"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." This is eye-opening - thank you. Also, happy birthday! Cheers
"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."
These have really been useful for me with writing! Thanks for putting these out for everyone! I stopped reading craft books a long time ago. I think I might finally get somewhere useful in my draft with this.
This post was SO HELPFUL - thank you! I come to prose from a playwriting background and your essay has helped me understand why my current novel-in-progress is giving first readers such difficulty… it is ‘dominated by scenes’ and denies ‘capacity for thought—either historical or personal’! I appreciate the distinction you make between American and European approaches and your comment that the ‘hard, slick surface’ of scenes can inhibit ‘the possibility of transcendence or knowledge’. This essay feels transcendental! Thanks once more xxx
Much of my reading life has been spent (or mis-spent, your choice) in comics and “speculative fiction,” and that experience leads me to wonder if the bolts aren’t even looser than you allow for - although I recognize that you are at least partly teaching craft here, so limit cases are not all that useful. But “incidental time” inevitably recalls the so-called Aristotelian unities to my mind. Strictly as a daguerreotype grandfather mind you. Maybe it would be better to call it “time of incident?” For me, “scene” is quintessentially a language game, with the oxymoron fully intended.
I wish I’d read something like a thousand years ago. The reminders are well-timed. It’s generous of you to share what amounts to a craft talk or entire seminar here. Thank you.
I'm definitely reading this one again. Especially for the various dimensions of "relief" in throwing story elements into relief.
In my perpetually-unfinished first novel, I have a lot of story-telling by my characters. The characters' stories are often about other characters, or at least other figures in the past who relate somehow to the story-teller or the plot or the situation. And I have reactions of characters hearing the stories, in dialogue--I try to avoid long paragraphs in general, and interjections help break things up. But the interjections also seem to help (at least slightly) with deepening the characters who interject. I don't have many readers for this writing project, so I don't have a sense of how this would work for most readers. I just know it works for me, as a re-reader of my own work.
Often, when I see and feel a scene, it's a view of a tightrope leading into fog, the vibrations underfoot as I step out on it. The real rewards are on the other side of the fog: writing something I didn't know, starting out, that I was going to write. There's something about having characters telling stories, to other characters listening and responding, that both keeps me on the wire and keeps me putting one foot in front of the other. Yeah, that fog is scary. But not as scary as the thought that I'll fall off the wire--i.e., end up abandoning the scene for lack of a sense of how to carry it through to a conclusion.
Summaries? I don't even know what those are. I try to make the last few lines, or just the last line, of a scene something that invites the reader to ponder the changes in the relationships (of characters to each other, or characters to situation.) You're giving the readers a temporal break of their own. Let them breathe.
The scene ending doesn't have to be a cliffhanger that makes them hurry onward. At some points, even in otherwise-suspenseful writing, it shouldn't be one. I don't have anything against that kind of suspense. But there's suspense and there's suspense. The cliffhanger is about crisis: fall or not fall? But there's also suspense in the form of levitation of the reader--of leaving the reader somehow safely floating, free to muse, but also free to float onward, forward--into what was, for you, fog you wrote your way through, and for them, still-unpenetrated (but mysteriously inviting) fog.
Coming in very late, Brandon, but want to thank you. Am in the middle of rewriting a chapter and your exhortations hit the spot. In the middle of night I worried I had derailed it and was losing the threat and should go back to what I had. I knew I should finish reading this before doing that. Now headed to my desk to go ahead and, in your words, blow it up and write the hard thing. Thank you!
"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." This is eye-opening - thank you. Also, happy birthday! Cheers
I love when I’m reading your essays and the light bulbs are going off, then I get to lol at “And, respectfully, that’s whack.” 10/10
"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."
Well, there's two of us at least.
So good to have you back with us.
These have really been useful for me with writing! Thanks for putting these out for everyone! I stopped reading craft books a long time ago. I think I might finally get somewhere useful in my draft with this.
This post was SO HELPFUL - thank you! I come to prose from a playwriting background and your essay has helped me understand why my current novel-in-progress is giving first readers such difficulty… it is ‘dominated by scenes’ and denies ‘capacity for thought—either historical or personal’! I appreciate the distinction you make between American and European approaches and your comment that the ‘hard, slick surface’ of scenes can inhibit ‘the possibility of transcendence or knowledge’. This essay feels transcendental! Thanks once more xxx
I’m really enjoying these essays and learning a lot about why my own efforts at writing fiction did not work. Thanks for sharing so generously.
Much of my reading life has been spent (or mis-spent, your choice) in comics and “speculative fiction,” and that experience leads me to wonder if the bolts aren’t even looser than you allow for - although I recognize that you are at least partly teaching craft here, so limit cases are not all that useful. But “incidental time” inevitably recalls the so-called Aristotelian unities to my mind. Strictly as a daguerreotype grandfather mind you. Maybe it would be better to call it “time of incident?” For me, “scene” is quintessentially a language game, with the oxymoron fully intended.
Thanks so much again. This is illuminating. And a happy belated birthday!
Thank you! And happy birthday :-)
Happy birthday! Thank you for this.
Tanti auguri 🎂
I wish I’d read something like a thousand years ago. The reminders are well-timed. It’s generous of you to share what amounts to a craft talk or entire seminar here. Thank you.
I'm definitely reading this one again. Especially for the various dimensions of "relief" in throwing story elements into relief.
In my perpetually-unfinished first novel, I have a lot of story-telling by my characters. The characters' stories are often about other characters, or at least other figures in the past who relate somehow to the story-teller or the plot or the situation. And I have reactions of characters hearing the stories, in dialogue--I try to avoid long paragraphs in general, and interjections help break things up. But the interjections also seem to help (at least slightly) with deepening the characters who interject. I don't have many readers for this writing project, so I don't have a sense of how this would work for most readers. I just know it works for me, as a re-reader of my own work.
Often, when I see and feel a scene, it's a view of a tightrope leading into fog, the vibrations underfoot as I step out on it. The real rewards are on the other side of the fog: writing something I didn't know, starting out, that I was going to write. There's something about having characters telling stories, to other characters listening and responding, that both keeps me on the wire and keeps me putting one foot in front of the other. Yeah, that fog is scary. But not as scary as the thought that I'll fall off the wire--i.e., end up abandoning the scene for lack of a sense of how to carry it through to a conclusion.
Summaries? I don't even know what those are. I try to make the last few lines, or just the last line, of a scene something that invites the reader to ponder the changes in the relationships (of characters to each other, or characters to situation.) You're giving the readers a temporal break of their own. Let them breathe.
The scene ending doesn't have to be a cliffhanger that makes them hurry onward. At some points, even in otherwise-suspenseful writing, it shouldn't be one. I don't have anything against that kind of suspense. But there's suspense and there's suspense. The cliffhanger is about crisis: fall or not fall? But there's also suspense in the form of levitation of the reader--of leaving the reader somehow safely floating, free to muse, but also free to float onward, forward--into what was, for you, fog you wrote your way through, and for them, still-unpenetrated (but mysteriously inviting) fog.
Thank you so much for writing this!
Coming in very late, Brandon, but want to thank you. Am in the middle of rewriting a chapter and your exhortations hit the spot. In the middle of night I worried I had derailed it and was losing the threat and should go back to what I had. I knew I should finish reading this before doing that. Now headed to my desk to go ahead and, in your words, blow it up and write the hard thing. Thank you!