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Pandora

 
 

Making A Scene

by n a bourke
 

My mother always told me I shouldn't make a scene, which may have been good advice for a well-bred daughter, but is not such great advice for a writer. As a writer, it's really your job to make scenes, and to connect them with each other, usually in a causal chain.

Show and Tell

School DeskWhen I was a little kid at school we had a weekly activity called "Show and Tell". Every week, a couple of the kids in my class would bring something in from home. They would stand out the front of the class and show it to us: a pet snake, a new set of braces, their pet rock. This is a staple of primary school education throughout the world. Kids bring in things to school that bear the traces of their other, secret lives, and show them to their peers. The pedagogic point is probably something about public speaking - something similar to the French notion of lessons from things - but what I remember most strongly about my own experiences of Show and Tell is all those kids, the weird stuff they brought in, and the strange worlds those glimpses opened up. What I remember, and what I think about now as a writer, is how the objects they brought in were fascinating not just because of the objects themselves, but because of the stories they were evidence of.

In kindy, for example, one of my classmates brought in her uncle. She stood him at the front of the room, just in front of the teacher's desk, where he sloped, looking foolish and huge. He had big, loose hands and the kind of callouses that told us - we were rural kids - that he was a farmer, like most of our dads. He wouldn't meet our eyes, which seemed a little odd. He was almost as shy as we were. I remember expecting my classmate to reveal that he was a fabulous but pretty ordinary uncle: that he could do origami, or knew how to do that trick where you roll a five-cent coin down your nose. Instead, after telling us his name and that he had only recently come to stay with her and her family, she told us that he was an 'uncovering alcoholic'. Her uncle's head dipped lower and it seems to me, in my memory, that he looked desparately to the teacher, then the door.

When I think about it now, in terms of scenes, what I notice is this: it was just as important that my classmate show us her uncle as that she tell us this astounding and mysterious fact about him. Some things can be perceived with the eye, others only with the knowledge of the past that comes from a knowing narrator. My expectations of what would happen next were a part of what she - as the storyteller - had to work with. The relationship between those two characters - the girl and her uncle - were a powerful part of the scene. There was a story there, and what worked most powerfully for me as a 'reader' was what she didn't tell me. What she left out or got wrong. Those things aroused by my empathy and the powerful leaping force of my curiosity. To find out what an alcoholic was, and what they worked to uncover, I had to wait for scene two: morning tea in the playground.

What else does her showing and telling do? It intimates a history, without giving it all away. It intimates a future, into which as a reader I'm compelled to travel with her. It intimates that the story - her story, as well as that of her uncle and her family - have a real dimension to them, a secret life, which I have been allowed a small glimpse of and about which I want to know more.

It also tells me that while a scene is commonly understood in the worst kind of how-to-write courses and classes as standing in direct opposition to exposition, most of the time a good scene is a melding together of observed actions (showing) and contextual information (telling). A scene is, in its most baldly undestood form, a shown rather than a told chunk of story, but often the meaning of a scene requires a leavening of information/backstory/context.

We all know that showing and not telling is one of the fundamental rules of writing, at least in fiction. But good fiction often does include good exposition - compressed scenes, gestures forwards and backwards in time, summaries of information - and that exposition is often recalled in a particular character's voice. Don't let the rule fool you: there is a place for telling in fiction, as there is in non-fiction. Nevertheless, scenes are the bread and butter of fiction. They are the sleeves of the magician, in which you hide all manner of things. Scenes show the reader, in a kind of real-time slideshow or filmic way, what is happening. They can be dramatic, vivid and memorable. Scenes are where your characters get to do and say things, revealing themselves through their physicality, their honesties and failures. There way of seeing, being, thinking and doing. Here's an example of a scene that I think is particularly powerful, from Maggie O'Farrell's short story "The House I Live In":

The next day, she stood over me with a long piece of dark red material. A scarf or shawl I'd never seen before. She snagged one end of it around the end of the cast iron bed and tied it firm. I realised too late what was happening. I made a dash for the door, still only half-dressed, but she was too quick for me. She grabbed my arm and lifted me, kicking and squealing, over the boards where letters and numbers got rubbed to unreadable runes.

