Choreography is defined as “the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion, form, or both are specified.” It is most often applied to dance, but the term gets used for pretty much anything that involves a need for a lot of people and/or things to move in complex patterns, from chorus lines to awards ceremonies to weddings to parades to battle scenes in a movie. A stage choreographer plans out a fight scene, move by move, so that it looks real to the audience (even though everyone knows none of the actors are really getting hurt). Writers can and do choreograph scenes and plot arcs for the same reasons: to make sure the scene or scenes look realistic and flow smoothly from one to another, and to prevent characters awkwardly tripping over each other or the furniture.
For writers, there are at least two ways of looking at scene choreography, and two levels to look at it on. The two ways are 1) the detailed physical actions and movements the characters make, and 2) the cause-and-effect sequencing of everything in a scene; the two levels are A) sequences within a scene, and B) sequences of scenes that move characters from one place, time, situation, or plot twist to another.
Different writers approach these in different ways. I know strongly visual writers who seldom bother working out the logistics of the characters’ movements even in the most complicated action scene; one of them told me once that they saw it like a movie in their head and wrote down what they saw – and they never got confused about where anyone was, because they just “look” at their mental picture. I know at least one who talked a bunch of friends into physically acting out a fight scene so they could figure out where everybody went and who they’d bump into when they got thrown across the room. And I know some who can’t write a dinner scene without drawing a seating chart showing exactly where each character is sitting at the table, with arrows for diagramming who comes in late and who leaves early.
Similarly, the cause-and-effect sequence of events in a scene or series of scenes is intuitively obvious to some writers and requires careful choice and construction by others. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether the writer in question is a pantser or a planner, either – the careful-choice-and-construction pantsers just have to do their careful consideration in the second draft.
As a result, different writers will approach the process of choreographing a scene or sequence of scenes differently. The trick, as always, is figuring out what works best for you – whether you’re a top-down designer, or bottom-up, or inside-out.
I tend to start at the macro level – that is, I look first at the key elements of the story I want to tell. I know there will be three arrivals – a challenger, an unexpected visitor, and a messenger; dinner will burn; the council will meet to discuss three different topics; there’ll be a family argument; there’ll be at least three confrontations; there’ll be an interview with a prisoner. Some of these things are tied together in causal chains or plot/subplot threads; others aren’t.
I sort out the elements I know I want into broad categories – the challenger, the unexpected visitor, and at least one confrontation are part of the main plotline; the messenger, council, and another confrontation are threads in a specific subplot. Within those plotlines, some of the events have obvious causal relationships: the challenger must arrive before the confrontation with him takes place; the messenger must arrive before the council is called to discuss her message.
Next, I look for places where I can cross my plotlines – that is, where two or more things from different plotlines can happen at more or less the same time. Either the challenger’s arrival or the appearance of the unexpected visitor can interrupt the council meeting; the resulting confusion may be the reason dinner burns, or the trigger for the big family argument. There are usually multiple options. (Also, when I speak of “plotlines.” I’m not just talking about action plots and subplots; I’m also talking about emotional subplots and things like character development and backstory revelation. These, too, need to come in some logical sequence – e.g., first Sue notices that George is cute; next she agrees to meet him at the tavern; then George sings her a drunken love song, etc. Which events also need to be worked in among everything else.)
All through this, I keep adding more events and developments as they occur to me, fleshing out the different plot sequences. Somewhere around here, I break out the Post-It-Notes, or sometimes a spreadsheet or storyboard. As I get more what-could-happen-next ideas, I discard some events or make specific choices about others: Three new arrivals (messenger, challenger, unexpected visitor) in the first two chapters is too many, so I’ll leave the messenger offstage. Feeding the unexpected visitor leftover pizza (because he’s unexpected and dinner burned) would be fun and provide an opportunity for more backstory.
