Week 6 -- Focus on Fiction Workshop

Week 6 – Focus on Fiction
Scenes With a Beat

The information in this week’s workshop chapter is taken from James Scott Bell’s book called Plot & Structure, published by F + W Publications, copyright 2004. I’m sharing this info with copyright permission that I encourage you to purchase this book yourself. It’s one that every writer should have on his or her personal bookshelf. These workshop articles are proof of the help you can get from a good writing book.

A good plot is about a disturbance to characters’ inner and outer lives.
Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances. Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot. And a plot is only as strong as its readers block.

Readers may be willing to forgive other writing sins if they are reading scenes that plop them down on an emotional roller coaster. On the other hand, flat scenes are like the city trains that take us to and from a location, like the park—slow, crowded, and hardly worth the ride. Moreover, readers aren’t likely to take a ride like that more than once.

So make your scenes count, every one.

As facilitator, I wanted to share some info about scenes that I ran across from another source. Consider it for use, as it is not a truism, just an option. Keep your chapter set in one scene, like a stage play. If you are changing your scenery, you might have an open option for opening another chapter with a fresh scene.


What is a Scene?

A scene is a fictional unit. If you string scenes together and they can somehow relate, you can write a novel.

If you can make each of your scenes truly unforgettable, you can write an unforgettable novel.

An unforgettable scene has something fresh. It has something surprising, and emotionally intense. It has characters we care about doing things that we {i]must watch. You create unforgettable scenes by freshening what is forgettable; making the scenes comes alive with tension and originality.

Write a scene for all it’s worth, and then look at it again later. Change the dull parts. Try something new.

Most often, the best way to create an unforgettable scene is to intensify the clash. Two characters oppose each other. They have the strongest possible reason to do so.

The Four Chords of a Scene

Scenes do four things. Bell calls these the four chords of fiction.

The two major chords are (1) action and (2) reaction.

The two minor chords are: (1) setup and (2) deepening.


These chords are often played together. Action and reaction tend to dominate, with some minor chords dropping in.

Nevertheless, these four chords will enable you to write any scene to serve any purpose in your plot.

Let’s distinguish between a scene and a beat (both of the terms come from the theater). A scene is a longer unit. Much of the time a scene takes place in a single location, and usually is played out in real time (no flashbacks or flash forwards). If you change location, or jump ahead in time, you may jar the reader—but a scene can be designed to do just that.

A beat is a smaller unit within a scene.

In The Wizard of Oz, there is a scene where Dorothy is confronted by the Cowardly Lion. The scene begins with threat and ends with the lion’s agreement to join the group on the way to Oz. There is obviously action and conflict. However, there is also an emotional beat after Dorothy slaps the lion’s nose. In addition, it deepens the character of the lion.


Let’s take a closer look at the chords:

Action

Action happens when a character does something in order to attain his main objective. In a given scene, he has a scene purpose.

A scene purpose may be anything that is a step toward achieving the story goal.

A lawyer wants to prove his client’s innocence. He goes to the home of a witness for an interview. His purpose in that scene is to get information that may help his client.

That’s action.

Nevertheless, a scene needs conflict, or it will be dull. So, the witness doesn’t want to talk to the lawyer. Now we have confrontation (an essential element of the LOCK system—Lead, Objective, Confrontation, and Knock Out Ending), and we can write an action scene.

Literary fiction works are structured more in terms of internal problems and personal growth.


Reaction

A reaction scene is how a Lead character feels emotionally when something (usually bad) happens to him.

The lawyer doesn’t get anything helpful from the witness. In fact, the witness said she saw the client pull the trigger at point blank range.

Now the lawyer is going to have to mull that one over. How does he feel about it? What is he going to do about it?

When he finally decides what he’s going to do, you can write another action scene.

A literary novel may feel like a lot of reaction scenes because they are generally more about the interior of the character.

Reaction is often done in beats.


Placing the Reaction Beat

You can put a reaction beat in the middle of an action scene so we know how the character is feeling. Dean Koontz Intensity is pretty much a non-stop cat-and-mouse game with a killer. Chyna, the Lead, is in a store, trying to avoid being seen.

She could not at first see the killer, who was at one with the night in his black raincoat. But then he moved, wading through the darkness toward the motor home.

