Story Basics #3: Scenes

where all the stuff happens

Hello friends—

It’s been a while. The semester and life got the better of me. But it is summer now, and I have some time on my hands. I thought we might return to our Story Basics.

I am in Florence at the moment, teaching for NYU. Yesterday was my birthday. I spent it being very lazy and reading lots of PDFs. As you might know, I’m working on a book of literary criticism for Graywolf. At the start of the year, I kind of came to an understanding of what I want the book to be about. But then…I had a lot of things get in the way, including finishing a novel, lol, and so I am just now getting around to the project this summer. I will spend the next couple of months, hopefully, reading and writing about post-2015 realism. For reasons that will hopefully be coherent and meaningful by the time the book is done.

Anyway, I wanted to procrastinate before rereading James Wood’s essays, so I thought I’d get back to writing Story Basics posts.

Also, my novel Minor Black Figures comes out October 17. Please preorder. Thank you.

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In the last entry of Story Basics, we talked about “Situation.” This time, I would like to talk about “Scene.”

In certain kinds of stories—films, plays, television shows, novels, short stories, narrative documentaries, dreams, etc—scenes form a basic unit of narrative. They can be short or long, comprising multiple sequences or a single sequence, filled with one event or many, populated by one character or several, vibrate with volleys of dialogue or be filled with ominous silences. They may occur in the present or in the past. A scene can be used either as a structural aspect of the story or as a structural aspect of a story that someone within the storyworld is telling. There are many kinds of scenes, but what characterizes the “scene” is its time signature with respect to the rest of the story. That is, a scene refers to a localized field of continuous time. It unfolds in the time of incident, that is that quasi-real time in which for a moment, time as experienced by the reader and time as experienced in the storyworld merge and enter, so to speak, into the field of play.

This time signature and only this time signature is what characterizes the scene. You might say, no, a scene must take place in one setting. That is what defines a scene. And I would say, yes, that is true. But also, I would say that is rule about setting comes as a result of the distinct texture of scene time, incident time. And in fact, a scene can change setting without being disrupted—take for example Aaron Sorkin’s innovation, the “walk-and-talk” in which characters change settings as they talk and argue about politics. The “single take” from cinema is a useful parallel here because it immerses us in a single duration as a character undertakes several different actions in several different locations, all of which are united by the durée. A scene usually has some beginning (which may or may not be blurred or tack-sharp for aesthetic effect) and has some end (also sharp or blurry depending on the author’s goal). A scene may have interpolated flashbacks. It may have discursive elements. But anything where the time of incident predominates—that is, any sequence where the foregrounding action occurs in quasi-real time—is a scene. Sometimes, it is the case that a scene begins and is interrupted by a flashback. And sometimes it is the case that the flashback goes on for so long that it becomes the dominant scene. This does not mean that there is no scene. This means that the scene that dominates is one set in the past.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes this effect is desirable. The the effect of the past scene interrupting the present scene to comedic or ironic effect is the chief aspect of Thomas Bernhard’s fiction and the fiction of his greatest interpreter, W.G. Sebald. It also characterizes the work of Marcel Proust, whose stories grow from the inside out, one observation giving rise to further observations until the background context has become the foreground and the initial foreground has been lost under the shaggy mass of history. Sometimes it is the case that we tell stories but then realize we need to tell a story in order to tell the story we want to tell. But to tell that story, we need to tell yet another one, and so forth. Some authors, particularly many authors whose work falls into the tradition of “brodernism,” make use of this technique to draw attention to the inherent falseness of the neatly trimmed narrative topiary that comprise much of anglophone literature these days.

During the spring semester, I was explaining to my students that the American storytelling tradition as they are experiencing it and participating in it privileges action and “scene.” It is a storytelling tradition that built on the time signature of incident. And that what some of them were brushing up against in the excerpts of Bernhard and Cusk and Knausgaard I was presenting to them was a discomfort with what we might call exposition or “telling.” These were two different regimes, I told them. On the one hand, you had this very European way of laying out a story, the very told nature of them, and on the other, you had the sneakier American way of just laying the events out and pretending that there was no invisible hand at work behind them. After all, a scene does not require exposition. It requires little discursive effort. It requires only an attentiveness to action. No thoughts necessary. And so little by little, a fiction dominated by scenes may lose its capacity for thought—either historical or personal.

