Scene-Creation Workshop -- Writing Scenes that Move Your Story
Forward© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
As the atom is the smallest discrete unit of matter, so the scene
is the smallest discrete unit in fiction; it is the smallest bit
of fiction that contains the essential elements of story. You don't
build a story or a book of words and sentences and paragraphs --
you build it of scenes, one piled on top of the next, each changing
something that came before, all of them moving the story inexorably
and relentlessly forward.
You can, of course, break the scene up into its component pieces
-- words, sentences, and paragraphs -- but only the scene contains
the vital wholeness that makes it, like an atom of gold, a building
block of your fiction. It contains the single element that gives
your story life, movement, and excitement. Without this one element,
you don't have a scene, you merely have a vignette.
So what is this magical element that gives your scene its life
and makes it the brick with which you build your fiction?
Change.
When is a scene a scene? When something changes. What defines the
completion of a scene? The moment of change.
We're going to create some very short scenes here -- I'll do some
demos, and then you'll do some practice scenes. We'll start with
the simplest of all possible scenes and work our way to scenes of
greater complexity. But you'll find out that even the most complex
of scenes become rather simple when taken down to its component
parts.
Let's start with the most basic of basic scenes. One setting, no
characters, a single elemental change. I'll do one, and then you'll
do one. Here we go:
***
In the heart of the command center, a single wire,
stiff and brittle from ten-thousand cycles of heating and cooling,
snapped away from its circuit board. The break set off an alarm
-- a tiny pulse of electricity that raced through the wires to a
monitored board at a control panel half a mile away. The pulse reached
its destination, a tiny light that should have come to brilliant
red life. But the light -- never used, infrequently tested -- failed
to switch on.
Those two tiny failures -- broken circuit; burned-out
bulb -- would have unimaginable consequences.
***
Okay. That's a whole scene, though there isn't much
to it. It comprises the essential elements of scene -- a place,
a time frame, and a change that moves the story forward. We know
that something vitally important has happened, because we're reading
about it. (If it weren't important, why write it?) We have some
feel for the story -- lives no doubt will depend upon the smooth
functioning of the control panel and the command center, and we
already know that there's a glitch that no one else knows about.
When we started into the scene, the command center was working smoothly.
When we left it, there was a problem, and a problem heightened by
the fact that the people who needed to know about it didn't.
Now it's your turn. Write a brief scene with no characters,
a clear location, a limited period of time, and a single event that
changes and moves the story forward. (You don't actually have to
have a story in mind. Just pretend you do.) When you've finished
it, come back and we'll move on.
--------------------
Okay. Next, we'll do something a bit fancier. This
time, we'll do a scene that has one character in it. No dialogue
yet. No interaction. Just one person making one change. Here's mine.
***
He danced into the kitchen through the green double
doors. He swirled. He pirouetted. He wore her blue dress, her blonde
wig -- the Dolly Parton one -- her bra (and stuffed into her bra
several pairs of his own dark blue lightweight wool dress socks),
and her Elizabeth Arden makeup, which he had applied with a skill
that would have astonished her.
He tangoed past the refrigerator, humming something
dramatic from the opera they'd attended the night before -- he didn't
know the name of the piece, but had not been able to get it out
of his head since he'd heard it. He slid between the blue-tiled
counter and the butcher block island on which sat bright red bowls
full of peaches and lemons and oranges. He gave his hips an electric
shimmy, admired his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that
covered the kitchen's far wall, and reached his arms left -- right
-- left. On the second left, something flashed in the morning sunlight,
then disappeared into the blue dress's deep pocket.
He spun, kicking up a leg with a grace that would
have shamed many a chorus girl, and tangoed back out the way he
had come, still humming.
On the kitchen counter, a single empty slot in the
knife block marked his passage. Top right slot -- one of the big
ones. Instead of fourteen knives, there were now unlucky thirteen.
The heels of his dancing shoes clattered up the elegant
oak staircase -- size thirteen shoes, black patent, with three-inch
heels suitable for dancing. He'd looked a long time before he found
those shoes.
***
What changes occur here? Our expectations of the character
are the primary change. We find out at the beginning that he's at
least a cross-dresser, and (as suggested by his skill with makeup)
one who's been hiding his secret for a while. We discover that he's
either married or living with a woman; we know that she has expensive
taste in makeup and questionable taste in wigs; we know that she
doesn't know about his hobby.
