Workshop:
Scene-Creation Workshop
Writing Scenes that Move
Your Story Forward
By Holly Lisle
© 2005,
Holly Lisle
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.
Original URL:
http://hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/scene-workshop.html
|
