Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure

by Jack Bickham

  Patience! The answer lies not in violating these rules, but in figuring out ways around them. By the time you finish the chapter, things will be a lot clearer.

  So let's look at all your alternatives if the story is going too swiftly and recklessly.

  HOW TO SLOW THINGS DOWN

  1. Look for scenes that you might possibly cut entirely, telling about it in a sequel.

  This is a most dangerous technique, one possible result (if you go an inch too far) being a total flattening of the story's appeal in terms of onstage action. But you might find a few scenes in a novel-length manuscript which could be cut out in this way. Such scenes will be the ones that you developed out of relatively minor, low-pressure character goals, which inevitably resulted in relatively milder conflict. These scenes are your candidates for possible elimination.

  It may seem paradoxical, on first glance, to look for weak scenes to cut when seeking to slow your manuscript's pace. Wouldn't it be more to the point, you might legitimately ask, to slash a few really big, exciting scenes and really slow things down?

  If you pause and think about it, you'll realize that the really big scenes are the heart and soul of your story. Cutting them out would constitute overkill — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "professional suicide." Cut out major scenes at your own peril! Not only will the reader feel cheated, but trying to explain everything about a killed major scene in a later sequel may be beyond your capabilities.

  Further, cutting out any scene will slow the pace. However low the intensity, any scene reads fast. So if you find a handful of relatively mild ones for elimination, you will accomplish almost as much in terms of slowing the pace as you would have by cutting out one that seems much bigger. It's the very structure of scene that makes it seem too fast, not just its content.

  2. Look for scenes in which you might reduce the amount of story time set up for playing out the conflict.

  Suppose, for example, that you set up a scene wherein your hero confronts the company board of directors, and you have the scene written now so that the hero enters the boardroom just as the meeting is getting under way —then fights the good fight for the entire day before meeting his disaster at 6 P.m. Is there any way you could change your scene assumptions so that hero is scheduled to appear before the board at 3 P.m., with only thirty minutes set aside for him on the agenda? Obviously, if he's in the scene a much shorter period of story time, the fight can't go on as long —and the number of pages you devote to it must shrink proportionately.

  3. Look for scenes in which you can get the job done in terms of presenting the conflict by entering the scene in the middle of things.

  How would this work? In the first place, you might make the character's scene goal crystal-clear in the sequel preceding it. You might then take your scene that is presently written in ten pages, covering from, say, 7 to 9 P.m., and slash you actual written presentation of the entire scene to a fragment that will get the job done dramatically. If the present scene covers two hours, ten pages, and six steps or maneuvers in the conflict, you might jump in with your presentation starting ninety minutes into the total time, with four of the six steps skipped over, something like this:

  By 8:30, John was already exhausted.

  "Look," he told Pettibone. "We've covered four of the six points at issue, here, but now we're down to the nitty-gritty. Let's talk about the bonus clause. . . ."

  Et cetera.

  It will probably hurt your artistic soul to trim out some of the earlier great conflict by jumping in in the middle this way. It always does mine. But if your pacing problem is severe enough, you may have no choice. You're working to reduce the disproportionate predominance of scene over sequel here, remember; you're fighting to slow down your book any way you can, and sometimes desperate measures are the only answer.

  4. Consider giving your viewpoint character more internalizations during the scenes. Internalizations can't be excessively long, but if you're really having trouble slowing the pace, there's no reason why you can't occasionally make story time stand still while you show the character thinking about a lot of things in an internalization, even remembering story background theretofore not given the reader.

  Such extended internalizations take place in a flash, in terms of story time, but may fill several pages of exposition that will slow the pace for the reader.

  5. Look for ways to build in more breathing time for your viewpoint character between scenes. The main way you do this: by changing some of your scene goals or disasters so that your character will have more time for sequel before he is forced by story circumstances to act again—and go into another scene. This is precisely the opposite of what you were advised to do if you wanted to speed things up. There you altered the viewpoint character's entering goal or story situation so that a disaster in this scene would require immediate action; or you changed the nature of the disaster slightly to allow no time for a sequel to take place. Conversely, when trying to slow the story down, you set up scene goals whose thwarting will not require instant new action, or you alter the disaster so that its full impact— or new action it will require —does not have to take place at once. Gone will be some of those falling-through-the-ice disasters, and in their place will go disasters such as the child cracking the ice and almost falling through, so that the viewpoint character can take the child back home and then think slowly and carefully about how he should proceed to (a) convince the child not to take such risks; (b) provide more constant watching over the child, or (c) making the pond totally off-limits by building a fence around it, or some such.

  6. Study your existing sequels and consider expanding one or more parts of them. Did you, for example, gloss over or perhaps even skip definition of the emotional part of the sequel when you might go into that more deeply, thus lengthening the total sequel? In the thought portion of the sequel, has the character sufficiently reviewed and analyzed things? Perhaps most important of all, are you sure he has considered all the nextaction options he might realistically consider in his present situation? If not, then you can show his further thinking about options, again lengthening the sequel and slowing the reader down.