This also shows up in American literature—the hard, slick surface of our scenes which may turn on well observed and well articulated gestures and details, but which do not permit the possibility of transcendence or knowledge through the accumulation of experience. This is partly because the intelligence of the story is locked outside of the scenes themselves, and if the story comprises only scenes, where is that intelligence—spiritual, moral, or historical—meant to parse any of the gestures, symbols, attitudes, or events that have been generated within or by or through the scenes.

I’m getting theoretical. And it’s starting to sound like I don’t like scenes. This is false. For one thing, I am an American. For another, I love Henry James. So I love a scene. Anyway, let’s talk components.

As I said previously, the essential element of a scene, the thing that makes it a scene, is the time signature. That is, it must unfold in the time of incident. But what must unfold. Usually, actions and events. Dialogue. Changes in the material reality of the setting. Cups get cleared away. The angle of the sun changes. Food goes cold. Cigarettes dwindle. The song on the radio changes. But these changes are tethered to the governing time scale of the scene itself. As an author, you can use these small changes in material reality to gather up larger or smaller quantities of time in order to move the scene forward slightly faster or slightly slower, but the total effect of the scene proper must be one of incidental time. In this way, you can build out a very long scene which itself seems to comprise smaller sub-scenes. Say, a dinner party taken as one scene, one continuous temporal unit, might be sub-divided into smaller sub-scenes, some in the kitchen, some in the dining room, more or less unfolding sequentially or near-simultaneously. You can arrange these sub-scenes in tight time sequence by gathering up a handful of details and signalling your transitions very tightly and clearly. For example, let’s say we’ve just written a scene in which Marcia is throwing a dinner party and we’ve just had a long dinner sequence, but we don’t want to break the total scene off, just change setting a little. We might write, “After they ate the dessert, they moved to the sitting room after dinner, where some of them stood by the window and others smoked outside on the back stoop. Marcia could hear them gossiping as she filled the sink.”

What might follow could be a scene closely related to the larger dinner scene in time, place, and subject matter, which is continuous with that scene. And so, the scene in which Marcia overhears the gossip is distinct from the eating dinner, yes, but, it’s not truly independent of that scene. It unfolds in the same continuous time of incident, so that our experience of it is as part of the larger scene that is the night total. This is what makes it a sub-scene in my opinion. Some people might say that these comprise two different scenes, but I would argue that they are in part the same scene.

Okay, so a scene happens in a place. It involves people. Doing and saying things—saying nothing counts as saying something for our purposes—and sometimes even thinking things. But a scene may also contain a flashback or a memory. It may interrupt itself to digress. It may do any or all of those things. But as long as the time that dominates is the time of incident, it’s still a scene.

But what about summary? Summary is often the thing that gets discussed most alongside scenes. As though the two were antithetical. But I have a hot take. Which is that sometimes scenes…contain summary. It’s less a contrast between scene and summary. It’s more the contrast between regimes of time. Scene is characterized by the time signature of incident yes, but what we mean we say scene is “sequence told in more or less real time or experiential time.” I have made use of this ellision in this post already. I have tricked you into thinking that “scene” only ever means “told in experiential time” because it is so baked into our storytelling grammar that to diverge would be confusing. But I believe you can handle it. I trust you. So let me tell you my insane idea.

Some scenes are summarized, abbreviated, compressed, distilled. How can this be? I think it might be more useful to think in the following way. Scene and Summary describe the same thing (a sequence or collection of data in the story world) but under different regimes of time. A Scene is when that sequence or collection of story world data is presented in experiential time. A Summary is when that sequence or collection of story world data is presented in narrated time. In this way, we can have a scene, but also make use of summary within that scene. In this way, I think they belong to different categories of object, but it is easy to understand why they are often mistaken for the same kind.

