scene breaks and other beginner stuff

I remember when I wrote my first novel that one of the main questions I had was how to break from scene to scene. Seriously, this concerned me enormously. I could not figure out how to stop telling the story moment to moment for my chosen viewpoint character. I knew readers wouldn't want to know about her sleeping, going to the bathroom, or eating, but the simple words "Two hours later" didn't occur to me. Or "The next day." Or simply a line break when I went on to the next scene or changed viewpoint character.

It is comforting to me to look back on this problem now and think how simple the process has become for me now to do scene breaks. I still have many, many things to work on. But I'm pretty sure I have scene breaks down.

Another thing I could not figure out: sense of place. I remember distinctly (Hi, Carol!) in our writers group that some of the other writers would constantly tell me that they needed a sense of place. They were not talking about paragraph long descriptions of the beautiful scenery. They were talking about stage managing. How one character was standing in the room, how they moved to the other character's side, and what they were doing while talking. This I also figured out and can with some assurance say that I am an expert at. I do it unconsciously while I am writing, even in first draft mode.

This is important to me because one of the things that happen to us as humans is that as we get better at something, we look forward. This is great for getting ever better. The reach should exceed the grasp and all that. But as I watch my teens struggle with the sensation that they are getting worse, because they see more and more that they cannot do, I think that this is essentially the job of adulthood.

Children think that adults know so much. The truth is, adults are aware of how much they do not know even more keenly than children are. They begin to sense the edges of their lack of knowledge. In fact, I think one of the moments when teens move into adulthood is when that feeling of "I can do everything and anything" disappears and one has to choose only one very small thing to excel at.

I suspect that I mourn that loss of innocence more than most and that is probably why I am a YA writer. Perhaps I also ignore the adult reality of limitation more than most, too. I continue to pretend that I do not have the limitations that I have. Maybe there is something wonderful in that.

But today, I am celebrating looking back and remembering that I have actually learned some things that I did not know before. Though my sense of the widening expanse of knowledge I do not have has expanded more quickly than it seems my competence has, still, I am not getting stupider. Lift a glass with me. *Cheers*