  You might even be able to come up with so many new options —none of which looks very great to your character —that he could get frustrated, scared or angry about his plight —so that he could have moved out of his emotional stage of the sequel and then find himself right back into it again as a result of trying to think logically and seeing more clearly than ever what a mess he is now in.

  Also, please note that there is nothing at all wrong with building in more story time between the decision on a new action and the sequelclosing new action itself. You see this sort of thing happen most often in detective or crime fiction, where the police officer hero, for example, decides that next he has to find and interview Madam X—but he's on special assignment for the next few days and won't have time to look her up, and then when he does have time, he has to go check several addresses and ask several sets of questions of other people before he can find her. (Some of these might turn into scenes unless you watch out, so be sure to summarize all such questionings, stressing that it's a long, wearying process, all this dull footwork poor Sam Spade is being forced to do as he struggles ever so slowly and tortuously to be able to get into that next scene with Madam X!)

  7. In extremis, you may even wish to consider slowing the pace by changing the nature of some of your existing scenes so that they don't really function well as scenes any longer. How would you do this? By doing such ordinarily terrible things as letting the hero wander into a confrontation with no clear-cut idea of what he wants next... or by having the "antagonist" turn out to be friendly and mildly helpful —and therefore dull and slow to read about ... or by making the scene-ending disaster so subtle that the viewpoint character simply walks away in a state of befuddlement.

  You can get double duty out of this last-described gambit. If the fact that there has been a disaster at the end of
a scene or semi-scene, but it does not dawn on the viewpoint character at the end of that scene, then he certainly is not going to be pushed into any swift action. At the same time, as he goes into a very mild sequel, you can then have him review and suddenly realize that —"Wait a minute, I just experienced a disaster and didn't know it at the time!"

  Thus, in terms of the reader's perceptions, you have done all the following: (a) calmed and slowed the scene; (b) removed all need for quick response by the viewpoint character at the end of it; (c) greatly expanded the slower-moving sequel by—in effect—forcing your character (and your reader) to wade through slow-moving review and analysis before the previous disaster is even perceived.

  When you pull off a trick like this, in terms of reader perception you have actually moved the disaster into the middle of the sequel because it's only then that anyone realizes a disaster has taken place. I guarantee you that if you use this technique, your story pace will slow dramatically: Your hero will be under less time pressure, your sequels will get longer, and the total impact of your scenes and semi-scenes will seem less forceful in terms of requiring swift further story line development.

  Thus—whether your story pace is too slow or too swift—you can remedy matters once you thoroughly understand the nature and structure of scene and sequel.

  At this point, however, I must admit to some personal qualms about having given nearly equal time to ways to speed up or slow down a narrative. That's because in my experience of teaching fiction technique in the university classroom for more than two decades, novice novels that fail because they move too slowly outnumber those that move too fast by a margin of about 10 to 1.

  There seem to be at least five obvious reasons why this should be so:

  1. As explained before, too many beginning writers unconsciously shy away from presenting conflict just as they shy away from conflict in real life. Few of us like the emotional discomfort of a nasty fight in real life, and there is a danger that we might try to dodge conflict in our fiction, too, for the sake of "comfort."

  2. Too many beginners focus on the interior life of the character's thoughts or feelings, failing to understand the reader's yearning for outside action of some kind, played onstage in the story "now."

  3. Most beginners start out with little concept of how many plot events (scenes) it takes to construct a story of 60,000 or more words. They start with half—or a fourth —of the amount of "scene stuff' they are going to need, then try to pad out to novel length by writing padded sequels.

  4. Writing scene conflict is hard, both in terms of handling the terse writing style involved and in terms of the emotional fatigue such writing brings upon its creator.

  5. Too many beginners want to be "poetic" or "philosophical," so they write overblown sequels to wax rhapsodic about character emotion, or bombast about their profound ideas.

  It is even possible—believe it or not—to make a novel read too slowly by making too much of your scenes. By this I mean taking the idea of momentby-moment narration to a painful extreme. Again, such minutely detailed overwriting may be the result of the writer's suddenly panicking when she realizes that she just doesn't have enough "stuff' (for which read: a sufficient number of dramatic confrontations) to "make length" for a novel. So what she does is expand and elaborate every scene she does have until the reader wants to scream.

  I experienced an extreme example of this kind a few years ago when I worked with a very talented young writer who was awfully good at writing detail, but not so hot on imagining additional plot events. Unfortunately, he was also too quick to hear any advice I might give, and then take that advice to an extreme.

