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Lecture 20: Building Scenes

Lectute 20: Building Scenes

When approach the day-to-day process of composition in many ways, and of course, what you do as a writer each day depends on the overall shape of your narrative and on the purpose of the particular passage you're working on. Writers also differ on what they consider the fundamentals of writing fiction: the plot, character development, ideas to be conveyed, the crafting of elegant sentences, and so on. In the end, no matter how you approach the day-to-day process, every writer is faced with the prospect of making the whole thing hang together. We'll talk about that in our next two lectures, but in this lecture, we'll discuss what a writer does each day, that is, creating individual scenes.

Defining Scenes
In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner defines a scene as everything "that is included in an unbroken flow of action from one incident in time to another." For Gardner, this unbroken flow can include movement through space from one place to another, as long as there isn't a big jump in time. In other words, a scene shows more or less everything that happens to a character, or between two or more characters, during a particular, discrete span of time, without any interruptions in the flow of that time, except for flashbacks or brief passages of exposition.

There are, of course, many types of scenes, ranging from brief scenes featuring only a few characters in a narrowly defined setting to epic scenes that show many characters in a vast setting. There are scenes that are merely transitional, scenes that are pivotal moments in the plot, scenes where we learn the thoughts of only a single character, scenes in which the only action is conversation among the characters, and scenes full of violent, thrilling action.

Deciding what you make into a scene as opposed to what you choose to reveal through exposition in other words, what you choose to dramatize rather than summarize is generally fairly easy. You usually want to dramatize the most important or interesting parts of the story, while relying on exposition to get across essential but less interesting information.

Requirements of Scenes

An individual scene must meet at least two requirements at the same time: It must advance the larger narrative, or at least fit into it, and it must be interesting in its own right. In other words, a writer needs to balance the scene's position in the whole story with its own inherent drama. The way to achieve this balance is to remember that a scene should be no longer than it needs to be for its purpose within the story as a whole.
—James Hynes.
(2nd reason is easier for most writers to do. —Lumna10.)

These two balanced requirements—the intent of the narrative and the inherent interest of the scene can vary enormously from one narrative to another.

George Pelecanos's hard-boiled detective novel The Cut is a fast-paced narrative, written with efficiency and economy. Its young detective, Spero Lucas, occasionally takes time out from the case he's working on to have an erotic interlude with a young woman. Such scenes move at the same brisk pace as the rest of the book, and they serve to tell us something we wouldn't otherwise know about Spero, but because they aren't central to the story, they tend to be much shorter and more expository than the scenes that advance Spero's investigations.

In a more expansive narrative, such as Ulysses or Moby-Dick, a scene can go on for pages simply because the author thinks it is inherently interesting. Melville, for example, devotes long passages or even whole chapters to describing the work of a Whaling vessel, the natural history of whales, and other topics. These scenes advance the overall purpose of the book, which is to evoke a way of life in as much detail as possible, but they aren't necessarily concerned with advancing the plot.

And with some books, the point of the novel isn't the plot at all but the individual scenes that make up the plot. Even though The Lecturer's Tale has a plot, the true purpose of the book is to make fun of the excesses of modem literary theory. For this reason, the book is basically a series of satirical set pieces. These set pieces aren't entirely self-contained each pushes the plot a little further along— but each chapter or scene is mainly intended to be amusing for its own sake.