Making a Scene

The basic dramatic unit is the scene. Put enough of these units together and they take on a form and a path, developing characters and accelerating complications and insights until they form a vignette, a story, a novel, a play. Like the throw of dice in a game of liar's poker, scenes present varying dramatic options to the point where they become memorable enough to eclipse the narrative in which they appear.

In varying degree, scenes have at least the following ingredients: setting, characters, beats, pace, blocking, tension, subtext,dialog. They may also contain reversals of fortune, shifts in power, changes in attitude, shifts of allegiance, surprise, discovery, revelation.

Characters come into scenes with expectations, which may be frustrated or met. A character who achieves an expectation may experience buyers' remorse or conversely indulge exuberant celebration. Just as likely, characters may enter scenes with fears, hopes, prejudices, agendas. A character who enters a scene with no expectations is coasting, admittedly a judgmental take, nevertheless one supported by the understanding that story requires of characters a sense of being right about something.

A character who is right about something--an interpretation, an entitlement, a sense of being a victim or a protector--has earned admittance to the tent of story and must now pursue the goals that drive him, perhaps tentative at first but then with the increasing intensity of ambition. Some characters require one or more scenes in which to ratify or shore up their sense of being right, which instills within them the glorious dynamic of defensiveness, which they are perfectly free to interpret as justice must be done. Even the ghost in Hamlet has a agenda, which drives the story forth, stirring up from beyond the grave the stew of ambition, sexual jealousy, and power. That lovely, dysfunctional family, the Macbeth? They are also propelled by ambition, but can we say that Dorothy Gale is a passive observer?

The scene is a crucible to which the heat of ambition or agenda or desire is applied. If a scene does not materially advance the movement of story, it may still earn its keep within the narrative by demonstrating or revealing important information about the characters, information that will effect the reception of the characters by the readers.

If scenes are set in landscapes where some characters are more comfortable than other characters, these individuals are at an advantage, which may be exploited, undermined, or neutralized. If scenes are cast in landscapes where none of the characters are comfortable, an added atmosphere of tension seeps into the dialog, the subtext, the likelihood that the crucible will boil over. In the famed motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise meeting with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and separates him from Martens. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Arbitrary as it may sound, scenes should be wound around the armature of at least one salient emotion. Characters may not agree with that emotion, may be prevented from recognizing it by the sun-in-the-eyes of their own agenda, but the reader will get it.

And don't forget the scene in a small lunch room, with the character of Bobby Dupea wanting at this point in Five Easy Pieces nothing more than a conventional breakfast. "You want me to hold the chicken," the waitress asks Bobby, producing not only the crucible overflowing but a subsequent persona for the actor Jack Nicholson.

A scene then is a crucible, an arena, a place where characters go armed with the baggage of their past, their attitudes, their agendas, fortified with a toolkit of their abilities and hopes. The scene is the Swiss Army knife of story.

Making a Scene

1. The scene is the basic unit of drama.
2. Most short stories and novels are compilations of scenes strategically arranged for the most effective dramatic result (which is an emotional impact of some sort).
3. Scenes in novels and short stories are often--but not necessarily--connected by narrative, which is in effect stage directions writ large, including but not limited to a particular point of view, an indication of intent, a benchmark of story development, and/or a summary adduced or deduced from things characters have said, done, or not done in earlier scenes.
4. Scenes contain but are not limited to:
A. Landscape/setting
B. Characters
C. Dialogue
E. Tempo
F. Conflict
G. Suspense
H. Tension
I. Beats (events)
J. An awareness of power being exerted or exchanged
K. Reversals
L. Surprises
M. Point of view
5. Characters enter scenes with expectations of some outcome, a hot slot machine in a casino, an argument, approval, being ranked on, being ignored
6. Characters enter scenes believing they are right and/or entitled or...
7. Characters enter scenes wanting to restore some status or balance
8. Successful scenes may lack two or three of 1-7 supra, but fall into the category of endangered species if they lack four or more
9. Epistolary stories do not necessarily have scenes
10. Postmodern stories may have formats (emails, IMs, recorded messages) that do not contain scenes but which nevertheless suggest the presence of past, present, and future scenes
11. Thus scenes have an awareness of time past, time present, and time future
12. Scenes have some relevance however tenuous or thematic to the story at hand
13. A story without scenes is of a piece with a body lacking in cells
14. The arrangement of scenes in a story does not demand a strict chronology or, indeed, any kind of chronology
15. If feng shui works for rooms, there is no reason why it cannot be a useful concept for placement of the scenes in a story.

Beats

1. Just as police are often injured when they respond to domestic violence calls, the writer needs to be careful about jumping in too precipitously when the characters progress beyond the name-calling stage.

2. An anthology composed of family meal and/or wedding scenes. Think about it.

3. A clock in the background, ticking off critical time, if used with care, adds a precious note of tension and vulnerability. Early in your publishing career, this was brought home when your company did the paperback version of James Grady's novel about the moral ambiguity of the CIA, The Six Days of the Condor, in which an operative is through no fault of his own caught between rival government factions. We're pretty sure they both want him killed. The lesson to be learned was that the movie people thought six days was too long to let Robert Redford dodge about; they changed the title to The Three Days of the Condor.

4. I knew I wasn't going to get Logan's Run even though I'd done a number of books for one of the two writers, and liked the idea, even though they started out with the concept that because of population explosion and ecological disasters, people were not allowed to live past age thirty. By this time I'd learned a few things and suggested they cut the age down to twenty-one. They both looked at me as if what does he know and in many ways they were right. But somewhere along the way, the age was cut back to twenty-one and within a year one of the two writers was driving a Porsche and the other was still a horse's ass, neither factor being relevant to the way the twenty-one-year age limit spoke to readers.

5. I suspect that I could have used Google to track down his name but as a matter of pride, I spent nearly three weeks trying to remember it on my own. I'd after all read a novel and two collections of his poems. Apparently he began talking to me again later this afternoon. Albert Goldbarth. I could have tried poet U of Kansas. I could have even tried Who Whispered Behind Me, because I knew that, but when you play with memory, there are issues on the table you don't even know about not to mention the ones you do, as in how accurate was the thing you remember in the first place?

6. Speaking of which a character I don't know is telling me that his kids are giving him the pitch about moving him to an assisted living facility, and he has assured me that the business with leaving the gas on under the kettle was not his fault. I don't know enough about him to know whether or not to trust him. He says his name is Phil.

7. It is helpful to eavesdrop on conversations--particularly arguments--between characters you are thinking of signing on.

8. Jerry, a classmate and pal of Lew,one of my ongoing characters, showed up this year as the vegan equivalent of the disabled person who does not need to be in a wheel chair. I think there may be a story brewing because I never thought of him as a vegan and he always seemed pretty trustworthy.

9. Lew, who is normally trustworthy, went to great lengths to steal Jerry's dog, concoct an elaborate plan to disguise the dog, and raise her as his own. But conscience got the better of Lew.

10. At one point in real life, I assisted two Hindu nuns in an elaborate plot to kidnap a dog we suspected of being ill-treated by a wealthy Bengali couple living in Pacific Palisades. The dog's name was Lulu.

11. A beat is a dramatic event that sometimes may be a long pause; everyone connected with it knows it has consequences.

12. Consequences are things that are said, felt, or done as a result of something having been said felt, or done earlier.

13. Without consequences, there is no story.

14. Rae has reached the point of being tired of coming home from work to discover her boyfriend, Harmon, curled up asleep on her new futon with his ex, Meredith.

15. Sometimes, particularly with Sally napping away on her pad, it is difficult to maneuver through my study without getting enmeshed in a good deal of behavior I am trying to understand.