The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: scene

  • Architecture Without Thought

    Mountains and blue sky are enough description to tell you where you are, don't you think?

    So it turns out that I’ve never really thought about how I construct a scene. That’s made blogging about what I do to set scenes in my stories very difficult. That doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts that echo what my fellow Confabulators have written about here, it just means that I don’t know exactly how I’ve done it in the past. So let’s examine what I think I do and we’ll see if it’s rubbish or not:

    THE PLAYERS

    Can a scene be written where there are no characters? Sure. I have. Boring. Awful. Pages of description of trees, pictures, buildings and nothing’s happening! Garbage. There needs to be action. Something has to happen. People, animals, machines, robots, anything that can move or can move things must be inserted into the description. So, I have to determine who is in the scene. Do I need to tell you what that person looks like, what race or ethnicity? Or do you only need to know their names and where they came from? Will that tell you enough to get into the story? I try to give you only enough to enjoy the story. If I were drawing, I would be using only enough lines to show the general shape of the characters, allowing the reader to fill in the rest. 

    THE GOAL

    Each scene has to accomplish something, some small change in the lives of the characters that moves them toward the end of the book. Remembering that, like the story, there’s a beginning, middle and end to every scene has been something that I often don’t do. There’s a natural arc to every scene, just like the story the scene is in, has a beginning, middle and end. By the end of the scene, things have to change. I need to know what the goal of the scene is as I begin to write it. This determines the action.

    THE PHYSICAL PLACE

    Something that I learned from making comic books (don’t worry, you can’t find them, they were self-published and really only circulated around town) is that you don’t have to draw the background in each panel. One does, however, have to describe the setting enough for the reader to be able to envision the physical place the players are inhabiting. The room they’re in, the vehicle, the house, the glade in the forest, wherever the characters are has to be described. Details are up to the individual writer to provide and I will give my reader fewer than others, but more than some. 

    THE TIME

    Day or night? Morning, afternoon or evening? April? September? January? 20th century or 14th? Perhaps the 33rd? It’s usual for a story to have a ‘ticking time bomb’ or at least a time element that’s working against the characters. If a main character is a nightowl then dropping her into a scene during full daylight certainly creates tension. These are things I consider.

    THE REASON

    Everything has to move forward. If it’s not moving, there’s not really a story being told. If the writer hasn’t developed a compelling reason for telling the story over the course of the scenes he’s written, he’s not written a good story. So, everything must advance and each scene must move things forward. Even scenes of people talking about what they’re going to do – though sometimes boring – can be essential. As long as the characters are somehow changed at the end of the scene, the story advances.

    So, to sum up here, my thoughts on the subject are indeed rubbish. Perhaps you can mine some nugget from this ramble, perhaps not. It has, however, given me an insight to what my process is and how I can improve it. Once I get there, I’ll let you in on how I did.

  • Laying out the Table

    When I stop to consider my favorite scenes and descriptive passages, I just stop.  Seriously.  “Setting the scene” has always been a difficulty in my writing, because I quite hate reading descriptions.  I like plot and character and telling detail as much as the next reader/writer, but description-skipping is one of my best strategies for consuming my preferred book a day diet. Alas, I now achieve that diet only in the summer and on vacation.  Ah well.

    The best metaphor I can think of for scene setting is Setting the table for dinner guests.  Some people like linen napkins, red silk tablecloths, magisterial dowager chairs on the table ends, baroque flatwafloe bowers of centerpieces. I am not into that. I prefer simple cotton napkins, maybe some placemats, whatever unmatched silverware is in the drawer. But my focus is on the food, the herbed turkey and cinnamon crusted sweet potatoes, creamed corn, apple spice cake goodness.  I don’t want dirty place settings, or inadequate serving dishes. I want my guests to forget all about the place settings in their rapture of tasteful delights. So my goal is that description and scene setting not interfere with the content of the story.

    Readers have offered me very inconsistent accounts of my success in this aim. Often, my creative writing teachers mentioned my descriptive passages as the strongest part of my story.  But another reader commented that my novel felt like I was watching the movie in my head and only sharing glimpses with my audience, enough to assure them that I could see the whole scene, but not enough to take them along with me.  Looks like I need to retrieve some new serving spoons–the ones I have been using can’t quite handle the gravy!

  • The Scene-tific Method

    A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a graduate student trying to earn a PhD. During my studies I discovered something very telling about my character:

    I am an empiricist.

    I discovered that I could never truly comprehend an advanced theoretical discussion without grounding it in an observable environment. Equations and symbols meant nothing to me unless I could take them out of the sterile world of theory and dump a whole bunch of real numbers on top of them. Then I could sit back and watch what happens. If I could see the mechanics in action, I’d get it. If I couldn’t, I didn’t. My fellow students at the time thought I was nuts. I thought they were nuts.

    They were probably right. I never did get that PhD.

    Turns out I have the same issue when dealing with my writing style. When I write dialogue, I often find myself mumbling the words of each character while I’m writing them, complete with the proper accents and inflections. If I can hear it, I know if it’s right or wrong. Just seeing the words on the page doesn’t often work for me. When I write action sequences, my hands are flapping and my limbs are tensing and twitching as I mentally perform the same actions I’m choreographing for my characters. At group writing events, people will often see me bury my face in my hands, looking like I’m in agony. I’m not. I’m struggling to force my brain to accept an abstraction instead of leaping from my chair and dancing around the room like an idiot to act out a scene or converse with my imaginary cast of characters.

    There’s a reason I do my best writing at home by myself.

    So, how does my empirical approach affect the crafting of scenes? (more…)

  • Start the Damned Thing Already, Just Not There

    Let’s talk about The Sound of Music for a minute.  Maria is, without a doubt, the most decorated sing-off opponent the Nazis have ever faced.  She also had an engaged naval captain thinking naughty thoughts about somebody who belonged to a convent, so she had that going for her.  (I guess.)

    But when it comes to advice about getting the ball rolling, I think Maria might have taken one too many spins around the top of that hill.

    “Let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start.”

    When it comes to storytelling, if you’re starting at the beginning, you’re probably doing it wrong.

    (more…)

  • Setting the Scene (Week of 6 February 2012)

    The Cafe isn’t always well-lit and open. Sometimes it’s dark and foreboding when you’re in here, especially at closing or before we unlock the doors and get everyone in here writing. While the furniture is mostly new, some of it was scavenged or given to us, which allows the Cafe itself to have a patina of age when you walk in. The place is clean (we do a pretty good job sweeping up at the end of the day) and the coffee’s always fresh, but when the place is hopping there’s nothing quite like being in here. The pictures on the walls by our favorite artists, the music in our earbuds to inspire us and the general tenor of the place all contribute to how we do our jobs as writers.

    Setting a scene, using descriptions and telling the readers what we see in our heads is perhaps a greater challenge than just writing a story itself. This is the personal part of storytelling, it seems. Each of us approaches descriptions differently and with good reason: we don’t necessarily share one brain. We’ve all read the theories of ‘get in as late as possible and get out as fast as you can’ and ‘start on the action’ that are common bits of advice for writing scenes and stories. This week the Cafe bloggers share how they do it.

    Pull up a chair. The dark roast is especially good this week: smokey and light-bodied but intense. There’s some half and half if you need it.