  He was writing a novel about a man trying to stop the inadvertent launching of an Atlas missile from a silo. By the time he reached the crucial late scene where the missile was fired anyway, he was about 30,000 words too short for a novel, didn't have enough scenes to make length, and wasn't developing very well the scenes that he did have.

  In his first draft, he had the hero peer out of the bushes at the missile silo site, see the doors open, and the missile shoot out and on its way — whoosh! —just that fast. I lectured him about "building the scene bigger" with more moment-by-moment action.

  Now, the Atlas missile in the silo had the words United States of America painted on its side, vertically, reading from top to bottom. So when my under "stuffed" and too-eager-to-please-me student came back with his rewrite of that single shot paragraph, the incident now required about ten pages.

  The doors swung open. They took about two agonized pages of description of motors whirring, concrete groaning, metal screeching, etc., to get open. Then the missile was fired. It's axiomatic that "time can stand still" for the character at such a moment of crisis, but what my student did was extraordinary in its extremity. The nose of the missile appeared above the surface. (One page of description of the shape and particular color of red that the tip was painted.) The first linear foot of the missile appeared as it began to rise. We saw the letter U. (Two paragraphs of character internalization about how terrible this was.) Next came the letter N. (Another few paragraphs about how awful, and what the next letter would be, and how he had arrived too late, etc.) By the time we got to the next page, out came another foot or so of the rising missile, and we saw the letter I. More internalization.

  It took the full ten pages to get the missile out of the silo as we counted it out, letter by letter, U-N-I-T-E-D-S-T-A-T-E-S, and so forth!

  This extremity of moment by moment was as slow-moving as anything these tired eyes have ever seen. The moral: You can carry a good thing to such absurd lengths that even a supposed scene or high point of action in the story gets slow and boring.

  But even if you don't go to such extremes —and even if you "have enough plot"—you need to remember something that's been previously mentioned in this book. Readers today are impatient.

  Even a decade or so ago it was possible to write longer and more minutely detailed scenes than readers will accept today. Compare, for example, a classic best-seller of yesteryear such as Hotel, by Arthur Hailey, with any of today's novels by someone like Sidney Sheldon.

  Hailey's biggest books were long, fat, multiple-viewpoint novels with fully developed scenes, some of which ran eight or ten pages of book print, or even longer. Because he wrote about several viewpoint characters, and developed his scenes to such length, the time span of most of his books was very short, sometimes only a few days, in Airport only hours. Because he was (and is) so good at providing harsh problems in his disasters, his novels sold very, very well.

  Sheldon, on the other hand, does not write such fully developed scenes today. He condenses scenes to the minimum, skips sequels, starts scenes in the middle, and performs all sorts of other tricks to make the pace incredibly swift. He has as many or more viewpoints as Hailey ever did, but because he writes so tightly, the time span of some of his books is multigenerational.

  Sheldon, incidentally, has said in interviews that his first drafts are four to eight times longer than his finished books. He starts with plenty of plot stuff and then writes his scenes and sequels for all they are worth. But then, in search of greater and greater narrative speed, he ruthlessly and relentlessly slashes and boils his material. Sometimes he breaks most of the rules about viewpoint and everything else to tighten something a bit further.

  Sheldon's structure is more in tune with today's impatient readers. Most of us are struggling to learn ways to speed things up in our books, not slow them down.

  The moral of all of this? In starting out on a novel, be sure you imagine world-aplenty of material—many, many scenes planned, with good, developed sequels to link them. Write all of them for all they're worth, confident in the knowledge that you not only can, but almost certainly will, go back through the manuscript, adjusting many of your structural components to achieve the pace you ultimately desire.

  CHAPTER 9

  VARIATIONS IN THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF SCENE AND SEQUEL

>   One Of The Things That Makes It devilishly difficult sometimes for an inexperienced fiction writer to see structural principles in action, in published copy, is the fact that there are so many possible deviations from the structural norm.

  You have seen, for example, that the classic structure of the scene is goal . . . conflict . . . disaster in that order, with the bulk of the structure made up of the conflict component. You have also seen that the classic structure of sequel is emotion . . . thought. . . decision . . . action, also in that order. And although we've looked at methods of tinkering with the length or intensity of internal components for good reason, or even leaving out a part of a sequel, for example, for reasons of narrative pacing, we have not previously considered the possibility that parts might sometimes be presented out of their normal order for some good dramatic reason, or that other variations might occur such as a flashback scene that might "play" inside the thought compartment of a sequel, or a scene which might have so little time pressure on it that a viewpoint character's momentary internalization takes on the structure of a full-fledged sequel right in the middle of things.

  This is all difficult enough, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. However, for you to understand more fully all the permutations of scene and sequel structure, it's necessary to look at some of the more common deviations from the classic internal structure so that you can understand what's going on as you analyze published work, and then expand your own arsenal of structural weapons.