We tussled and fought each other for the first time in our lives together, my mother and I, me twisting and turning in her grip, her with silent tears coursing down her cheeks. Some of them fell on to me in dark circles, I remember.

"I have to do this," she cried as I thrashed around, "I don't want to but I have to. I'm not supposed to have you here. They," she pointed down to the floors below, "know that. I'm sorry," she whispered, kissing my hair, my face, my hands, "I'm sorry."

After she'd gone I lay for a while on the floor, exhausted and spent. Then I examined her work: a stretch of material tethered me to the bed, an intricate knot bound my ankles together, heavy and dark as a human heart.

Every day this happened. And every day we fought and wept.

In non-fiction - too - scenes are effective, particularly for locating the abstract ideas and information in a concrete, human world; for breaking up long and exhausting chunks of data. A good scene - a retold or imagined moment in history, a scene describing the author's discovery of a bit of information, or the conditions in which an interview took place - can lend your critical writing humanity, urgency, vividness. Consider the following two examples: first, a scenic description of the beginning of a fire from Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire:

When at approximately four o'clock that afternoon the parachute on the radio had failed to open, the world had been immediately reduced to a two-and-a-half mile gulch, and of this small, steep world sixty acres had been occupied by fire. Now, a little less than two hours later, the world was drastically reduced from that--to the 150 yards between the Smokejumpers and the fire that in minutes would catch up to them, to the roar below them that was all there was left of the bottom of the gulch, and to the head of the gulch that at that moment was smoke about to roar.

Here, the details of the fire are connected to people, and to an escalation of events, and to a place. The fire seems more threatening because the smokejumpers are caught up in it. The world is 'reduced' - an emotional, analogical effect, not a simple fact. And yet there's no violence done to the facts here, nothing you could really call sensationalising. Consider the following small scene, which opens Anne Fadiman's essay on flags ("A Piece of Cotton")--particularly the American flag. The essay is partly a meditation on the role of flags in the patriotic consciousness of the US, post 9/11. It begins with this small snippet of scene, which establishes the author's mode of speaking, their authority, the point at which they begin, while also acknowledging the awkwardness with which many modern people approach ideas like patriotism and national pride:

When we bought an old farmshouse last summer in a small New England town, the elderly couple who had lived there for many years left us a set of plastic lawn chairs, a garbage can, a tool bench, a wheelbarrow, and an American flag. On September 13, two days after the attacks, we raised it, with our children's help, to half staff. Our six-year-old son enjoyed pulling the halyard; on its way up the peeling white-painted pole, next to the big maple tree in the front yard, the flag made an interesting and satisfying sound, partway between a squeak and a ring. We'd read up on half-masting protocol, which dictates raising the flag briskly to the peak and then slowly bringing it halway down. George said, "This flag is lowered now, but it will rise again, just as our country will." It is useful to have children around at such times: they authorize cliches that their parents deeply believe but might otherwise hesitate to voice.

Here the flag and the family that raise it are made human, given heft and weight. Rather than a distant and moralising voice of certainty and cliches, the narrator positions herself as having a personal relation to the flag.

ere's one more non-fiction use of scene: the opening of Sarah Burton's Impostors: Six Kinds of Liar:

Early one October morning in 1859, a Salford man was walking along the banks of the River Irwell on his way to work when he noticed a hat floating in the water. Something about this hat caught his attention. As the water swirled around it, it did not move. Closer inspection revealed that the hat was firmly lodged on the head of a dead body, standing upright in the water.

I don't know about you, but this opening scene has me hooked: who is this dead body, 'standing upright' in the water? I'm curious, engaged. The scene is evocative and specific without needing to be embroidered. It feels like the bare facts, and yet there is a story here - a sense of something with a cause, and an effect - a sense of mystery.

