Scene Soup

In general I stick to a zoomed-out perspective in these Tips, because for the most part this wider structural work is what I engage with when I work with writers on their stories. Yet, often in these conversations we end up talking about Scenes. Especially when it comes to overall texture. There is a problem that can arise, especially across a longer piece of fiction, in which the depth at which the reader is allowed to experience any moment in time never varies. We are led through the events of a character’s life at the same speed, either consistently skimming the surface via summary, or entirely moment- to- moment. In the former case, this can result in a feeling of being continually told what happens rather than ever experiencing it ourselves alongside the character. And in the latter – an absence of summary, of places where time is moved on more quickly – can lead to tedium and a lot of banality which the reader comes to suspect they don’t actually need to witness.

In my experience it is usually the skimming, summarised effect that occurs most often when writers are working on their first novels. And this is something I clearly remember my first editor telling me – ‘you need to open up scenes,’ she said. She also told me (kindly) that this was completely normal for a first-time novelist, and so I shouldn’t be discouraged.

In any story-telling that is vivid and engaging, scenes (no matter how momentary) usually make up the higher percentage of word count. But - especially if scenes can be momentary, the length of a few sentences, a paragraph, as well as many pages long - what is that makes a scene? What plunges us readers into that active imagining?

It’s the ingredients. And anyone can learn to include these, like learning a recipe. 

What follows is an exercise I made up early on in my teaching. It’s one way of approaching the building of a Scene, via its separate ingredients, and though I have chosen a certain order, you can choose any of the five elements as a place to start - whatever comes most easily, perhaps - and then proceed from there. A writer I worked with enjoyed this process so much that he designed a paper dice in which the different faces represented each scenic element, and he would regularly throw the dice while scene-building, as a prompt to instruct him as to which ingredient he should add next.

Here’s the exercise. I call it Scene Soup.

1. Take a few minutes to write a scene of pure DIALOGUE - only dialogue - between two or three characters. Just let the dialogue flow, hear the voices in your head, dig out the tensions, listen to what the characters have to say to each other and let them say it. Just keep going until you reach a natural stopping place or run out of steam. 

2. Read through what you have written and do a quick edit, cutting anything that feels like filler, and keeping the lines that somehow ring true to you, that carry their own weight and push the story forward. Write these lines out on a clean page of paper, with spaces between each line. What are you doing with Dialogue is AURAL - you are making the readers hear something. You are speaking inside their head.

3. Next, in between the lines of dialogue, add physical ACTIONS. These can be tasks the characters are performing as they interact: cooking, driving a car, teaching a class, cleaning a fridge. It can also be gestures: leaning forward or drawing back, folding hands, raising an eyebrow, smiling, glancing down, fiddling with a pen, etc. The most important aspect of the ACTIONS element is the visual pictures they create in the reader’s head. Actions also help maintain continuity within a scene, as well as refresh the setting, as well as reveal the emotional state of the characters. But mostly what they are adding is SIGHT. (You don’t have to add an ACTION between every line of dialogue - there may be times when you want the next response to follow immediately without a new visual grabbing the reader’s attention. This is fine.)

4. Now you are going to add SETTING. (In between these spaced lines of Dialogue and Action.) This is helping the reader to be in the Place where your characters are. Give me a wide shot, so I can get my bearings. Go in closer. Show me the objects in the space, the objects the characters are handling. Give me the temperature, the light, the sounds, smells, sensations. This can be done in a whole paragraph between lines of dialogue and action, or in single interpolated lines. But in order to keep the Setting alive in the reader’s imagination it needs to be refreshed throughout the scene, as in when you touch the screen of a computer to bring back the picture. Or else it will fade in the readers’ imaginations and your characters will be talking and moving in a grey, formless vacuum.

It is at this point that some writers stop. Some writers work in a style where everything they want the reader to know or believe about the story and its characters comes only from what can be externally observed. These writers want readers to decide things for themselves, based on the evidence they give. And that can be exciting. 

But if you want to add more, here are the final two elements that can be inserted in a scene. Remember they are not crucial, and if these last two things are ALL you are writing, then what you have created is NOT a scene. 

5. INTERNALS. These are the sentences that give us a character’s feelings and thoughts, either directly (I’m not afraid of you, she thought), or indirectly (Lindy was not afraid of him). If you are in first person, then direct feelings and thoughts are easy to achieve, whereas in third person you might have to work harder to make them clear.

6. Finally, you can also add AUTHORIAL COMMENT, the opinions of the writer (a God-like omniscient voice) or the narrator, things that refer to ulterior knowledge. These can be things the writer/narrator knows but the character may not (Lindy had no idea her husband was cheating), or they can be generalised, thematic statements (Love is a one-way road to despair, You have to break some heads to succeed in this life). Generally these kinds of comments need to be heard right from the top of a story, if you are going to use them, or else it can be very jarring for a reader to suddenly hear the voice of God for the first time a hundred pages in. 

So. That’s it. This ia a good exercise to try when you know you have to write a scene and you’re really struggling to get started. Because in working this way you don’t have to do everything at once and it feels easier. These are your tools: ACTIONS, DIALOGUE, SETTING, INTERNALS, COMMENTS. Writing a scene is like juggling: you are trying to keep all these balls in the air, never neglecting one for too long or it will drop, and this is because you are constantly stimulating and refreshing your reader’s imagination. And why are you doing this? Because you want them to believe you. And you want them to care.  And people care about things they have experienced first-hand ten times more than they care about something they have been told about from a distance.