Having established on somewhat shaky grounds what I think a scene is, I think the next natural question is What is a scene for? After all, some authors have written magnificent books making use of summarized anecdote. Victorian novels are filled with reported or narrated events which never really break out into full-on real-time scenes. Why this privileging of “scene” in American literature in particular. Why does it have such a hold on the Anglophone literary imagination? After all, there are rich literary traditions in which alternative narrative modes dominate.

I think part this has to do with the retreat of the narrator from literature and with the rise of a kind of verisimilitudinous fiction. I won’t rehash the arguments people make about the decline of postmodernism or the rise of pre-emptive streaming deal fiction. But I will say that I do believe the primacy of scene and the decline of interiority are related. Even in vibey first-person novels, one encounters less a person parsing their own thoughts and more a person watching themselves on a screen in their own minds. But maybe I’m the crazy one for continuing to believe in the project of experience and the capacity to integrate the events and actions of my life into a meaningful whole.

What I tell my students about scenes is that a scene at a fundamental level is there to generate some change in the underlying situation. Either the situation of the character, the situation of the story world, or the larger organizing situation of the story itself. Sometimes the change in situation can be a change in a character’s awareness of a situation. Or it can be a change in the status of a relationship. Ideally, a scene brings together all the disparate threads of a story and through that joining up brings about something new—this new thing used to be called experience or knowledge. Now, it typically refers only to the rote, literal facts of the character’s life. As in, will they lose their job because of this thing they did. Will they fall in love with this guy they meet at a bar. Will they fall down and break their knee running out on a tab. What the contemporary scene has, usually, stopped doing is asking what any of this means. It doesn’t do what scenes used to do, which was to form a part of a whole awaiting integration at some later time or date.

But, even if you don’t believe in experience, you can gesture at depth, I suppose, by assigning your scene the task of generating and discharging history for your characters. That is, the scene’s function is to provide your characters with history, so that by the time the story ends, they have been through something, and we the reader have been through it with them. This forms an affective bridge between reader and character, but also reader, and story, so that even if you the author don’t know what to say or have anything to say about what has transpired—and even if you deprive your characters of imaginative or affective possibility—the reader can sometimes step in and provide substrate for such a possibility.

In that way, you might be writing entirely abritrary stuff (a story that never once provides the characters an opportunity or capacity to ask what any of the shit befalling means can only ever feel arbitrary, after all), but if you have provided sufficiently rich, interesting, or varied scenes that stem from the underlying situation of your story, then the reader will usually overcome your ineptitude on this score and find meaning for you.

The work of a scene is to be a crucible for meaning. It is how meaning is generated and disclosed. It is where a character reveals themselves through their actions, thoughts, anxieties, or dialogue (ideally, a combination of these things). It is where you demonstrate reversals of fortune or fate. It is where symbols attain their symbolic resonance. After all, a symbol is only a symbol if it is first a literal object in the story world that acquires meaning through sustained engagement and interaction from the story world and the characters and their situations. This is generated in scenes. Otherwise, you’re just kind of inserting things in there and being like, Aha, a symbol. And, respectfully, that’s whack.

So then, how do you select scenes? As mentioned briefly above, scenes should probably flow from the situation of the story or the characters. Putting your characters into scenes that will reveal to them or to the reader who they are or what they are going through is usually a good idea. This does not have to be immediately obvious. If your character is lonely, you don’t necessarily put them on a park bench and have them look at strangers passing by. I mean, you can do that, sure, but i don’t know, is that so very interesting? Or is it more interesting that they’re on their lunch break and they’ve stopped by the hot bar at their local grocery store and they carry their food out into the dining area and they have no choice but to sit at the table with fintech bros. And maybe the fintech bros keep trying to talk to them and the character has to deal with that. Such an interaction would tell us more about the particular and acute circumstance of their loneliness than them by themselves looking at the jogging strangers. What you want from a scene is the exact and particular interface between your character and the world. And what you want is a sense of useful, frustrating complication of your character’s status quo.

