The Scene Book

When I was working on my first draft I jumped into a scene by starting to write. Then I watched with interest as a scene or a chapter took shape. Sometimes the result was pleasing. Other times it stank.

A particularly annoying feature of this pot luck process was my inability to define what it was that drove a scene to success or failure. I never really knew why a scene worked when it worked, and why it stank when it stank. It seemed a matter of luck and inspiration. Clearly not a sound basis for authorship.

This time round I'm looking for a balance between planning and freedom. I want to let the characters breathe if I can, at the same time I'm looking to ensure some essential scene characteristics. I'm experimenting with some of the ideas in The Scene Book: A Primer for The Fiction Writer by Sandra Scofield.

Scofield describes these core elements of a scene:

Stripped down to gesture

I'm writing again. Covering about 1000 words a day. Of which I'll probably throw away most. I allow myself to digress shamelessly, my dialogue stalls or gabbles, my descriptions veer off into shadows and under floorboards. Let the editor sort it out, I think. And – well it's word count after all.

I don't believe unusable words are wasted. In a way, having an outline is giving me the freedom to ramble. I can stray from the path because I have a map now. The map puts me in the right general place, and then I can explore. I can always correct my course in the edit. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll discover something rich along the way. Maybe it will be good enough to make me redraw the map.

I'm also experimenting with tricks and techniques along the way.

Please report to the transporter room

Have you ever been convinced you invented a term, only to find that it's been in circulation for years? I received some constructive criticism today about my outline. My correspondent suggested I had introduced a particular POV character too late in the story. Very fair, but I had a particular twist to the rules on POV characters in mind.

On not knowing why

Of course you need to know why something happens. One decision gives birth to new circumstances which require another decision, and that's how story grows.

It's obvious enough, but still it hit me with the force of a revelation. Work out what your characters want, make them act to get it, and have the world (the world, that is, of other characters with their own desires) push back.

When I was making notes for my current outline I tried isolating my point of view characters into separate strands. Just as we negotiate the world trapped in our own bodies, no matter how much empathy we have, so I trapped each character in his or her own timeline. I also found that it helped to place the word 'so' between each event. Here's an example from Holly's causal chain:

Notes from a workshop

Well that was interesting. In my writers' group no-one else is outlining.

I described my current experiment. I'm breaking the first third of my novel into scenes, and mapping them out in summary before I start my next draft. That called forth a polite little silence. Eventually someone remarked on the weather. And everyone agreed with relief that, yes, it has been lovely and sunny here in San Francisco, and maybe we're moving past the fog. OK, it wasn't quite that bad, but I definitely got the sense that people want to let their stories and characters grow from the practice of writing.

As the session progressed, though, I began to see that the two approaches aren't as opposed as you might think.

The Outline

I've given up writing. For the last two weeks, anyway, I have broken my habit of churning out five hundred to a thousand words a day, and concentrated instead on the bigger picture.

This morning I covered only about three scenes. And I didn't write them. I summarized each one in a single short paragraph. Not a huge output for over an hour's work. For the first time I'm trying to map out my story ahead of time. I have opened a single document and I'm adding scene summaries. Each one looks something like this: