by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
Scenes in Books and Movies
A transition in your writing is not unlike a transition in a movie. When you go to the movies, you see that something happens, quick cut, then something else happens. In writing, you need a bridge or two, something such as, "When they got back to Chicago," or, "Meanwhile, back at the ranch," or, "Twenty years later," or, "When Frankie arrived on Thursday"—that sort of thing. You're cueing the reader that you've gone to another time and place. And you've done it with a minimum of words and detail.
Here's an example of what you don't want to do: Lenny and Irving decide to hijack a bullion truck. In one scene, they get together and make the plan. That's kind of exciting because they have a disagreement about how best to hijack the truck. The next scene that's really important in the story is when they do the hijacking. Here's a sample bridging passage:
"Tuesday morning, when the truck pulled into view in Lenny's rearview mirror, they put on their masks and got ready to rob it."
Unfortunately, lots of writers do something such as this:
On Saturday, Lenny was still thinking about bullion hijacking. How many bags of cash would there be? he wondered. When he got to the rope factory, he avoided talking to his co-workers for fear of giving anything away. At lunch he didn't go to Danny's grill, the regular place where all the guys usually gathered, instead he went to the Clifton Cafe. Should I order a bagel? he wondered. Naw, he thought. Instead, he ordered the grilled cheese sandwich on whole wheat toast and a glass of chocolate milk. Irving was all right, he thought, a nice guy, and sharp. When the five o'clock whistle blew at the rope factory, he went straight home. He turned on the TV and settled down to watch the Rangers game. When it was over he went to bed, but it was hard to sleep thinking about all that money, so he read for a while until he felt sleepy. Then he turned out the light, rolled over and eventually fell asleep.
You don't need to tell us every detail of a character's life. You're not writing his life, you're writing his story. And if he goes from Thursday to the following Monday with nothing important happening, readers understand he had a normal uneventful life. You don't have to waste time recounting it. No matter how much time or how much space is covered in the transition, you still need only a few words, one or two sentences.
Let's say you include a love affair in a science fiction novel. The lovers meet in 1997, and through some miracle of technology, they arrange to meet again in another twenty thousand years, and even then, it's on some planet six billion miles away. You simply write, "They met twenty thousand years later in a galaxy far, far away." A single sentence. You can see that readers wouldn't want to read about everything that happened in those twenty thousand years. The same thing goes for a couple of days. Readers don't want to have to read about everything that happens during that period of time either.
The Reader Will Understand
What we're talking about are transitions in which the action that occurrs is obvious for the reader and doesn't need to be covered. Nothing of importance, in story terms, takes place between the scenes. For example, if you've said that someone in a scene in Boston has to go to Chicago, it is sufficient to write, "When Sammy got to Chicago." You don't have to include, "He left his apartment, he got in his car, turned on the ignition, drove down the street ..." The reader understands all the steps that got Sammy to Chicago.
However, if something did happen during this transition that needs to be explained, you need to acknowledge that to the reader.
H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines, used to write cliff-hangers for the London Serials monthly magazine during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In one of his stories, he had a character called Ben. At the end of each installment, Ben would be in a terrible calamity, and readers would wait with bated breath for the next month's issue to see how Ben got out of trouble.
At the end of one particular installment, poor Ben was at the bottom of a twenty-foot pit, with no tools or weapons with which to help himself and no one around to hear his cries for help. Poor old Ben was in a pickle. Of course, all the magazine's readers sat around for weeks wondering, How's Ben going to get out of this one?
Problem was, Rider Haggard was wondering the same thing. When his deadline arrived, he still hadn't come up with a clever way to get Ben out of trouble. Well, the next issue arrived, and the readers eagerly turned to the start of the story. To their amazement, Rider Haggard had written, "When Ben got out of the pit, he went to London. ..."
It isn't recorded what the reaction of the public was to this solution, but you can bet that the vast majority of his readers were very unhappy. Rider Haggard had tried to use a transition to get himself out of trouble. You can't use transitions to do that. No "with one leap he was free" kind of stuff. It's cheating, and you will seriously aggravate your readers to the point where they may well fling your story across the room in disgust and never pick up another book by you ever again.
If it is not obvious how your character got to be in the time or place you're writing about during the transition, you need to explain that.
FLASHBACKS
One of the aspects of pace that troubles a lot of writers is flashbacks. How do I get my reader from the present into the past, then back again? The first rule of flashbacks: If you can possibly avoid a flashback, don't put it in.
There is nothing literary about a flashback, and nothing really arty about it. It is usually clumsily handled and an annoyance to readers. Make certain you need one before you write it.
However, there are times when you do need flashbacks. It's not necessary, for example, to always tell your story in a chronological fashion. Certainly, you need to structure it that way in a story synopsis, but you don't have to tell it that way.
The key to writing a good flashback is to lead the reader gracefully through the transition into the past and bring him back through the same door you used to get into the past. What do I mean by that?
Say you have a character, a woman, who's in her forties, and she's just gotten some terrible news: Her husband is dead from a car accident. You have this scene where she receives this tragic news and she begins to cry. She sits on the couch, and her beagle, Buster, comes over to comfort her. She begins to think about how six years ago her husband first brought her Buster as a puppy.
So, as in real life, you're using a present-time catalyst, in this case Buster the dog, to trigger a memory that will take readers into the past. You begin the flashback sequence with,
"It had been a lovely spring day when George came through the door holding the perfect birthday present, a puppy."
Had been is the past perfect tense. You use it once, maybe twice, to get readers six years into the past. Once there, however, you use a regular narrative past tense.
You can do whatever you want in that flashback. It can last through one scene or for the rest of the book. It doesn't matter. Readers move forward from that point as you relate the things she did with her husband and with Buster and the places she went—whatever you want to cover. The important thing is, when it's time to come back to the present, you say something such as,
"And now, holding Buster, she knew it would never be that way again. She put down the dog, stood up, and walked out of the room."
When readers see the dog again, they remember, Ah ha, we were in a flashback, and now we're coming out of it. Buster was the door through which we went and which we came back. The catalyst doesn't have to be an object, but it must be something memorable, perhaps an unusual word or an inflection, whatever is likely to spark a memory. That's what flashbacks are: the dramatized best bits of a character's memory.
William Goldman, in a novel called The Color of Light, has a character called Chub on a college campus:
Late on a late spring afternoon Chub saw a girl...
She turns out to be someone he knew six months before, and we're into the flashback and we see his relationship with this girl, and after several scenes, Goldman brings us back to the present by saying:
&
nbsp; And now, late on that late spring afternoon Chub wondered if he should speak to her again.
She is the catalyst that triggers the memory of the past, and the phrase "late on a late spring afternoon" becomes the doorway to the past that takes us into the flashback and eventually brings us back.
We remember we were in a flashback and are brought immediately back to that college campus where he began the story. That is a properly done flashback.
In Oscar Hijuelos's 1990 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), the main thrust of the novel's narrative is set up as a flashback by the opening paragraph:
It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years ago when I was a little kid, and around three o'clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted out into the courtyard, "Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you're on television, I swear it's you!'' When I heard the opening strains of the I Love Lucy show I got excited because I knew she was referring to an item of eternity, that episode in which my dead father and my Uncle Cesar had appeared, playing Ricky Ricardo's singing cousins fresh off the farm in Oriente Province, Cuba, and north in New York for an engagement at Ricky's nightclub, the Tropicana.
This was close enough to the truth about their real lives....
The keys to the flashback here are "years and years ago when I was a little kid" and "When I heard the opening strains of the I Love Lucy show I got excited because I knew she was referring to an item of eternity."
The whole passage is infused with a sense of remembrance ("It was a Saturday afternoon . . . years and years ago. . . ."), then there's a subtle shift to a more immediate present ("When I heard the opening strains of the I Love Lucy show I got excited. . . ."), then the "teasing" flashes of hindsight recollection that will become important as the narrative develops (". . . that episode in which my dead father ..." and "This was close enough to the truth. . . ."). The use of tenses is very important in the flashback, and it is one of the reasons they are deceptively difficult to write well. If you're not careful, you can tie yourself and your readers in knots figuring out past, present and future in the narrative.
Some of the most intriguing examples of the use of flashback are in Ambrose Bierce's famous short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," about a Civil War soldier about to be hung from a bridge; and William Golding's Pincher Martin, about a drowning sailor. Both use the same conceit, that is, a flashback of the main character's life at the moment of his death. Perhaps the most complexly successful use of flashback that's worth studying is Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which ranges in time from the 1930s to the 1960s. A uniquely intriguing example is Harold Pinter's play (and movie) Betrayal, which tells the story of a love triangle backward in time. This was also used to powerful effect by J. Madison Davis in the novel Bloody Marko, and by Martin Amis in Time's Arrow.
ACTION
This is the smallest building block you use as you construct your narrative. Don't be afraid to write a sentence about small actions. "He sat down in the chair." That's fine. "He stood up. He buttoned his shirt." They're all fine. You don't have to feel as though they're too trivial to write about. Readers can see them. There is movement. But make sure there is at least one new piece of information in each sentence.
So you might write, "He sat down and picked up his pen." That's fine. But what you don't want to write is a sentence that adds no new information or movement to the story, such as, "He sat down, he picked up his pen, it was black, it had a silver clip, it was made up of two pieces."
What you've done is rewrite information readers already know. They know there is a pen, and that's all they need to know—unless the specific information about the pen is important to the plot in some fashion.
