Writing Tip #17: Back to the Scene
As Brenda Miller writes in her book,
Tell it Slant
, scene is the backbone of creative nonfiction. There are exceptions but not many. Yet people are still under the misguided perception that creative nonfiction is actually a kind of free association journal writing exercise. No. Creative nonfiction means you lean into literature and use the tools of proper storytelling--scene being as important to your writing as a hammer is to a builder.
I pulled this from a book I'm reading titled Wake Up to Your Life, and while this isn't a writing book (it's a spiritual book on meditation), this paragraph speaks more clearly to why we need to write scene--active, present, emotional and detail laden scene--more than anything else I've seen.
In the midst of action, intellectual understanding is much slower and less powerful than emotional understanding. To access intellectual understanding, we have to remember to bring what we know intellectually to bear on the situation. With emotional understanding, the understanding is part of our experience of the situation. We don't have to remember. For this reason, emotional understanding leads to deeper and more extensive understanding in our lives.
The writer is explaining something that is true about human nature and the thinking process. To think, to rationalize, to go to the intellect is actually a slower process than the feeling process. This is why good writing is emotional writing, good writing is clear and active and experience based. Anything less forces a distance intellectually and it slows down what it is to be alive because the intellect
moves
so
s l o w
And when you write in a way that makes a reader call on the intellect, you slow them down and boredom sets it. Your book is put down and the reader is off to something he can relate to--a story that catches his interest and his understanding at a feeling level.
Okay, so you get it. Write scenes. But then there is the question of how?
Ironically, expository writing is fast but scene writing is actually slow. It takes time and effort and a lot of words.
This post will not touch what needs to be done. The specifics of how to write a scene require you to take a class (which you can do here on the site, CLICK HERE). And you need to study the writing of others who come before you. Here is an example of a scene being set. This comes from the beautiful work of Joanne Beard, The Fourth State of Matter.
THE COLLIE WAKES ME up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She's on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She's staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.
She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator -careful almost went down - then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.
In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor's house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.
The dog turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house she drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I've climbed back under my covers already but her leg's stuck underneath her, we can't get comfortable. I fix the leg.
She rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up and she's gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40 A.M.
~
What has happened here? Very little. A woman takes her dying dog out to pee. So little happens but then again, EVERYTHING happens. That is the power of being in a moment and setting the stage and letting the action take over.
Prompt: Get up from your computer and go outside right now. Look up, down, right, left, front and behind and make note of as much as you can. Remember the actions of standing up, going outside, looking around and then returning to sit down. Now write that entire moment out. That is a moment in time. See what your observations reveal about that one moment but be in that moment. Don't go anywhere else. Just be with what it and write it down.
Write: 25 minutes
Post: Put your results here on the comments section.
Good luck
I pulled this from a book I'm reading titled Wake Up to Your Life, and while this isn't a writing book (it's a spiritual book on meditation), this paragraph speaks more clearly to why we need to write scene--active, present, emotional and detail laden scene--more than anything else I've seen.
In the midst of action, intellectual understanding is much slower and less powerful than emotional understanding. To access intellectual understanding, we have to remember to bring what we know intellectually to bear on the situation. With emotional understanding, the understanding is part of our experience of the situation. We don't have to remember. For this reason, emotional understanding leads to deeper and more extensive understanding in our lives.The writer is explaining something that is true about human nature and the thinking process. To think, to rationalize, to go to the intellect is actually a slower process than the feeling process. This is why good writing is emotional writing, good writing is clear and active and experience based. Anything less forces a distance intellectually and it slows down what it is to be alive because the intellect
moves
so
s l o w
And when you write in a way that makes a reader call on the intellect, you slow them down and boredom sets it. Your book is put down and the reader is off to something he can relate to--a story that catches his interest and his understanding at a feeling level.
Okay, so you get it. Write scenes. But then there is the question of how?
Ironically, expository writing is fast but scene writing is actually slow. It takes time and effort and a lot of words.
This post will not touch what needs to be done. The specifics of how to write a scene require you to take a class (which you can do here on the site, CLICK HERE). And you need to study the writing of others who come before you. Here is an example of a scene being set. This comes from the beautiful work of Joanne Beard, The Fourth State of Matter.
THE COLLIE WAKES ME up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She's on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She's staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.
She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator -careful almost went down - then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.
In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor's house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.
The dog turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house she drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I've climbed back under my covers already but her leg's stuck underneath her, we can't get comfortable. I fix the leg.
She rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up and she's gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40 A.M.
~
What has happened here? Very little. A woman takes her dying dog out to pee. So little happens but then again, EVERYTHING happens. That is the power of being in a moment and setting the stage and letting the action take over.
Prompt: Get up from your computer and go outside right now. Look up, down, right, left, front and behind and make note of as much as you can. Remember the actions of standing up, going outside, looking around and then returning to sit down. Now write that entire moment out. That is a moment in time. See what your observations reveal about that one moment but be in that moment. Don't go anywhere else. Just be with what it and write it down.
Write: 25 minutes
Post: Put your results here on the comments section.
Good luck
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