scene: in a drama, a subdivision of an act or of a play not divided into acts….”scene” is also the name given to a “dramatic” method of narration that presents events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are supposed to be occurring, i.e., usually in detail and with substantial use of dialogue. In this sense, the scenic narrative method is contrasted with “summary,” in which the duration of the story’s events is compressed into a brief account.
—The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Scenes are one of the fundamental building blocks of narrative fiction – so fundamental, in fact, that almost all of the how-to-write books I looked at in the course of writing this post hardly talked about them at all, any more than they talk about spelling or grammar. The assumption seems to be that if you write at all, you already know what a scene is and how to write it.
The two key characteristics of a scene are place and time. The term originated in the theater, where the definition was basically “continuous action that happens in one place at one time, and when it’s done we have to change the set or at least lower the curtain to let people know that we’ve just skipped a couple of hours.” Characters can come and go during the course of a scene; the focus can change from one person to another; but the place where it happens generally stays the same and the scene itself runs continuously from start to finish.
Note that I didn’t say anything about action. Stuff happens during a scene; people move, talk, punch someone else, whatever. But it’s not the action that makes the scene; the scene is the container for the action. Place and time constrain what can happen. You’re not going to see an army on horseback riding to battle if the scene takes place in Lady Grenville’s drawing room; you’re not going to write a half-hour argument if the scene takes place during a two-minute commercial break while the characters are watching TV.
Not that action is completely unimportant. A so-called scene that simply described several hours of an empty, unchanging drawing room doesn’t make for much of a scene or story in most cases (though Ray Bradbury pulled it off in the magnificent tour de force “There Will Come Soft Rains.”) In most cases, the point of choosing this place and that time interval to show as a scene is that one’s characters are doing something interesting and story-relevant there and then.
Scenes are the “show” part of “show and tell.” “They spent three hours in the library, hunting for the next clue” is a summary, not a scene. “They walked into the library. ‘You take the shelves on the right,’ Sandy told Bob. ‘Dan, you do the ones on the left. I’m going up by the windows, and we’ll meet in the middle.’ Dan nodded. ‘Yell if you find anything,’ he said over his shoulder as he started toward the back corner. ‘Anything at all.’ The other two nodded soberly at his back and went off to begin the hunt.” is a scene (an extremely short one, granted, but this is just a blog post, after all).
Scenes have a beginning, middle, and end, but except for the very last scene in a story or novel, the “end” of a scene is never a complete resolution; it leads onward. The action and events that take place here and now are over, but there’s more going on elsewhere or later on that is or that will be important. That bit of openness at the end of every scene is usually some kind of unanswered question (Will the hero escape from the snake pit? What is Uncle Al doing while all this was going on? Who wrote that letter? Where did the cheese come from? Is she really in love with the lawyer? If the clue isn’t in the library, where is it…or did someone else get to it first? What are the consequences of whatever just happened?), and it is a large part of what ties a novel together and keeps it moving forward.
What all this means is that scenes are where all the basic elements of writing – dialog, description, action, characters, setting, conflict, viewpoint, etc. – come together at once. Sometimes you can strip away some or most of these elements – there are scenes that are pure dialog, for instance – but that doesn’t work as a regular thing. It’s too abstract for most stories except as an occasional teaser (who are the characters behind these two voices, what is the mysterious stuff they’re talking about, and why is it relevant to the rest of the story?).
Juggling all those other elements makes it easy for some writers to lose track of those key scene boundaries, place and time. A scene that was supposed to be a brief, tense dinner-table conversation drags on over dessert and coffee because the characters are still doing and saying things that follow one another and never seem to get to a good stopping spot, though they’re long past the point of being story-relevant. Time – and the scene – just keeps rolling forward until all the characters finally go off to bed. This is why so many beginning writers seem unable to end scenes or chapters unless their viewpoint character falls asleep or is knocked unconscious; they’re being true to life (in which we keep on doing stuff as long as we’re awake) instead of being true to the story (in which most of the stuff the character does – dressing, eating, etc. – doesn’t contribute anything to the story).
