From: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian)
Subject: Fiction Advice 11: Scenes
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 04:28:07 GMT

Constructing a Scene

The basic unit of fiction is not the sentence or the paragraph, but the
scene. Every scene in a story has both a verbal and a nonverbal content. The
verbal content may be a young man fervently courting a girl, or the President
of the United States deciding whether to go ahead with a nuclear attack on a
biological-warfare research center. The nonverbal content appears in the way
you present the scene: You want your reader to think that the young man is
touchingly awkward, or obnoxiously crude; that the president is a shallow
twerp or a deeply sensitive man facing a terrible decision.

In effect, you are like an attorney presenting a case to the jury: You supply
the evidence, and the jury supplies the verdict. If *you* tell us that the
young man is touchingly awkward, we may well disbelieve you. But if you show
us his awkward behavior, and *we* say, "Aw, the poor lunk!"--then your scene
has succeeded.

Every scene presents a problem of some kind for one or more characters, and
shows us how the characters deal with that problem. That, in turn, shows us
something about the characters and moves the story ahead.

Here's an exercise I've found useful with my fiction-writing students. I give
them about 30 minutes to take the following elements to construct a scene
that dramatizes the elements and leads to a decisive resolution:

*A taxi and public-transit strike that's completely tied up downtown traffic

*Donald Benson, a 35-year-old businessman: male chauvinist, aggressive
personality, with business troubles

*Helene Williams, his 22-year-old secretary: insecure in her new job, able to
make friends easily, knows the city well

*The need to get Donald to a hotel out at the airport to make a crucial
presentation to a potential investor from Los Angeles; the investor will be
flying out in four hours.

Give yourself half an hour to write such a scene, so that the reader will
finish it knowing all this information. I predict you'll be amazed at how
quickly you can produce the scene, and at how it leads logically to another
scene. The key is *knowing what you want to show your reader about your
characters and their problems.* Once you know that, everything else follows
pretty easily. So consider what's going on in your own story. What do you
want your reader to think about your heroine? That she's shy but determined?
That she thinks no man could ever love her? That she's perceptive about other
women but baffled by men? Whatever those traits may be, you should be able to
think of logical, plausible events that could force her to show them to us.

In some cases, your plot will give you some automatic scenes. If your heroine
is flying from New York to Frankfurt, maybe her seatmate is an attractive man
who studiously ignores her; maybe the German customs people give her a hard
time but she insists on her rights; maybe the heroine sees the attractive man
greeted by a woman he seems to dote on even though the perceptive heroine can
see the woman despises him. And so on.

How long should a scene be? Long enough to make its point. A scene may run to
just a sentence or two, or it may take up 20 pages. When it ends, we should
know more about the characters involved, and their problems should have
increased. This doesn't mean endlessly increasing gloom, but it means that
even a success only clears the way for a more stressful scene to come. The
hero may disarm the terrorist bomb in the daycare center, but the resulting
publicity will make him a marked man; now the terrorists will try to kill him
or his loved ones.

How many characters should take part in a scene? As few as possible. Even a
debate in Congress isn't going to involve every last representative. Here's a
tip in this connection: If your plot demands a fairly large cast--for
example, your protagonist is the commanding officer of an infantry platoon,
or the headmistress of a girls' school--don't introduce a whole mob of
characters at once. Bring in your protagonist first, in a scene that
demonstrates the character's key traits (courage, leadership, self-hatred,
whatever). Then bring in each of the supporting characters in a scene that
lets him or her display key traits as well, while deepening our understanding
of the protagonist and moving the plot along.

This way we build up interest in the story by building up interest in the
varied and complex characters. Tolkien does it in The Lord of the Rings;
Kurosawa does it in Seven Samurai. Learn from the old masters!


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