Editing Continued – Writing a scene

Despite all the other wonderful discoveries I had been making about my characters, I still struggled with scenes. I couldn’t really identify which was a scene, an incident leading up to a scene or just an event in the story. I was operating along the definition that a scene caused a bend in the story line, but I found that wasn’t always true. Sometimes a scene prevented a bend in the story line, like when a character chose not to take a particular action even though it was what they wanted. That kind of scene can happen entirely inside one character’s head, if need be. So what really defines a scene? I don’t know. I still don’t, but I will eventually learn I think.

            However, I did find this really great article about writing a scene.  By examining this and following the basic three part pattern defined here, a scene/sequel has the following three-part pattern:

scene (goal, conflict, disaster) and sequel (reaction, dilemma, decision), I was suddenly able to see where I was going wrong. It was so enlightening. What I thought were small incidents suddenly became much more important and needed to be filled out. Places where I had glossed over the reactions of each character stuck out and begged to be fixed. Moving forward, I started writing this three part pattern out for each character in a scene. This helped me look at their actions and fix those obvious places where the characters were acting wrong or worse, not reacting at all. You’ve seen this on TV, where a bomb goes off and the guy in the background doesn’t even flinch. When that kind of thing happens in a book, it just makes the writing feel dead. This is all in line with Kurt Vonnegut’s advice that “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” I had heard that line before, but it had never really come home to me until now. I knew generally what each of my characters wanted, but by being more specific in each scene, I could more precisely fix their reactions. It felt like my story was growing up. In places where I have completed this task, the story has gone from a nebulous blobby thing to all sharp spikes and beautiful angles. Well, that is how it feels in my mind anyway. Time will tell if I actually managed to get that feeling to the paper.

            So I still don’t have a good feel for what a scene is, but I am getting closer. In those cases where I had written the same card out 2-3 times to put them in each character’s story track, I felt those were obvious places for a scene. If the incident/event was important enough to affect each character’s journey track, then it is probably some part of a scene. Since I have had all these revelations and am only about 2/3 of the way through my first serious editing attempt, I may have a few more revelations before I am finished. Who knows? Next and probably last post in this editing series will be…well, we’ll see.