciously. But at the door she turned and said in a normal and regretful voice, 'Good-bye.' (p. 96)

Another way to transition into a scene is to begin it in medias res. The chief advantage of this approach is that it adds energy and urgency to the narrative. It also engages readers on a deeper level, forcing them to pay attention to what's going on.

For example, the opening sequence of Eleanor Catton's epic historical mystery The Luminaries introduces a character named Walter Moody, who has just arrived at a remote gold rush community on the west coast of New Zealand in 1866.
In the opening pages, he finds himself in a hotel lounge with 12 other men, who tell him a long, complicated story about a suspicious death, a suicide attempt, and a fortune in gold, all of which happened two weeks before Moody even arrived.
Catton runs the risk here that the reader might feel overwhelmed, rather like Moody himself does, walking into a group of people he's never met before who are talking about something complicated that happened before he arrived.
But she constructs this opening scene so expertly, with such attention to the detail, that she hooks the reader into a mystery that isn't fully explained until 800 pages later.

Transitioning out of a scene is perhaps a little less difficult than transitioning into one. Once the main purpose of the scene has played out-the new character has been sufficiently introduced or the plot point has been made-you generally want to wrap it up as quickly as possible. For some kinds of narrative, you might want to end with a sort of punchline a witticism from a character or a sudden revelation-but even with narratives that aren't driven by plot, you don't want to linger over the scene after its purpose has been fulfilled.

There can also be transitions within a scene, such as when a writer pauses to provide some exposition or segue into a flashback.

Again, The Luminaries is made up mostly of long, dramatized scenes, but because the plot is so complicated, Catton often pauses the action to introduce an extended flashback or some exposition about a character's history or psychology.

Because the novel is written in the style of a 19th-century novel, sometimes Catton directly addresses the reader in a manner that calls attention to the transition itself. At other times, she slips effortlessly from drama to exposition with hardly any transition at all.

Transitioning into and out of flashbacks is generally fairly straightforward. If it's a short flashback, you might signal the shift by putting the whole episode in italics. If the flashback is from the point of view of a particular character, you can simply write something like, "Leo thought back to the conversation he'd had with Anna the day before." A more subtle way to signal a flashback is with a change in verb tense from the present tense to the past or the simple past to the past perfect.

Stories Within Stories

Although some scenes are just small bursts of drama that can be truncated or incomplete, most of the weight in a narrative is carried by fully dramatized scenes with a beginning, middle, and end. These major scenes are basically small stories within the larger story.

Even if a major scene couldn't stand alone outside the context of the whole narrative, it should have the structure of a simple story. Earlier, we discussed fractals, the mathematical concept of a pattern that repeats itself at every level of magnification. It's not true that each individual scene should reproduce the structure or plot of the larger narrative, but it helps to remember that any story made of scenes is basically made of smaller stories.

Writing Exercise Prompt
Choose an undramatized moment from a story of your own or from a story or novel you admire and turn it into a full-fledged dramatic scene. In other words, take a moment from a story that is only alluded to or is depicted only briefly in an expository passage and dramatize it fully. For example, you might dramatize the moment that Hamlet is told that his father has died, a scene that doesn't appear in Shakespeare's play. Use as many words or pages as you need and turn that scene into a little story, with a beginning, middle, and end, making sure that the scene you write contributes to the larger narrative. This exercise will give you practice in making a scene self-contained, as well as making it an integral part of the larger story.
—James Hynes

Probably the only lecture that makes sense so far, Skylights. —Lumna10.