Even if he glanced back, he wouldn’t be able to see her in the dimly lighted store. Her heart thundered anyway as she stepped into the open area between the heads of the three aisles and the cashier’s counter.

The photograph of Arial was no longer on the floor. She wished she could believe it never existed.

The last line is a reaction beat, a moment of reflection in the midst of intense action (thus the title of the novel).

These major chords, action and reaction, were called scene and sequel by writing teachers Dwight Swain and Jack M. Bickman. They allow the narrative to unfold in a logical fashion.

Character takes action, is frustrated by conflict, and usually ends up with a setback. He reacts to this development, thinks things over, and decides on another action.

It is not necessary to ping pong between those two chords every time. You can place reaction or sequel as a beat within action. If you handle action and reaction well, your plot will move along smartly.


Setup

Setup scenes, or beats, are those units that must occur in order for subsequent scenes to make sense.

All novels need a certain amount of setup.

We have to know who the Lead character is, what he does, and why he does it. We have to see how he gets into whatever predicament is going to dominate a book.

Further, there may need to be some setup beats in the course of the story.

How, then, do you do this without writing dull exposition?

You simply build in a problem, however slight, to the setup scene. It can be anything from the character feeling anxious, to an argument, to a problem that must be dealt with immediately.

Setup scenes are minor chords, and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Usually they occur early in the book.

The opening pages of Gone With the Wind are for setup. They give us Scarlett O’Hara and reveal her character. How? She is having a coquettish argument with the Tarleton twins. We get some setting, and the flavor of the book to come.

Then Stuart Tarleton declares that Ashley Wilkes is going to marry Melanie Hamilton, producing the following reaction beat:

Scarlett’s face did not change, but her lips went white—like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened.”


Deepening

Deepening is to the novel as spice is to food. This chord of fiction is generally not a full scene. It is, instead, what you add to the mix to deepen the reader’s understanding of character or setting. Make it fresh, drop it in strategically, and the flavor will be exquisite.

But like spice, deepening must not be overdone or it will ruin the taste.

In his novella, The Body, by Stephen King takes a short spicy break from the narrative to have Gordie tell one of his famous stories to his friends. It concerns a certain large boy named Hogan, some castor oil, a number of pies he eats for a contest, and the revenge he exacts on the town as a result. (one might pick a better metaphor than spice for this particular deepening episode.)

Why did King take this digression? Because it is just the kind of story these boys would like. It deepens their relationship as they continue their journey. It adds something to the story that straight narrative would not.


What a Scene Isn’t

Summarizing is when the author tells us what has happened “off scene.” Think of this as the stuff that is not unfolding for the reader in linear time, beat by beat.

A scene is like this:

John took a step toward her.
“Stop,” she said. She picked up a hammer.
Laughing, John shook his head. “That’s pitiful.”

Summarizing would look like this:

He tried to attack her, but she had picked up a hammer. When he laughed about it, she actually used it on him. His headache lasted five weeks.”

You use summarizing primarily as a short cut, to get you from scene to scene as quickly as possible. In the following summary, we are in linear time but we’re skipping the beats that would make a scene.

Holding his head, John drove to the hospital. Traffic was terrible. It took him two hours to get there.

Then you get back into a scene:
”Hoo boy, what happened to you?” the nurse asked.
“I attacked a hammer with my head,” replied John.

Get H.I.P. to Your Scenes

In order to be successful, you must write scenes that always give readers their money’s worth. You can do it if you master these three essentials: Hook, Intensity, and Prompt (HIP).

Capture Them at the Beginning

The hook is what grabs the reader’s attention from the start and gets him pulled into the narrative. And here is where many a writer stumbles.

Feeling there needs to be an adequate description of the location first, then the characters, a writer may tend to start his scenes slowly. This is, of course, a logical course. We think in a linear fashion, and figure we have to get the reader seeing the location, then the characters in the location before we can get to the good stuff, like action and dialogue.

Don’t fall into this trap. Readers don’t care about the natural order if they are intrigued. You have a number of options to choose from in order to make that happen.

Here is an example of the linear way:

We were back in his office. I sat in the armchair in front of Pistillo’s desk. His chair, I noticed this time, was set a little higher than mine, probably for reasons of intimidation. Claudia Fisher, the agent who’d visited me at Covenant House, stood behind me with her arms crossed.

“What happened to your nose?” Pistillo asked me.