A Time and a Place

One way to define a scene might be to say that it's a chunk of action that takes place in a single place, or in a short or contained space of time. Most scenes in films, stories and essays can be understood this way: one place and a short space of time. And yet, often that's only the frame. Within a scene that takes place in, say, a kitchen, during breakfast, you might also include information about something that happened ten years ago. This other temporal information might be included in the form of a flashback, or it might just be referred to glancingly in the dialogue, the narration, or a character's internal thoughts. In the extract from Maggie O'Farrell's story, above, while the scene is located in a specific time and place (in a single room, while a child and mother battle, and then the mother departs) the scene also includes references to - fragments of - other times and places. At its end, the scene opens out and is 'repeated' in that expository final sentence that says they fought and wept ever day.

Your characters might also metaphorically or literally look out the window, and think of another place, another time. An action or a moment can echo across time, in prose, perhaps, more effectively and seamlessly than in film or on a stage, because we can read the character's thoughts, and because we can say things like 'this happened all the time' or 'this was the second time that day I'd lost my car keys' - compressions and overlays of time that are much harder to convey in a visual medium. Perhaps, then, a scene can be understood not as a strictly contained set of actions that take place in a single time or place, but as a set of related actions, ideas, images, etc that are held together within the frame of either a particular time and place.

Most of the time, in writing fictional prose scenes do work better if they occur in a single time and a single place, or a series of places (rooms) the character moves through, and if that time and place are revealed to the reader. White box scenes - scenes in which characters 'think' in a kind of no-place - are not usually as successful. They lack the sense of story, of reality, that a specific time and place lends a scene. Even as a writer, having a character muse on the meaning of life in a state of suspended animation is less interesting, less textured, than having them do so in a particular time and place. Thinking about the meaning of life will feel different to the reader - and to you as a writer - if you locate it in different times and places. Consider, for example, the differences between a character thinking - "I look outside myself and the tree inside me grows" (which is a line from a poem by Rilke) - in the following times and places:

  • a supermarket late on a Thursday night
  • an open field with a handful of cows on a warm summer day
  • a hospital waiting room, early in the morning
  • a church during a baptism or a wedding

And then ...

If we consider the way a scene works in a play, and what a scene means when we talk about them in scripts, you can quickly see that a scene is something in which action occurs. A man walks into a room, pulls out a gun and then ... Then is a magical word in a scene. I think, too, that then is necessary to make a scene. Without it, a scene is not a scene, but something more akin to a painting or a photograph. A moment captured. Most scenes require verbs: active, muscular ones, at that. In order to move forward, your story will need to proceed through a series of scenes in which things happen, and in which things change.

In most stories and in most works of non-fiction, the restating of scenes soon gets boring. Good prose has movement and change embedded in it. Works of history implicitly unravel the and then, and then of time marching forward, just as fiction does. Engaging non-fiction about ideas, too, has a narrative force to it. Textbooks, perhaps, are one of the only forms of non-fiction in which the over-arching logic of narrative isn't essential to keep a reader engaged. In most other forms of writing, either explicitly or implicity, we move through a series of complications, of scenes, each of which is presaged by the intimated whisper of 'and then...' As Clark Blaise writes:

Then is the moment of the slightest tremor, the moment when the author is satisfied that all the forces are deployed, the unruffled surface perfectly cast, and the insertion, gross or delicate, can now take place. It is the cracking of the perfect, smug egg of possibility.

I love this quote, particularly that last part about cracking the smug egg of possibility. THEN is the point in your scene or story where you stop setting things up and begin to really write. You're no longer just deciding how to arrange the seating, or imagining what kind of tensions will emerge if you sit X near Y: you're committed. You've started.

Thinking about this concept of then-ness helps me to know when a chunk of writing I've been working on isn't yet a scene. If I read over a piece of writing that I'm trying to work up and I see that, despite what I thought, there is not sense of something happening or changing, I know I've still got work to do. Or, perhaps, that while the writing might be good in itself, and might have been hard work to produce, maybe it isn't essential to the story I'm trying to tell. If it doesn't matter - if I could take it out and my story or essay would still make sense without it - how necessary is it?

