Building Scenes

Welcome to my next installment of writing tips for those of you who might be in need of them. I’m posting these in hopes that they might be of some help to people along their way to becoming published authors because a lot of this stuff was stuff I had to learn the hard way; I just kind of stumbled in the dark as I went, trying different things until I found out what worked.

My previous tip post was about three act structure and, like that post, this one isn’t meant to be the last word on writing or the last word on anything, for that matter. Everyone has his or her own process, and if you’ve found something that works for you, then by all means stick with it. These little essays just describe approaches I’ve found that work and I publish them here in case they might be of some value to others. Take whatever you want from them.

Dramatic Format of a Scene

Today, I want to talk about scene building. Scenes really go hand in hand with the three act structure. The structure is basically a sequence of scenes that start at the beginning of Act I and end at the end of your book.

There’s a strong relationship between the concept of “Showing vs. Telling” and scene building. Many writers, especially those just starting out, seem to have a hard time with the showing vs. telling thing. Let me see if I can clear up any confusion.

Consider the following paragraph:

John got a date with Amelia tonight. He drove his car to her place and picked her up. After that, John and Amelia went dancing at that new club, Ringo’s. John drank too much and got into a fight. He wound up in jail. Amelia had to bail him out the next morning. She wasn’t too pleased.

This isn’t a scene, it’s a synopsis. It contains an overview of a number of different scenes. Scenes are dramatic, meaning they contain drama. To write this dramatically requires you to unpack the details. How much of them you unpack is really up to you and, in some degree, defines your style as a writer.

I will write the first line of the above paragraph as a scene to give you an example of what I mean:

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John came home from work late in a rather unpleasant mood. He’d had a fight with his boss and all he was thinking about was having dinner, putting up his feet, and watching the football game on television. Bedtime wouldn’t come soon enough.

That’s when there was a knock on his door. He could tell just by the sound of the knock that it was Tim Jackson, his landlord. Shit, John thought. He’d forgotten to pay his rent.

Tim knocked again right away. He knew John was home; he could see his car in the driveway. Oh well, there was no point in post-poning the inevitable. John answered the door.

“Hi Tim,” he said, scratching his head.

“I need the rent, John,” Tim said. Tim always reminded John of a reptile. It was something about the way his teeth were set in his mouth.

“Yeah. Okay if I get it for you tomorrow?”

“Why is it always tomorrow with you? Every month it’s tomorrow.” Those teeth looked ready to snap any minute.

“Sorry ’bout that, but I really don’t have it on me. I’ll have it tomorrow for sure.”

Tim searched John’s face as though trying to see whether or not to trust him. John didn’t think Tim ever trusted him. “I’ll be back tomorrow. If you don’t have my money . . . ” He never told John what would happen, just made it seem like it wouldn’t be good.

“I’ll have it. Jesus, Tim.”

“Lots of people would love to live here, price I charge.”

“I know. You’re a saint.”

Tim narrowed his eyes. He was trying to tell if John was being sarcastic. Luckily he wasn’t bright enough to pick up on sarcasm. “Just have my money.”

John closed the door and sighed. He had no idea how he was going to come up with rent money in twenty-four hours. Not unless the rent fairy came and left him a check while he was sleeping. Could today get any worse?

As though reading his thoughts, John’s telephone rang. John didn’t even bother considering whether or not to answer it. At this point, he thought, just let the problems pile themselves up.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Hi, John? It’s Amelia. We met a couple week’s ago at Shelly’s birthday party.”

Amelia. John remembered Amelia. Tall, blonde, curvy. Everyone at that party probably remembered Amelia. “Hi,” John said, putting on an air of suaveness he didn’t know he had.

“I was just wondering what you were doing tonight? My schedule sort of cleared up on me and I was wondering if you might want to go out? Maybe go dancing? I’d like to check out that new place. What’s it called? Ringo’s?”

Jack nearly stumbled over his own tongue. “Yeah, um, sure. Yeah! I’d love to. Want me to pick you up?”

“That sounds great!”

“Okay, hang on, let me get a pen.” He grabbed a pen and the envelope containing his overdue telephone bill. “All right, give me your address.” John copied down her address as she told it to him. “Okay, I’ll see you in, say, an hour?”

“Sounds perfect.”

John hung up the phone and smiled, wondering if maybe the rent fairy had come and just left him a present other than the rent money.

