Let's Make A Scene

Let’s Make a Scene

I know what you’re thinking, but trust me I’m not going to throw a fit in the middle of the grocery store because they don’t carry my favorite brand of yogurt, lol.  Not that I would do that anyway, I swear.  No, instead I’d like to talk to you about writing a scene and what goes into it.  I was years into my writing before I learned there was a method to writing a proper scene.  A beginning, middle, and end.  And here I was simply writing until the scene got too long and then I’d start a new one.  Not a good way to write.

Well, my favorite mentor, Dwight V. Swain in Techniques of the Selling Writer, maps out scene structure in this simple a-b-c formula and it works:

a.      Goal.

b.       Conflict.

c.       Disaster.

Let’s think about what a scene is.   Swain says it is a ‘unit of conflict, of struggle, lived through by character and reader.  A blow-by-blow account of somebody’s time-unified effort to attain an immediate goal despite face-to-face opposition’.  

What does a scene do?  It moves your story forward.  According to Swain it ‘pits your focal character against opposition’.  And doesn’t that make us, the reader’s, wonder if the hero/heroine will win and want to read on?  

But, what part of the a-b-c above makes us want to read on and care so much about the scene?  The conflict!  My favorite, favorite part of writing!  Without conflict you don’t have story.  Without story you have no scene.  Without scene you have no story.  See how that works?  

So, to begin a scene, your point-of-view character must have a goal.  It can be as simple as wanting to go home and take a shower, but they must want something.

Second, there must be conflict.  Why can’t they have that shower?  When they get home is there a surprise birthday party?  A friend in need of a shoulder to cry on?  A busted pipe and no water?  Flat tire?  Must be something to prevent that shower.  Make is as personal as you can to tie into the internal conflict.

Thirdly, there must be a disaster that leaves the reader hanging and wanting more.  You want the reader to stay up until three in the morning reading your book because they can’t put it down.  Disaster=hook.  A new question, a new dilemma, new information, urgency.  Not only can’t your character take that shower because of a house full of people there for a surprise party, her ex-husband is there and she never told him she was pregnant.  Oh, boy!  Big hook.  Big problem.  Disaster.  

I hope this helps make sense of Swain’s a-b-c method of building a scene.  If you don’t have a copy of his book I would definitely consider ordering it.  It’s a must have for writers. 

Good luck building your scenes and happy writing!

Jennifer Kamptner

w/a Jennifer Lowery

http://jenniferloweryauthor.wordpress.com/

http://romancerecipes.wordpress.com/

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Managing your time

Writing can be an all-consuming activity. If you're like most writers, you find an idea or scene or character that really grips you, and you can't wait to start writing.

I started writing my first novel in this mindset. I just couldn't wait to get going. I read on the internet and decided to do an Excel worksheet that would break my story up into scenes. But when I started to actually type it out, I thought, "Oh, this is marvelous! I could go in so many directions here! Who cares about the scene-by-scene thing - I wrote it, and I can ignore it if I want! Yeah, not such a great idea.

What happened was that by the time I was done with the monster of a novel, it was a mess of characters, plots and subplots. I knew whom I wanted the heroine and the hero to be, but I got so caught up in the lives of the other characters that I wanted to give them all "full" stories, too. So everyone ended up telling their own story, my heroine was in there shouting to receive attention in the mix, and my poor hero didn't get very much attention at all.

So, you might be asking yourself, what exactly is the point here? Well, ladies (and gentlemen), here is the biggest tip I can ever give you: once you have a idea of where you want your story go, who the main characters and secondary characters are (see my previous post about character charts), PLOT OUT EVERY SCENE. I'm not shouting, I promise, but I really do want to get your attention. Put down each major scene, from the beginning to the end. When you're writing, you might decide to change minor things, or move a scene to another part of the story, but don't completely diverge from your original outline.

Currently, I have my second novel plotted out into scenes. The novel is being told by two different characters, so it can get confusing. So what I did was, I wrote down the scenes that each character would have, as the story progresses. I outlined each character with a different color, so I could see at once who was going to do what. Just a small word of caution: don't jumble your points of view because you could really, really confuse your reader. In my case, each character gets a chapter or two to tell her story, and then it switches to the other character. In other words, my readers will have a chance to really immerse themselves in each character's vastly different lives.

My second novel has been going fantastically well so far. I'm about 1/3 of the way done, and it's progressing much faster, and much less confusingly than my first novel. I can already tell this one will be a lot easier to edit.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any tips on how to organize your book before you start typing it out.

Adriana