Line Up The Pearls

In my head, I see each scene of a novel as a pearl.

A pearl is born in conflict. Something, some irritant, a grain of sand or a tiny piece of grit somehow gets inside the clam. Once it’s in there, it causes instant problems, irritates the soft, sensitive tissue.  So the clam secrets some substance, the name of which I don’t know and don’t care about, to coat the irritating piece of grit. Slathers it with layer upon layer of the un-named coating until the offending irritation is covered over, and in its place is a pearl.

Scenes in a novel are born in conflict, too. At the center of every scene is some discordant note, something that invades the status quo, the ordinary world and becomes an irritant. That discord causes such discomfort that something has to be done about it. Conflict and the response to it. That, my friends, is your story.

Once you have written the synopsis of your novel, you know what happens, when and to whom, your next step is to make what I call the List of Necessary Scenes. It think this may be where other writers and I part company. I keep hearing the words “outline” from writing circles and I’m not certain what that means in terms of writing a novel. I don’t write an outline; I make a scene list. I’d suggest you do a little research on outlining a story and you might discover that you prefer that instead. As I’ve said all along, I have no idea how to write a novel. I just do it. Have done it seven times so far. And I’m sharing the how with you. But if it doesn’t seem to fit, by all means go out and see if you can find a method that suits you better.

For me, the scene list is the next logical step after the synopsis. Now that you know the story, what scenes will it take to tell that story? My film-maker son knows exactly what I mean by that question. In a movie, every scene has to be listed and individually, meticulously defined. Where will it be shot? What characters are needed, equipment, special effects, camera angles, etc. As a novelist, you provide all the “camera angles” and “special effects” with words, but before you can begin you have to know what the scenes are.

Surely, you’ve figured this out already, but if not let me own this bit of personal trivia: Ninie Hammon’s picture appears in the dictionary beside the term “low tech.” I’d write with a duck quill on parchment if it weren’t so time-consuming. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that I don’t make a scene list on a laptop, iPad, IPhone or IAnythingElse. I use Post-It notes on butcher paper. I begin by drawing a timeline. The line starts in the “past,” the timeframe before the book begins. Say your main character is haunted by the time he was supposed to be caring for his little brother and the little boy drowned, and throughout the book, he keeps flashing back to that event. That scene goes on the timeline before the action begins.

You’re only interested in the scenes you will actually use to tell the story. Just because the character went to college for four years and then joined the Navy, doesn’t mean any of that timeframe will be a scene unless it’s relevant to your story. But what scenes are relevant?

In Five Days in May, Mac, a minister, visits a death row inmate named Princess every day of the last week of her life. Obviously, every one of those visits will be an individual scene. As will all the flashbacks that occur within those visits when Princess reminds Mac of his wife and he flashes back to when she died. Or when Princess remembers the little sister she was convicted of murdering.

I use one Post-It note for each scene, different colors for each character from whose point of view that scene will be told and then stick the notes on the timeline where they belong. When I’m finished with that process,  I have the whole book laid out in chronological order before me. But that DOES NOT mean that’s the way I’ll tell it. Once I have the timeline of scenes to look at, I can decide exactly where I want to start the story. And it can be anywhere on the line. You can move back and forth along the line at will so long as you make it clear to the reader where you are, what’s happening in real time and what is a memory.

As I go through and decide where the story will begin and where I will proceed step by step from there, I make my official List of Necessary Scenes. What is Scene One in the book and Scene Two and Scene Three—not the chronological order of events, but the order in which I’m going to tell my reader what happened.

My job, then, is to write one scene and attach it to next and the next, like pearls on a necklace, each one born in conflict.

So what is the difference between a scene list timeline and a Character Timeline? Glad you asked. We’ll talk about that next week.