Moving around–Part 1: Process

Suggestion box: Could we have a post on moving characters around in a scene?…I struggle with how much detail to include on movement and on background. I don’t remember who described a scene as having naked characters sitting on clouds, but that’s about where many of mine start. Dialog, now, I could do an entire novella in dialog, I think.

Here’s the next question. At first glance, “moving characters around” looks like it should be an expanded version of stage business (i.e., doing stage business that isn’t related to dialog), but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Because there are two aspects to this question. One is technical—how much and what kind of background, movement, description, etc. needs to be in a given scene, and what the techniques are for working it in. The other is about the writing process—when and how do the sentences about movement, description, etc. get composed and put into the manuscript.

I’m going to address the second part of this first, because the answer to most process questions is nearly always “do whatever works for you.” A lot of process problems arise from trying to do what works for someone else. There is nothing wrong with starting to write a scene with talking heads in a void, as long as the final manuscript contains as much description, movement, etc. as the reader needs.

Yes, many writers do all of it at once, and only tweak the phrasing in revision. They go from “Mario drew his gun. ‘Put it down,’ Henry said, struggling frantically” to “Mario drew his Colt 45. ‘Put it down!’ Henry yelled, struggling against the ropes.” In my experience, these writers are often the ones who describe their process as “like watching a movie and writing everything down.”

However, some writers don’t “see” the scene like a movie in their heads; they hear the dialog or the viewpoint character’s inner monolog instead. Other times, the writer gets so immersed in a scene that they forget that it isn’t a movie the readers can see; they know that the curtains are blue, that Mario has a gun in a hip-holster, and that Henry is currently tied up in the corner, and it just doesn’t occur to them that the reader needs to be told those things. Still others are partial-pantsers—they can sit down and write one aspect of a scene (e.g. “what everybody says” or “what happens”), but they don’t know what else they’re going to need until they’ve first written the easy-thing-they-know-how-to-do.

When these writers see many of their peers writing scenes that include at least rudimentary bits of everything right from the get-go, they often think that this is how people are “supposed” to write. There is, however, no One True Way to write stuff, and layering is a perfectly valid way of working. (And really, go read the layering post, https://pcwrede.com/pcw-wp/layering/ It’s too long to recreate here.)

For less-visual writers, going through multiple layering passes has two advantages over trying to do everything in the first draft. The first is that it allows the writer to deduce what the reader needs to be told: Mario has a gun, Henry is tied up, they’re indoors…and what the reader doesn’t need to know: the curtains are blue. (Though the dramatic arrival of rescue-ninjas may work better if the window is mentioned, or at least implied to exist by mentioning the curtains, well before the ninjas jump through it).

The second advantage of deliberate layering is that it lets the writer focus in on one aspect of the scene at a time. How the characters sound. What they’re thinking. What details the POV only notices because he’s an artist/dentist/engineer. What needs to be set up (if Mario is going to snatch that gun off the mantelpiece instead of drawing it from his holster, the writer had better have mentioned earlier that there is a gun on the mantelpiece). What the place looks like. What it sounds like. What it smells like. What the POV hears.

The only caveat here is that a writer who routinely does talking-heads scenes (or pure description instead of dialog, e.g. “Mario pulled his gun and Henry told him not to shoot anybody”) often writes that way because dialog or narrative summary is their “for free” thing. It’s easy. So the writer defaults to what’s easiest and most natural to them, even when a different choice would be more effective. This means that they get better and better at the easy part (and OK, that’s a good thing), but they don’t get any practice on whatever in the things they’re not as good at doing (which is Not Good).

Writing effectively takes a certain level of skill in multiple areas. It’s fine to lean heavily on your strengths; if a writer is a level 10 in ability to write dialog, but only at 5 in action and maybe 7 in description, it isn’t wrong to choose dialog-heavy options. But if dialog is a 10 and action, description, characterization, plot, etc. are all at 2 or 3, avoiding them does no favors for either the writer or the story, and certainly not for the writer’s future development.

That took longer than I expected, so next week will be the technical side of moving characters around.