First sentence in the scene -- Starting the experience

  First sentence in the scene 

 Starting the experience   

 

I’m having some fun creating a big Building Bolder Scenes course, and now I’m focusing on the mechanics of creating the scene experience with the sentences and paragraphs. Scenes are EXPERIENCES, not just recountings. So getting the experience started early—the first sentence!—can set the reader up to FEEL all the way through.

  Just keep in mind that your reader is apprehending the scene holistically-- she's incorporating every detail, not just your character's thoughts and feelings, into her experience. So you can imbed emotion subtly in the description and action. Just remember not to overdo. But yes, you can use adjectives and adverbs here. Just don't use them when you don't need them ("shouted loudly, bright scarlet"), and then when you DO use them, they'll have more effect.

You can set the stage early, hint at that "beginning emotion" of the emotional arc of the scene, by anchoring the setting in the first paragraph or so... but meaningfully. Here are some examples of how to sneak in emotion with physical/setting detail in the first paragraph of the scene:

LIGHT
His bulky body filled the entrance and blocked most of the afternoon light.

She shielded her eyes against the harsh noon light and squinted at the broken window.

He parked in the pool of yellow light from the streetlamp and slowly got out of the car.

She woke when the dawn light sliced through the curtains. Nothing had changed.

He squinted to see through the dimness in the barroom, searching the dark booths for the woman he had lost.

The car brakes skidded on the gravel, and when they finally stopped, the moonlit lake was only a few feet from their front bumper.

TIME OF DAY
The Angelus bells were ringing when she started across the muddy field towards the church.

She woke suddenly. The red glowing numbers on the bedside clock read 2:04. It took her a moment before she realized she had missed her flight.

He was going to be late for work again. Again.

All she wanted to do was rush home and be halfway through a quart of Java Chip ice cream before American Idol came on.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE
She pushed the porch door open and stood there a moment, drinking in the view and the crisp mountain air.

Jamie woke up cold and damp on the bare open ground.

I knew this place—the kitchen looked familiar and unpleasant.

Patty rubbed the condensation off the passenger-side window and looked  out at the snowdrift. "How stuck are we?" she asked.

He put his fork down on the dining room table and grimly called the family to order.

The old barn stood alone on the hill.

The road gravel infiltrated her sandals, and she was limping and lost by the time he found her.

It was a lady's parlor, all dainty and tidy, and he didn't think he better sit down on any of the little chairs.


AIR
The barroom smelled of ground-out cigarettes and spilled beer.

She zipped up her parka and pulled on her gloves, took a deep breath, and stepped out the door into the howling Chicago winter.

From the lantern-lit park pavilion across the river drifted the lazy strains of a dance band.

The library was so overheated every breath felt like she was sucking in a blanket.

It was going to snow. She could taste it with every crystalline breath.

Not a breeze stirred the evening air, and she hesitated with her hand on the gate.

 

When You Have Too Many Words....

I was just asked for a few tips on cutting big bunches of words. You know, you were aiming for a nice 75K novel, only this ended up at 95K words.  And from your perspective, it works! But it's too long for the line or the editor or the type of story, right? So how can you trim words without deleting meaning? 

It's hard. It can be done. I had to cut 35K from one of my books once, and it was hard, but I don't think afterwards the reader could tell what was missing. (Okay, okay. Theresa did most of the cutting. I did most of the whining and whimpering.)

While the plan here is not to go back, it can really help to think that nothing you're doing is permanent, that if you realize you cut something important, you can restore it. So be sure to 

 save the original version first, then save the version-to-be-cut under another filename. Just in case you want to UNcut later!

But here are some tips if you want to cut 20K words:

1) The first option is to cut a whole scene. That's a broadsword rather than a scalpel approach, but let's say you wrote this book in a white heat during Nanowrimo. There are probably scenes you wrote or started to write which ended up as unimportant or irrelevant, or you later did a better version and both versions are still in there. 

A whole scene might well be 5,000 words. That's a pretty good cut! And cutting it might make for a stronger, tighter plot. Then again, you might accidentally cut out something essential like a clue, or an important step on your character's journey, or the satisfying "reunion" scene the reader has been waiting for. 