Change

I think the one essential element of a scene is change. A man walks into a scene tired and heartworn, and walks out of the scene the same is not a good scene, I think. BUT if a man walks into a scene tired and heartworn, and walks out of the scene tired, heartworn and drunk it is a scene: not a great one, maybe, since there's not enough of a fundamental shift to make it a big scene. To me, this kind of scene might be understood as incremental or accretionist: it adds nuance, but doesn't change anything. He's still the same guy that walked into the scene. And it's obvious. Plots like this - stories made up of scenes in which the characters do and say things that just affirm and re-affirm who they are - can work, but they'll often feel hackneyed and predictable.

On the other hand: a man walks into a scene tired and heartworn and walks out of a scene tried, heartworn and having punched the woman he's heartbroken over in the face has a different feel to it, especially if before that moment the reader thought this guy was a 'nice' guy. Maybe he still is. Maybe nothing inside him has changed, but his actions, and therefore his external character positiion, have changed. Maybe he's still heartworn, still tired, but now he's got a new set of problems that both he as the character and you as the author need to work on.

Storyboards

One trick for working up a piece of fiction, especially once you have the main pieces in play, is to work out the storyboard. I do this for non-fiction as well. Get a nice big sheet of paper and rule it up into little oblongs - like a comic-strip - and draw a picture that shows the moment of change for each scene in your piece. One of the things you'll notice about this exercise is, I think, that you'll soon notice if you have scenes that aren't really scenes at all. And you'll also notice really quickly if your story is just one big scene (that's ok, by the way, there are some great stories that are just one scene!) or if it's a racing avalanche of scenes. Most of the time, in a book-length work, you want something in between: some swift parts where you're moving through a whole lot of dramatic action quite quickly, and some downtime when things happen, but not quite as quickly.

If you're not artistically inclined, you can do this by making a list of the scenes. The trick is not to write things like: Jo visits Judy at the zoo, which gives me the who and the where, but to make sure you include the 'what happens' statement: "Jo visits Judy at the zoo and tells her she's thinking about having plastic surgery". Now the scene has content.

Storyboards of this kind are also useful because they give you an 'at a glance' version of your article, short story or novel. With one look, you can see whether all the scenes in the first third of your article contain the same characters, are in the same place, and/or contain the same action. You can probably start to see where you've made a classic early-drafting error and rewritten the same scene in three different ways, maybe because you were'nt quite sure which way would work best at first, and you kept going till you got it right, but then you've forgotten to cut the extra/doubled scenes. A classic example of this kind of doubling up is where you have one scene in which something happens - say, Jo tells Judy she's going to have plastic surgery - and then another in which Judy drives home thinking about what Jo told her, and then another in which she's at home, making dinner for her family, and she tells her husband that Jo is thinking about plastic surgery. Now, unless the husband knowing about Jo's plans is significant, what you have here are three scenes with the same content, they just happen to look like different scenes because they happen in different times and places.

The Secret Life of Scenes

I said earlier that scenes are like the sleeves in which a magician hides his secrets. I don't think I've quite got the simile right yet, but let me unravel that idea a little. Most of the time, scenes operate as a kind of sugar-coating for a bit of narrative medicine. Most stories could be told as cold, hard facts: like dates and death-counts in a history book. When you sit down with someone who's just read a good book, and ask them what it was about, they might tell you the summary version of the story. The thing is, of course, that it won't have any of the magic of a well-told book. But engaging with the book itself will be richer and more satisfying experience precisely because it is built up not of strings of information and facts, but of scenes in which the information and facts are embedded, like pearls in oysters. The pleasure is in the information - partly - but the real pleasure of a good book is, I think, in the way a writer wraps all that nutrition up in something appealing. Something you want to read. A good book - a book that engages it's reader and makes them want to read on - is rarely if ever a bald recitation of facts; it is, instead a series of scenes in which the characters - whether those characters are ficitonal or historical figures, or movements, or ideas - evolve and change, make mistakes, get lost, falter and fail and try again. In which those characters live through a series of changes, and we - as readers - live through those moments with them.

***

OWLThis article is an edited extract from a lesson in Olvar Wood onLine's free course Playing with Prose. You can access the course by clicking here...

 

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