How to Create a Scene - by Amy Shearn
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I had a weird epiphany this week, which is that I (and every writing instructor you know) always say Show don’t tell! Expand into scene! without really going in to how one shows instead of telling, how one goes about writing a scene. It’s something that, once you’re used to doing it, seems so second-nature that one worries it would be condescending or something to go through it step-by-step. But when I thought about breaking it down into steps, I realized that was actually quite helpful? And a good reminder to myself, even?
Because here’s the thing. As I’ve noted before, it’s really easy to get in one’s head about the abstractions of writing. Thinking about writing can be entertaining, but it’s not exactly actually writing. Often when we’re stuck in a piece of writing, it’s because we’re getting tangled up about what it means or what it’s about, and sometimes — especially with fiction, I find — you really just have to write it in order to truly discover what it’s about. Annoying, I know.
In a work of fiction, so much happens in scenes. It’s like in life, no? You don’t get to know people just by looking at them (I know, I’m superficial too, we all are, but after we look at them, there’s more work to be done). You get to know people by talking to them, seeing them in action, finding out what they think, and learning how they respond in various interpersonal situations. So too with your characters.
So how does one actually write a scene in which the characters start to come alive? I do have a couple of strange tricks. I don’t know if other people do these things. Maybe they are actually wrong. If so, just don’t tell anyone this is how I write scenes, okay?
Now, I’m going to focus here on fiction, in which the scenes have to be fully invented. If writing scenes in memoir is an act of intense remembering, writing scenes in fiction is more like, I’d say, playing with paper dolls. And a lot of what I’m going to suggest here actually happens before you write the scene at all. It’s the pre-writing that will will make the scenes possible. Cutting out the paper dolls and setting up their stage, if you will. Will you? I can’t tell if this is too weird.
First, set the scene. You, the writer, should be able to see the setting in great detail. What time period is your work set in? What specific city or suburb or county or planet (even if you don’t plan to name it on the page)? I’ve sometimes kept Pinterest boards of visual inspiration while drafting (like this one, for my novel Unseen City, where I compiled sources that helped me to fully imagine what life might have been like in 1860s Brooklyn, down to the kinds of music people would hear, what foods they would eat, what they would wear and what they felt like, etc). Know the world you’re creating. The specific is the universal. (I’m quoting someone there and I can’t remember who, but I’m guessing it’s my graduate school thesis advisor Charles Baxter. God he’s good.)
If you have a few main locations for your novel or story, you might consider drawing a map. I did this while writing my first novel, which takes place largely in a roadside motel — drawing the layout of the motel, the locations of each room, parking lot, pool, and so on, helped me to really picture scenes when I wrote them. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, he suggests that one should also map out the spaces of novels, including stage directions of where and how characters move in pivotal scenes, in order to really understand them as readers — and his scratchy little maps prove that this need not be an artistic endeavor.
So perhaps now you have the details of the setting down. What about the paper dolls, I mean characters? WHAT is more fun than fully imagining characters? Okay I can think of some things but like, you know what I mean.
You might want to want to draw portraits of your characters, or put together a bulletin board, or whatever feels like it will help you to fully imagine them. Get to know much more about your characters than you’ll ever need to put on the actual page — have them answer the Proust Questionnaire, or empty out their pockets/purses/glove boxes/attics and find out what’s there.
Ready to get even weirder? You know what the playwright Edward Albee did, to test out whether or not he knew his characters well enough to write about them? “He will go for a long walk, often on the beach, and introduce his characters to a situation that is not part of the play. If they behave easily and naturally—if he is able to improvise dialogue for them without effort—then he will decide that he and they know each other well enough, and he will start to write,” according to Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker.
Go on, why not? Walk along the beach and talk to yourself. (Are you in Brooklyn? Literally no one will bat an eye.) If you’re not feeling quite so, well, dramatic, talking with your characters into a voice recorder works well, too. If you hate speaking words out loud, which sometimes I really do get, try writing a letter or journal from the POV of your characters.
Okay I know this all sounds like a lot of work just to write the scene where the protagonist walks into the room and finds her keys and leaves, or whatever. But the thing is, it’s just to get you started. After you’ve learned enough about the texture of your characters’ lives, it’ll be easier each time you write a scene — you won’t have to map out where her room is in the big spooky house in order to know whether or not walking to find her keys sends her past the room of the person she has a forbidden crush on, because you’ll already be able to picture it. You see what I mean? It’s like the most funnest homework on Earth.
By the time you’re revising, you’ll want to make sure each scene is doing some distinct unit of narrative work: moving along the plot; revealing character; or both. But I think it’s hard to figure that out in a first draft. Or a second. Or a third. Ask my editors, I might be a nightmare actually. But EVENTUALLY. Each scene is doing something.
Did that help or just make it worse? Let me know! And good luck with your scenes.
Do you want to hear me talk even more about writing and reading? Why? Sorry, I mean: I was recently on this wonderful podcast called Tell Me What You’re Reading, talking about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse with the brilliant writer Hannah Oberman-Breindel, who I met on a residency last summer at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony.
Oh by the way! My next novel, Dear Edna Sloane, coming out from Red Hen Press in April 2024, is available for preorder (here! and at the bad place too! and elsewhere!) It’s about a WRITER! I think you will like it!
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