At this point, I haven’t gotten to determining scenes yet, at least, not all of them. Some scenes are pretty much nailed to the wall already – the council meets in the Great Hall at mid-morning, with a specific set of characters, for instance. If I’m going to show the council meeting, that’s when and where it will be. Other events are more fluid – the prisoner interview should take place in the dungeon, but it could involve just the two characters, or three to five additional ones, and the only time-stamp is that it has to happen before the prisoner is executed. The challenger could arrive in the castle courtyard, or at the city gates, or show up in the market, or turn up pretty much anywhere that’s not restricted, and he can show up at any time of the day or night.
The thing to remember here is that there is no system or set of rules for deciding on the “best” order of events. It’s a matter of taste and intuition and what sort of effect you’re going for in terms of pace and character development and surprise. Some readers – and writers – like to twist the story in a completely unexpected direction a few chapters in; others prefer a leisurely opening with steadily building tension through the entire first half to two-thirds of the story, or slam-bang action from the get-go. I do try to interweave my various plotlines as much as possible, so that my readers won’t be so busy thinking about the council and the prisoner interview that they forget about the romance between Sue and George.
In a pinch, if I am waffling among several apparently-equally-good choices for ordering an event, I decide based on what I think will be most fun for me to write, because if I am waffling that much, picking one choice over another probably won’t make that much difference to the story.
As the order firms up, I usually find that events clump up and scenes start falling into place. The challenger could arrive in one of six places, but if his arrival interrupts the argument with the general, it makes most sense to set that scene in the courtyard. Some writers go the other way – they start by walking their protagonist chronologically through a typical day, scene by scene, and then figure out what events fit into each scene. I’ve never been sure how they make that work, but obviously it can be done.
Since this is getting quite long, I am going to leave figuring out the order of events within a scene for another post, which will probably be at least two weeks out. (Next week is an Open Mic.)
Getting back to physical choreography, one scene required the protagonist to leap onto a runaway horse as it galloped past him. I could picture it well, and I delineated each move the would-be rider had to take to get into the saddle.
I thought I did it well, but the members of my writers group universally said that they were confused—essentially, the words got in the way of the action. I changed that muddle to “From nowhere there was a rush, a sudden breath of heat, and Grayl’s arms wrenched as he was yanked off his feet. He was flying for a moment, weightless, then he was hit in the stomach hard enough for the world to go grey about him. Somehow he pulled himself forward and his feet found stirrups and his grasping hands released the saddle he had grabbed by instinct and his fingers tangled in the mane of a madly running riderless horse.”
Even that is far longer a description than I remembered it being; the first draft must have been epic.
The trouble I have with physical-action choreography is mostly with the small stuff, the stage-business bits rather than with locating and moving about the warm bodies.
I have even more trouble with the cause-and-effect stuff, on both scales, even though most of the time it isn’t really cause and effect (at least as I think of it) but just chronological order. I don’t think of the first dwarf to arrive as “causing” the second dwarf to arrive second, but just as how the events are sorted in time.
I got complimented once on my fight scenes, but any success I have isn’t from being visual, but rather tactile. I picture the fights in my head as I write them, but it’s the body positions, recoils and impacts I’m focused on.
Beware of things where the time is fixed.
I see this most on the macro level, where if scene one has to take place in spring, and scene 10 in late summer, you have to structure the story about that (with some fudging) or the heroine gets pregnant and gives birth during the story (less room for fudging), but if your hero starts to cook spaghetti and serves it in a scene, remember the time for the water to boil and the spaghetti to cook.
I read one novel where Act 1 takes place in very early spring, and Act 2 at planting; then the characters ride horseback for a week and arrive at the Spooky Castle–in an atmospheric late autumn. I don’t think the author had noticed, but I sure did, and it was jarring.
It’s fascinating how much of this choreography has to go on behind the scenes to set up what looks to the reader like a simple event, without breaking the suspension of disbelief (as in Ms. Kuhner’s example).
And it’s interesting how much of it may be behind the scenes for the author, too: the subconscious processing that underlies the conscious working-out of the choreography. The difference between the writer for whom this seems to come easily (for instance, the one who just “looks” at their mental picture) and those for whom it takes meticulous planning may be a matter of how much of this work is being carried out subliminally.