Asking “where does this scene start?” and “what is the end?” are important questions. Starting too early or too late, or stopping too early or too late, can throw the scene out of balance even if everything else is working just fine. If the scene is about the tense dinner conversation, it may be tempting to lead into it by starting with someone setting the table, but unless they’re also poisoning the plates or rearranging the seating in a way that’s going to cause trouble later, the table-setting is too early in most cases. The important/interesting action that’s taking place here-and-now is the tense conversation; show that, with maybe a line or two of lead-in to keep things smooth, if you need it, and when the conversation is over, stop and move on to the next scene or transition.
If you’re having trouble with this, try studying some plays. The scenes are all laid out right there in front of you, and since they’re almost nothing but dialog, there isn’t a lot going on to distract you from the structure of the scenes, especially their beginnings and endings.
Is it bad of me that I now want a scene where a mounted army invades Lady Grenville’s drawing room?
That said, I find myself trying to end scenes with a kind of hook. Not necessarily a true cliff-hanger, but something that (I hope) would make the reader want to know what happens next.
Of course, my big problem right now is getting the characters to shut up so that I can get a hook in. *sigh*
Dreaded scene that drags on past desert to bed-time, I know you well. It’s one of those nasty habits I’ve been trying to break. 🙂 I think one reason that particular mistake happens is that you can follow someone through teeth-brushing and beyond thinking that you’re writing a transition when actually you’re not- you’re just fumbling and mumbling until the next important bit comes along.
This is off-topic for scenes (or is it?) but I think you recently asked for future topic ideas. The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters – so the reader is rooting for them?
Thanks for keeping on sharing your experience, by the way. It’s inspiring and daunting. 🙂
The time factor of a scene often jumps out at me, but in the opposite way. Two characters meet for lunch, have a two minute conversation and suddenly they’re wiping up the last of their meal and paying the bill. I think this happens when authors are too afraid of summary and neglect to say something like “we talked about nothing for the rest of the meal” – it’s one of my reader pet peeves.
I’m going to be a little bit contrary because for me, the unity of place and time thing is proving more and more restrictive. (Another writer might not feel that restriction; this is about how I’ve _internalised_ the concept of ‘scene.’ Mileage may vary.) For years I have concentrated on learning to write those direct, in-the-moment scenes (and made major mistakes, but that’s another issue). or else summarised events as ‘not worth expanding into a scene’.
And somehow missed the memo that it’s perfectly possible to support a story with a lot of little scenelets and concrete, lively details that are glued together in a different manner. And I did it in Valendon’t diary, which could afford to be abrupt in its transitions, but I haven’t done it since then.
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.
Chicory – That’s a really good insight – and kind of embarassing, because I just got called on exactly that by my editor!
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.
whether anything important happens
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?
I don’t think in scenes. For me a story happens in four dimensions at once, and ‘unity of time and place’ is just something that sometimes happens as a side effect of telling the story in a forward direction on the time axis. People who write in scenes talk about beads on a string, but I’m doing crochet, or macrame, or something like that when I write: all I’ve got is string.
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.
Michelle – Seems to me that you’re looking at the unity of the story itself, not just the scenes. I think that in your crochet/macrame metaphor, the scenes would be the stitches or knots. And I think that metaphor works really well for people who have trouble with the scenes-as-bricks/units metaphor that so many people assume when they’re talking about scenes.
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.
Oops! Said that wrong.
…You ARE going to have to discard your concept of a story being a series of “units”.
green_knight – “Scene” is a description, not a prescription. IF you have some action that happens in a particular place and time, THEN it is a scene. Trying to cram a three-month library search into the definition of “scene” just so you have something to call it is…counter-productive. And there isn’t a word for “the bit where they spend three months searching the library” that I know of, unless the search fits neatly into a chapter or section all its own.
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.
Pat & Michelle,
the way I look at it, ‘the bit where they search the library’ needs a name, and ‘scene’ is as good as any – I’ve also just written one where two characters have a conversation. It starts in the office an is interrupted by something else and they travel by bus into town and go into shop and wander down to the river and sit down on a park bench – not much unity of space, but unity of purpose. (I’d say ‘character travels to destination’ is a pretty common type of scene. What happens when they get there is something else.)
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.
As for the nothing particularly wrong with it from an outside perspective, I would beg to differ. There’s nothing particularly wrong with _each individual sentence_, which is probably why nobody ever pointed this out to me. _Collectively_, they create a distancing effect. Helen called it ‘describe, don’t explain’, and that hits the nail on the head – what I’ve been doing was to stay in this slightly distant, explanatory distance the whole time.
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.