In Gone for Good, however, Harlan Coben starts the scene like this:

”What happened to your nose?” Pistillo asked me.
We were back in his office. I sat in the armchair in front of Pistillo’s desk.

Dialogue is the stronger hook here. It starts the scene off with a question, and makes us want to know what the narrator is going to answer.

Another hooking technique is the teaser. This is a subtle promise to the reader that a tense scene is about to occur. Coben begins aGone for Good chapter thus:

“”I fell into such a deep sleep that I never heard him sneak up on me.”

Who is he? What happened after he snuck up on the narrator? Coben teases first, and then unfurls the answers.

Still another hook is action, pure and simple. Again Coben:

”Claudia Fisher burst into the office of Joseph Pistillo.”

This raises the question of why Claudia burst into the office, instead of knocking or strolling. We read to find out.

Even description can work as a hook, so long as you make it do double duty. Each place or character you describe should not only create a picture for the reader, but also establish the proper mood. In “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away”, a story about a man’s darkest moment, Stephen King begins this way:

It was a Motel 6 on I-80 just west of Lincoln, Nebraska. The snow that began at midafternoon had faded the sign’s virulent yellow to a kinder pastel shade as the light ran out of the January dusk. The wind was closing in on that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country’s flat midsection.

www.dictionary.com
(I didn’t know what it meant. Good Stephen King word!)

Even though this is description, notice the mood created by the fading light dusk, wind, emptiness. We are being set up to feel the inner life of the character even before we meet him. And when readers feel something, they want to keep reading.

So work to grab readers at the start of every scene. Try different opening paragraphs. Vary your methods. Try to alternate dialogue with action, and description with a teaser. You’ll soon happen upon a hook that feels right.


Make Them Read On

Finally, you need to end scenes with a prompt, something to make the readers turn the page. So often new writers let their scenes fizzle out, ending on a boring note: People walk out of rooms, drive off in cars, or offer dull parting phrases like “Good-bye” and “Nice talking with you.” Since everybody does it, try something different.

Don’t ever let your scenes droop at the end. You have many ways to move the reader along.

One of the best “read-on prompts” (ROPs) is impending disaster. In Intensity, Chyna is hiding from the villain in a convenience store. Koontz ends the scene this way:

As she stepped out of the aisle to hide at the end of a row of display cases, Chyna heard the door open and the killer enter. A growl of wind came with him, and then the door swung shut.

The danger can also be to the emotions, as when Arthur in Ask the Dust leaves the woman he longs for:

As I closed the door, all the desire that had not come awhile before seized me. It pounded my skull and tingled my fingers. I threw myself on the bed and tore the pillow with my hands.

Another ROP is portent, which can be given through a haunting image. In Stephen King’s Needful Things Hugh Priest has fallen under the spell of Leland Gaunt, the mesmerizingly creepy proprietor of a shop that has items that people feel they must have. Hugh Priest feels that about a foxtail that brings back warm memories.

Gaunt refuses money for it. Instead, he asks a woman named Nettie Cobb or “Crazy Nettie” to the town:

”Now listen to me, Hugh. Listen carefully. Then you can take your fox-tail and go home.”

Hugh Priest listened carefully.
Outside it was raining harder, and the wind had begun to blow.


Here are some other great ROPs to end scenes with:

• A mysterious line of dialogue

• A secret suddenly revealed

• A major decision or vow

• Announcement of a shattering event

• Reversal or surprise—new information that turns the story around

• A question left hanging in the air


If a scene seems to sputter to a close and you’re not sure what to do, here’s a great tip: try cutting the last paragraph or two. You don’t have to write every scene to its logical conclusion. In fact, it’s often the best choice not to. Cutting creates interest, a feeling of something left hanging—and that makes readers want to find out why.

Remember Hitchcock’s axiom about finding yourself in a dull part. Get “HIP” and you will not have to worry about dull parts showing up in your fiction.






And so ends the Week 6 article for our Focus on Fiction Workshop. There are no exercises included, because it’s possible that you have some work to do on your own manuscript. I know I do.

E-mail [e-mail] if you have any questions or writing problems I might help with.

I’m planning for us to go about 12 weeks, as we still have characterization, setting, and literary symbols to cover. If you find these articles useful, I will dedicate myself to keep typing them up for awhile.

Your facilitator,

Patrice