For three months, they searched the library, but found nothing has no tension – you know exactly what happened (they searched and found nothing, the searching isn’t important. And in a transition or summary, that’s fine, but when you never get the chance to observe the characters _doing stuff_ and wondering what will happen, that’s… not so fine.

I don’t know what came first, summarised writing or thinking about the story in terms of ‘what’s important’ instead of ‘what the characters did.’ The details thing is part of that (and part is not being very visual) – as long as I knew ‘what happened’ (they searched without finding anything) I was perfectly happy to write that down. I am now struggling to write in the moment narration, and I find that it needs a different way of _looking_ at what’s happening – even in the bits that I don’t want to dramatise in a fully-fledged scene.

I like the results. A lot, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not damn hard work, and I truly wish someone had pointed this out years ago, or that if people did, I had managed to understand it.

I am very much looking forward to the narrative summary post – I could really use some additional skills in that department.

As for the process, the ‘build it up block by block’ doesn’t work for me at all. I like the bonsai image -it could prove fairly accurate! I usually have an idea how the bit I’m working on will it into the whole, just not what exactly it will entail.

For an analytic people, breaking the story down into scenes (or building it up scene by scene, like stacking bricks into a wall, or sewing pieces together in a quilt) probably works pretty well, but not everyone does that kind of analysis. You have a more holistic process. I think green_knight may be doing something more like bonsai, with the story fighting back and the end result being an interesting compromise between the artist’s vision and the plant/story’s urge to grow in particular directions.

Anyway, three months is too long a time unit for a scene; it isn’t actually a unity of time, only a unity of place, because at the very least, they presumably don’t eat and sleep in the library during the search. Most of what happens in those months isn’t going to be relevant or interesting enough to dramatize…and you know that perfectly well, or you wouldn’t be talking about using a combination of narrative summary and scenelets.

What you’re talking about, really, is how much detail to give when you’re skating over a big chunk of time using narrative summary. There’s nothing at all wrong with “For three months, they searched the library, but found nothing,” except that your backbrain is obviously not satisfied with leaving quite that much out. Equally, you’re not happy with “The first day, she searched the library shelves but could not find anything out of the ordinary, though she would have liked to take several volumes home,” though again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it from an outside perspective.

So what you have is a three-month search that your backbrain is saying is important enough that you want the readers to remember it, but in which not enough things happen to justify a full-fledged series of scenes. So you want the narrative summary to have more details, and really interesting ones, so that it’ll be longer and more interesting and more memorable and right, rather than the minimalistic “Three months later…” versions. If you strongly associate “detail” with “scene,” then it’s no big surprise that you’re having trouble with the narrative summary part (especially since you’ve had so much trouble with details for so long anyway).

I think I’m going to have to do a post on narrative summary soon, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve chewed this over a bit.

…You ARE going to have to discard your concept of a story being a series of “units”.

green_knight, I don’t think you need a name for this “other unit”, I think you need to stop thinking of it as a “unit”. If you are going to stop thinking of unity of time and place, then you aren’t going to have to discard your concept of a story being a series of “units”. It’s a flow… a process. It’s string. If you’ve got multiple viewpoints, then your string is made out of multiple strands. But you change viewpoints by sliding one strand to the bottom, and another strand to the top — you don’t chop the strands into pieces.

I’m not sure that’s the most productive approach for me. What happened is that I was dividing the story into ‘something important happens’ (so I need to dramatise it in a scene) and ‘this isn’t really important’ (so I glossed over it in summary or mentioned later or had the character think about it etc.). The side-effect of that is that I’ve been stuffing _everything_ into scenes – all the interactions between characters and their development and their reaction to it – it’s the dark side of ‘a scene should do at least two out of the Big Three’ because I’ve been asking my scenes *to* do all of them. And… it’s produced scenes where everything _stops_ until I’ve caught up with all the things I want to fit in.

I think particularly my current WIP will be served much better by an approach that occasionally dips into key moments of the search with a one or two-paragraph scenelet This approach needs, sigh, a lot more transition skills. Once thing I’m struggling with is that I summarise almost everything at sentence level, so I will write ‘she searched the library shelves but could not find anything out of the ordinary, though she would have liked to take several volumes home’ rather than ‘she began pulling books from the shelf at her left, tilting each book to look behind it, occasionally flicking open a thick tome to ensure the pages had not been glued shut. One, adorned by the embossing of a single flower caught her eye. “Feyhart’s History of the Natural World,” she murmured. “Siggen will kill me if something happens to it before he can read it.”‘
And then you can move back to ‘she found nothing else of interest that day’ and move on.

I still feel that ‘unity of time and place’ is… well, if that’s a scene, then I don’t have a word to describe ‘the bit where they spend three months searching the library’ because in a multi-POV story that might well be the unit, only it needs an alteration between action and dialogue and summary and reflection. If it’s not a scene, what is it?

Matt G – I’ll see what I can do.

Alex – The time factor thing can happen when people are careless about transitions, or when they’re a little too much on auto-pilot while editing and trimming. “We talked about nothing for the rest of the meal” looks like a useless sentence – why bother telling the reader than the characters talked about nothing? It’s obviously not important! – so on auto-pilot, it gets cut. But even though the specific content isn’t important, the context and the transitional function of the sentence is…but when you’re on auto-pilot, you forget or don’t notice.

green-knight – A scene is what it is; it’s a definitional thing. But you don’t have to use scenes for everything. Narrative summary, which is what you used in Valendon’s Diary, works just fine for a lot of things (especially in first-person). If the characters spend three months turning the library upside down, you can use three or four short scenes, or you can transition right over the whole thing with “For the next three months, they turned the library upside down without finding anything. Then, in late May…” and you’re at the point where they DO finally find something.

A third alternative is the more mixed approach, where you do a summary that hits some high spots but still skips all the detail, or one that skips most of it but occasionally dips into key moments of the search with a one or two-paragraph scenelet. Which approach you choose depends on whether anything important (other than the discovery of The Clue) happens in the course of the search. Sometimes, the only way to find that out is to write the long version and then cut everything out that isn’t critical (which, in the case of a three-month library search, can be pages or even chapters-worth of stuff).

Scenes are one way of doing things, and they’re very, very common, and hardly anyone talks about them, so I did. Alternatives to scenes aren’t scenes, so if you’re trying to find out how to write them by writing scenes, you may have considerable trouble doing it.

What if your characters spend three months turning the library upside down?

One option would be to write three or four very short scenes – the first foray into the library, a couple of encounters where the searches get more frantic, and the last one where they find *something* and now have a different problem.

Right now, the alternatives are on the tip of my feather – I feel confident that this _could be written differently_ but I’m not able yet *to* find alternatives. Part of my problem is that I’m hyperfocussed on what’s happening to the character _right now_ and I’m following along as they experience things. That trick of stepping back and picking the most poignant moment – the instant or object or brief exchange that will illuminate what’s happening and then tieing it together smoothly – is something that evades me right now.