The reverse of that is pushing the pace of the sentence too fast and omitting something: "He sat down. The cigarette tasted fine." The problem is, you forgot to have him take out the cigarette and light it: "He sat down. He lit the cigarette. It tasted fine." One action after another. They're little steps. But they're steps forward.
Another thing you want to think about in the matter of pace and little actions is the order in which you tell them. What you want to think about is something called stimulus and response. Here's an example:
Shirley smashed into the chair in the living room. Ivan had just punched her in the face. That's the last time you'll hurt me, she thought. There was a lamp in the corner. Ivan ducked as the lamp came flying toward him.
What's happened here is that the writer has a pretty clear set of images about what is happening in this scene, but unfortunately, she's also assumed that the readers are as familiar with what is going on as the author is.
From the readers' perspective, however, they first saw Shirley fall down. Then they saw Ivan hit her. Later on, the readers saw Ivan duck, and then they saw a lamp come flying through the air. Get the problem? You need to be aware of both the literal sense of what you write and the sequence with which you write it. Writers often say things such as '"You're a real pest,' he growled nastily." It would be much better to write, "He growled nastily, 'You're a real pest'." Now readers have a clue ahead of time on how to read what's coming next.
Readers get information one step at a time. They don't read to the end and then go back. So, you should have written this:
Ivan punched Shirley, and she fell down and smashed into the chair. That's the last time you'll hurt me, she thought. She glanced around the room, saw the lamp, grabbed it and threw it at him. He ducked.
That's the order in which all those actions take place. Every sentence is a stimulus for another action. So make sure you write sentences and actions in their logical order.
DESCRIPTION
Imagine for a moment that you're downtown on a rainy afternoon. You come upon an interesting old theatre on a side street. You walk inside and take a seat in the fourth row. The stage is bare, poorly lit, nothing terribly attractive to look at. After a moment, the actors come out and begin to read their lines. Perhaps there's a scene where they're sitting at a card table. What they have to say is witty, compelling, and interesting, and you're getting caught up in the story.
While you're seated, the stage begins to get decoration. Like magic, costumes appear on the actors. Lights come up to illuminate all that is going on. Now the scene has been enhanced. The lights, the costumes, the set and props are all adding to your experience. The story becomes more compelling. What the characters have to say is more interesting, more vivid. It's all more real to you. You're having a real good time, caught up in this play.
But what's going to happen if at some point the actors decide to leave the stage? How long are you going to sit looking at an empty stage? Not very long I imagine. And that's what description in the narrative is all about.
Remember, description is subject to viewpoint. In other words, it's a function of who is doing the seeing and how he is feeling.
Description is a slave, not a master. It enhances what you're doing, but it's not there for its own sake, just as a decorated stage doesn't have much interest until the actors arrive to perform their parts.
The most important thing to remember about description is to keep it short. For some reason, when writers start out, they fall in love with description. They give paragraph after paragraph of sunrises and sunsets and stars and moons. Description should be sprinkled on like salt, not smeared on like butter. A little bit goes a long way.
EXERCISES
1. Go through five or six pages of your work and underline every sentence in which you can honestly say there is some action, some movement forward in the story. It may be a small movement, such as someone going to the refrigerator. Everything else you don't underline will be other information, exposition and so on. Now go back and underline that in a different color. The ratio should be something on the order of five to one. Don't worry about that ratio, but if you have twenty or thirty sentences whe
re there's no action, your story is moving too slowly and you should pick up the pace.
2. Take a scene you've written, and go on an adjective and adverb hunt. Mercilessly delete every single adjective and adverb you find. After you've done that, read the passage aloud. You should notice that the thing you tried to describe is still there. The reader still sees it. The pace of the whole scene picks up. After you've read the scene out loud to yourself, you can afford to put back some adjectives—but just a few. Look instead for active words you can use. Books don't lie on the table, for example, they're stacked.
Chapter Twelve
Structure and Rewriting
One of the best analogies for writing is carpentry. Carpentry is about craft, an awareness of how things fit together snugly and seamlessly, an appreciation of the aesthetics of various types of wood (in the same way writers have a love for, and interest in words) and the harmonizing of the creative instinct with the mundane pragmatism of just measuring, shaping and fixing together pieces of wood.
While carpentry is a great analogy for writing, one of the best analogies for rewriting is the concept of shaping your words and ideas the way you would use a chisel, a plane or sandpaper to smooth and sculpt those pieces of wood into a seamless, graceful whole.
Writing is not just an attempt to get down on the page the "movie" that's going on inside your head. Writing involves editing and shaping and polishing the images and scenes of that movie until the words on the page convey exactly what you see when you close your eyes and watch and listen as your characters interact.
FOCUSING ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT
One of the great problems of rewriting and self-editing is cutting, particularly when what has to be deleted is terrific writing, perhaps some of the best you've ever done. Remember, the higher calling is not the ambition to be a writer but to become a storyteller. Concentrating on what is important to