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There, that’s the first sentence of the paragraph above written out as a short scene. Now it’s dramatic. You might think it sucks, and it probably does. I just wrote it off the top of my head. But it fulfills the job of the first sentence. Where the original sentence “told” us what happened (“John got a date with Amelia tonight”), the scene “shows” us him getting the date. It not only shows him getting the date, it also shows John’s thoughts and feelings about it. There’s also some added back and forth with his landlord that I seem to have arbitrarily added. Why did I do that? Because of our next topic:

Conflict

Every scene has to have conflict. In a lot of ways, your scenes are three act structures squished into smaller time spaces. They should have virtually the same elements: a setup, some sort of rising conflict and tension (and maybe suspense), and everything should eventually crescendo toward a climax and resolution.

Conflict is key. Conflict makes us interested and keeps us there. I added conflict by making John unable to pay his bills (I’m not sure how he’s going to afford to pay for his date tonight, but somehow he gets drunk enough to get into that fight).

Remember, you want to keep the conflict and tension rising throughout your book (especially throughout that great expanse known as Act II), and the only way to do that is by writing highly charged scenes, with each one being a little more ramped up than the last. In reality, of course, you can’t possibly have every single scene more conflicted than the one before it, but you do want to make sure you average a nice rising effect.

Energy

Another aspect to writing scenes is energy. This is something Robert McKee goes on and on about in his great book Story. Energy is either positive or negative. It means your character is either feeling up or he’s feeling down. The energy of a scene has to move. Every scene should show movement of energy one way or another. It should either start off positively charged and end negatively charged, or it should start off negatively charged and end positively charged.

This is yet another reason for me to give John all his problems with the boss and the landlord (and even mention the unpaid phone bill). I wanted to start the scene off negatively charged because I knew it was going to end with him getting the date of his dreams which would leave it ending in the positively charged position.

If you use index cards to map out your scenes (some writers are crazy for index cards and plot out their entire story on them), you can put a +/- or a -/+ in the top right hand corner to designate the energy movement of a particular scene.

Now, there’s one further thing Robert McKee preaches. He says that your scenes should line up so that positive ending scenes butt up against positive starting scenes and negative ending scenes butt up against negative starting scenes, so you end up with scenes looking like this: +/- -/+ +/- -/+.

I think that’s being a little too anal retentive and asking for major headaches later in your writing process if you happen to want to move one scene from somewhere in your novel to someplace else. You’d have to redo every other scene somehow to keep the pattern intact. But who am I to argue with a master like McKee? If it works for him, it might work for you.

Special Scenes

There are a few scenes on the hero’s journey (in other words, throughout the three act structure) that require special attention. You should spend extra time on these to make sure they are highly charged emotionally and that they are well-paced. These are the cornerstone scenes I talked about in my three act structure post: The Inciting Event, The Climax, and the Pivot Points between Act I and Act II, and Act II and Act III.

You will generally find that, as you close in on the end of your novel and ramp up to your climax, your sentences will naturally begin to shorten and, quite possibly, your paragraphs will as well. This is because you automatically feel the subconscious need to increase the tempo as things come to a head. The same might very well be true of your Inciting Event.

The Pivot Points are very emotional places in your story which might benefit from some good internalization. Generally, these are times when the characters are going through inner changes which you might want to draw the reader’s attention to. Sometimes this can be tricky, as the characters themselves might not be aware of the changes coming over them.

Scene Composition

You want to come into scenes late and leave early. Not doing this is a very a common problem with a lot of authors, even authors who’ve been writing for some time.

What I mean by coming in late is that you want to start the scene at the latest possible time you can without losing any valuable information. It’s a lot like starting your novel. You don’t want to show your character from birth and you probably don’t want to show him sleeping and getting out of bed. You want to start on action. You want to pick up right where things get interesting. You want to hook the reader.

And you don’t want to overstay your welcome. Again, here scenes are much like your novel as a whole–once you’ve finished showing the reader what is essential to the story, get out. You’re done. If you have characters saying, “Goodbye,” a lot in your scenes, or getting into cars and driving down streets (although, sometimes getting into a car and driving away is a good way to end a scene), you’re probably going on too long. Once again, you want to end on a hook or, in this case, you’d probably call it a cliffhanger.

Cliffhangers don’t all have to be about damsels in distress tied to railroad tracks with trains only yards away from running through them; they can be little things. I’d consider the ending of the short scene I wrote above a mini-cliffhanger. It leaves the reader with at least a little bit of a question. Who is Amelia, anyway? What’s going to happen on this date? Is John in over his head? It seems like nothing else in his life goes right . . . how is he going to botch tonight up?

It’s really more in the phrasing than the content when it comes to ending scenes well. Although, sometimes, especially when writing thrillers or mysteries, you really can end on a good cliffhanger. If you get the opportunity, by all means, pull out all the stops!

That’s about it for building scenes. Just try to keep everything interesting with lots of conflict and tension and make sure you’re showing more than you’re telling. And always remember that the more you write, the better you get.

Michael out.