A lonely character should never be alone. A lovesick character should be put in enraging circumstances. A sad character should be stuck at a clown convention. A miserable character should be at a party. Etc. You want to always put your character in scenes that will throw their situation into relief, either to themselves or the reader. But you want also for the scene to take us further down into the story world and into the life of the character, so that the complications do not feel arbitrary, or if they are arbitrary, their arbitrariness feels natural, like life, and in watching the character deal with them, our sense of their struggle brings us closer to understanding them. You want a scene that changes something—it doesn’t to have change your character in a big way or blow up your plot, but it should, I think, generate some pulse of life in the story, something that the story must reckon with and which the characters must reckon with.

You want a scene that puts your character at odds with their old idea of themselves, somehow. That idea can survive. Sure. But you want the scene to mark the transit of your character from one relationship to their self-concept to a different, richer relationship to that self-concept. Sometimes, that involves, a lot of banter and quips and dialogue. Sometimes, it’s someone saying or doing one thing that spawns a deep flashback that throws everything into relief. Either way, a scene should perform some kind of work on the story, or the character.

When writing scenes, sometimes I will just do a first, rough pass. He went here. She said blah. Etc. And then in revision, I will try to locate the key moment of the scene. The moment at which the different currents come together and there is a hard, bright spot of intensity. Sometimes, to locate that intensity, I ask myself, “What is the emotional question of this scene? What is the dramatic question of this scene?” What is its aboutness? Then I build out from there. How to get that moment to flash out brighter, hotter. How can I unfold it in a more natural way, how can I have fun with the tempo of the scene, playing off different characters and ideas. Then I ask myself if I understand each character’s motive. To make sure I’m not just playing one side. SOmetimes, this generates the most productive moments in a scene, when the world’s challenge to my character’s worldview or idea of themselves is most assertively mounted. You get that by changing the seat of primacy, by viewing the scene from the perspective of other characters. Are you throttling them to get a smooth scene out?

Other things I do with scenes: I sometimes find that people stop their scenes before the important thing happens because they do not know how to write it. You should write it. Write the hard thing. Blow up your scene. Write the thing that derails all of your plans. If you think you know how a scene will go, write the version you don’t know. Force yourself out over the tightrope. That is where the writing is. That vertiginous feeling that you’re about to lose the thread. That is real writing. But more than anything, stay with your scene. Longer. Force yourself to endure. Do not be elliptical. Write the thing.

Also, you should experiment with different kinds of time in your scene. Instead of breaking the scene, summarize some of the boring stuff and keep the scene going with more interesting stuff. Write a scene in two parts. Write a story in one scene. Write a story in two scenes. Experiment with scenes within scenes. See how long you can stray from the “main” action before you go back. See if you can make it work.

I should also say that there are some writers who do not write scenes, not really. Or whose scenes are so brief that they barely register as such. I think of Nicole Krauss as being the best writer at work today who does not write in scenes but whose stories and novels still feel like narratives. Satisfying narratives at that. See her brilliant story “Seeing Ershadi” as an example. The way she presents some of the summarized anecdotes make them seem like scenes, and yet…are they? Really? Which is to say that sometimes it is enough to attain the aura of “scene time” in order to make a thing work.

I should also say that part of downside to scenes is that they take up a great deal of space. They simply do. And it is true that readers will tend to take space as an argument for significance in a work. That is, the more time they spend in it, the more invested they become in it, and so it becomes more important to them. There are many novels and stories which are too long simply because someone told that writer at some point that scenes are important, and they didn’t tell them about the importance of selection. But yes, scenes take up space. They are slow. Because they unfold in, say it with me, the time of incident, “real time.” For all of their power to dramatize and illustrate and render meaning, they are thus sometimes susceptible to bloating a story and generating empty symbols and emptier stories. So beware.

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