To do this, however, you have to look at scenes not as groups of words but as part of the action of the plot. So try this: Outline the book as you have it. Yep, a scene outline. List -- in order they occur, every chapter, and every scene or scenelet or passage (complete or not) within each chapter. 

Then you can evaluate if there are scenes that can be deleted without causing plot/emotion problems.  

2. Look also for adjacent scenes that can be combined.  That will let you delete some of the set up and transition between scenes. Be watching for "single-purpose" scenes, especially several in a row-- a scene where he argues with his brother, and then a scene were he discovers a clue to the mystery, and then a scene where he travels to where the robbery took place. You could combine those into one scene where he argues with his brother, leaves and discovers the clue, and ends with him deciding to go to the robbery site. Really, once you start looking at what happens from scene to scene, you might find several which can be combined.

3.  If you can't cut a whole scene, look for passages (especially at the beginning) which are mostly set-up. That's where I found the most opportunities to trim, at the start of scenes, where I might have spent a couple pages describing the setting and establishing what the characters are doing there. 

Here are some other "cutting" options:

4) Look for mini-scenes (I call them "scenelets"-- 1-2 page bridges usually from one important event to the next) that don't much matter. Often these involve a main character interacting with a minor character or a "walk-ons" like a waiter who will never be seen again in the book. An example might be a cab ride to the convention hotel. There might be good character interplay with the cabdriver and give a good sense of the main character's mood, but if you want to cut, that's an example of a good 'non-essential' scenelet. Usually these aren't full scenes but intros to more important scene passages. You can always argue how this bit is important or clever or enlightening, but you know, you have to trim something, and a scene without an event to change the plot is usually trimmable.

5) Try the Jane Austen tactic-- in dialogue, if there's no conflict, do narrative summary. (They reminisced for a few minutes, then she remembered, and said insultingly, " ". :) There are going to be parts of scenes the reader needs that might have no conflict (like a moment of grace where two characters share a cigarette), but those are best kept fairly short and fairly rare. 

6) Look for those passages where there's nothing-dialogue-- often when there's some movement from one setting to another. ("Let's go into the den and watch TV/What do you want to watch?/ I thought this season of The Voice was starting. Did you record that?/No, the last one was so annoying, I didn't bother. But we can probably get it on-demand." :) No, I never actually wrote that passage, but that's the sort of "transition conversation" that's usually easy to cut away.

7) Also look for long passages of introspection where a character is thinking. Sometimes these are important, and the way they think is important to show, but the deeper we get into the story, the less long introspection is needed. (The reader knows more about the character by the middle of the book, and probably just needs a hint of what they're thinking, or only introspection when something unexpected is felt and needs explanation.)

8) Try my ruthless technique: Decide on a page goal, like "cut 50 words out of this page". This takes awhile, but it's usually easy to find at least 20 words to cut. Or "cut one sentence or sentence part out of each paragraph". Or "trim two sentences and combine them into one shorter sentence". This is actually my favorite thing. :)

9) Even more ruthless: If you know there are words you over-use (for me, it's "then" and "just"), do a "find" for them and for each one, decide whether it's needed. Delete if not. A friend of mine cut two pages out just by getting rid of justs. :)

Because all this is so "voice-centric," it's probably best to do it yourself first and see how much you can cut. That way you'll still have control of the scenes and the interactions between characters and how that's presented. 

Then again, an outsider might be able to be more objective, as Theresa was with my over-long book.

I can tell you from experience, trimming is hard to get started, and painful, but after awhile, it's easier to see where something can be discarded, or  how scenes or sentences can be combined.

Broadsword/scalpel experiences you can share? 

Alicia

Emotional experiences in books

Let's think of ourselves as readers, which we were before we were writers. We're still going to learn most about writing from the authors we love. So let's talk about books that have affected you emotionally.

For example, there's a great Patrick O'Brian book, Reverse of the Medal, where the hero, a storied sea captain of great courage but not great intellect, has invested his war booty with someone who turns out to be a crook, and Jack gets charged with stock market fraud. He is sentenced to pillory (this is 1811) and forced to be shackled in a public square in London in the midst of a crowd which is going to pelt him with rocks and
rotten fruit.  But seamen (his fellow Royal Navy guys) show up from every corner of the kingdom and surround him and doff their caps in respect for him-- and of course, keep the rabble from humiliating him.