Initially he seems harmless and happy, if a bit weird
-- but as the scene goes on, we get a tiny surge of foreboding (lightly
foreshadowed by the butcher block, the red of the bowls)
with the mysterious something that flashes in the morning light
before disappearing into the pocket of the dress.
With the revelation that the knife block is suddenly
one knife short (the slot in the top right is usually reserved
for
the butcher knife, incidentally), our friend's antics no longer
seem so harmlessly eccentric. And the revelation that he bought
the shoes himself -- that he spent a great deal of time finding
just the right ones, suggests a change in his habits, an intensification
or commitment to something going on inside of him that, tied in
with the missing knife, bodes badly for the future.
Now it's your turn. Write a scene in which a single
character moves through one location in a limited period of time,
saying nothing, and makes a single change that moves the story forward.
---------------------
Back? Let's move on to our third and final practice
scene. Two characters this time. One change (it's always one change.)
Here we go:
***
He grinned at me from across the table. "I promised
myself I'd never hire you."
"And why is that?" I didn't return his smile; I'd
never much cared for him, and I liked him even less when he was
sitting across the table from me in my little tavern, in
my corner.
"I always figured you wouldn't be the type who'd mix
business with pleasure -- and I promised myself the day we were
introduced that you and I were going to be the best of friends."
I sipped my drink and studied him through narrowed
eyes. "You shouldn't make promises you can't keep -- not even to
yourself."
He laughed, not put off by my manner. But he was that
sort -- the kind of man who refused to believe that a woman might
not find him attractive, might not be flattered by his attentions;
might, in fact, prefer her own company to his. Insults rolled off
his oblivious shoulders because he simply refused to believe a woman
might mean them.
I meant them.
"You and I would have had a great time."
Only if he was lying on the floor and I was kicking
him in the kidneys, I thought. "What do you want?"
"I want you to find my wife," he said. "She's been
missing for two days, and I can't go to the police."
I leaned back, almost unable to breathe. He had a
wife? Some poor woman had married this shmuck? I took a hard
pull on my drink, feeling the soothing burn down the back of my
throat. "Your wife. And why, exactly, can't you tell the police
she's missing?"
He gave me a weak smile. A dead-fish-on-a-plate smile.
He cleared his throat, and his gaze darted away from mine, and he
said, "I hired mumble mumble mumble. . ."
I didn't catch it, and the part of it I did catch,
I didn't quite believe. "One more time," I told him. "And this time,
tell me so I can hear you."
He still didn't meet my eyes. In fact, he was staring
at the ring on his left hand like it was the key to the kingdom
of heaven. He said, "I hired these guys to kill her."
Yeah. That was what I thought he said. "And you want
me to find the body?"
He shook his head. "She's still alive."
"I see," I said, not seeing at all.
"They took her," he told me, "but they didn't kill
her. They're blackmailing me with her. They said they're going to
tell her that I hired them to kill her, and they're going to turn
her loose just outside of a police station, unless I pay them one
million dollars."
"Ah." It became clearer.
"I want to get her back before they tell her. For
that, I need you."
***
The change here is gradual. We know the main character
doesn't like the man who wants to hire her, and we gradually get
a feel for why -- he seems slimy. We find out that he's married,
and this confirms to us that he's definitely not the right man for
our hero -- her instincts are good. Then, however, we discover
that he's the sort of guy who would hire people to kill his wife,
and we suddenly realize that our character shouldn't even think
about working for this scumball -- except, if she doesn't, who's
going to save his poor wife.
We go from disliking this guy a little to disliking
him a lot. As changes go, it's fairly small, but enough to give
us a complete scene and to move the story forward.
Your turn. Two characters, one setting, a period of
from five to ten minutes in which something happens that changes
their relationship with each other and turns the story in a new
direction. Here are some directions you can take:
hate --> love
fear -- > trust
anticipation --> dread
belief --> disbelief
joy --> sorrow
anger --> amusement
trust --> distrust
There are a million more of these. You might want
to make a list of them -- it can come in useful when you're stuck
on a scene and you need a few prompts that can get you unstuck.
The big thing to remember in writing a scene -- any
scene -- is that it isn't a scene until something changes; and once
something changes, it's time to move on.
Timed Writing
Workshop -- Freeing Up the Subconscious in Writing>>
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