Reading this really did show me the separation that can occur between the reader's experience and the main character's experience. Jack feels overwhelming gratitude and humility, to be protected so well. The reader
feels pride mostly-- the opposite of humility-- because of the actions not of the hero, but of all these anonymous seamen. Centuries before Facebook, they manage to learn of this travesty and figure out how to
deal with it together, and they do it with a characteristically British blend of self-deprecation and bristling arrogance.

That is, in the final moments, and throughout the book, I as the reader of course identify with Jack, the protagonist. But every character, every scene, every setting, every value in this book contributes to the reader experience. I really learned from that book that the emotion comes from the entirety of the story, everything that builds up to the final scenes, and everything that comes from the interaction of all the characters with the events of the story and the settings.

So I learned it's really important to get the reader to identify with the protagonist. But that's not enough. The reader has to be able simultaneously identify deeply with the main character, but also have a fuller experience that comes from reading the whole book (which the hero can't do :).

Let's start with the totality of the book experience, the change from start to end, and then break it all down:

Theme: I'm just pointing to the title here-- this book is all about "reversal"-- of fortune, of expectations, of focus.

Change from start to end, the "praxis": Jack starts out at the top, a real war hero, a bit conceited about his new glory. Because of his gullibility and desire for wealth and status, he trusts the wrong person. So the change for him is from pride to shame, really from "moving up" to "falling down". This descent is paralleled in the war's progress. In the beginning, it seems that France (Napoleon) will be surrendering soon, that Britain will finally triumph (which it does, but not for another long year and not in this book). In fact, this misconception is what is used to trap Jack into the stock swindle. Point is, the nation's fortunes seem at the top to start, and that turns out to be wrong.

Situation change: But all of O'Brian's stories are more than the story of the main characters (Stephen, the other major character, has his own downfall). The situation is the Royal Navy at war, a war that the Navy won years ago (at Trafalgar), and at this point is more about acquiring wealth in ships and influence. The purity of purpose has been lost, along with the camaraderie that makes months at sea bearable. The powerful simplicity of the military at the beginning is corrupted into the deceptive, dangerous world of the City of London and Westminster (finance and politics).

Setting change: The setting starts out in that "wooden world" of the ship at sea, with its familiar traditions and simple loyalties. But half the book, the latter half, is mostly on land and in the sophisticated, deceptive world of London politics and finance. The ending takes place at Cornhill, in the City of London, the finance center, so very different than the ships and the sea. But that pillory scene brings the two worlds together as all the seamen "from Land's End to John o' Groats" arrive to protect Jack.

The fulfillment in the end: The end really does have to fulfill the promise of the rest of the book. The conflicts are intensified and then resolved, if not in the obvious fashion. The Reverse of the Medal's ending is particularly emotional because the verities are restored. Jack has, to some degree, abandoned his crew by associating with the men of finance and politics who destroy him. As a consequence, he loses his ship and his position in the Navy. (This is extremely affecting, btw.) That loss makes him remember what really counts. I know it sounds trite (it's not in the book), but he learns who his real friends are when every seamen in the kingdom shows up to honor him in his moment of greatest shame. (And then Stephen buys the old ship and gives it to him to be a merchant ship.)

The distinction between the protagonist's emotion at the end and the reader's: Jack's shame and loss are so entire, and the reader participates in that. But when the seamen come to protect him, Jack's response is appropriately (for him) gratitude and humility. He knows how badly he screwed it up, and how fortunate he is to be restored to the camaraderie and friendship he had moved beyond. But for the reader? We don't have to be confined to his experience. I know what I felt as I closed the book was pride-- pride in the Navy and these simple seamen who were able to forgive so generously-- and also admiration not just for the courage of Jack, but for the unstinting love of his wife and his best friend. I know I had a sense of the power of forgiveness, as everyone was able to forgive Jack and gather him back into the family of the Navy. That is, the reader response moves beyond Jack's to a greater understanding of the meaning of the story, and part of the emotional reaction (to me, at least) was a renewed hope in the goodness of humans. (A final reversal-- at the lowest, most humiliating moment in the 20-book series, we have the greatest joy.)

So how about you? What's a book that you can remember really experiencing emotionally-- the book, not just the character?  And how in the end did you feel and why?

Alicia