know that you must up the ante on your characters and keep the action moving forward. Always keep your significant situation in mind, and be sure that there are consequences that get first complicated, then addressed and resolved, and that there is an antagonist of some kind that helps to add conflict. So ask yourself, what is the next bite?
If you find yourself stumped, you can run it through this criteria test. The next bite of plot information should:
• Involve your main character(s)
• Be related to the significant situation or one of its consequences
• Give the readers the impression of having more knowledge or clues, or that they're smarter because some new information is revealed
•Add complications or resolve an earlier complication
Even if you were never an A student in school, you're probably someone who gives everything your best try; after all, you're reading a book on scene writing. At the very least, you can follow the recipe in chapter one and combine all your ingredients to create a rudimentary scene. So don't get discouraged now when you learn that you can write a competent scene that still falls flat.
Scenes often need depth or subtext, texture that links the scene to the themes and larger plot of your narrative, and fleshes them out. A theme is the underlying message, idea, or moral of the narrative. Building in this subtext may take a second draft or more, because you are bound to know your story and characters far better after you have already written them into being.
Scenes that lack subtext read as if they've been dictated by a court reporter: "Bailiff had to escort the defendant, in pearls and red sweater, out of the room. Sunlight filtered in. Courtroom was quiet."
There is nothing wrong with the details above, but a scene full of sentences like that will be guaranteed to lack dramatic tension and emotional complexity. A good scene should ideally have a surface—all that is visible and palpable, from setting to physical descriptions of characters to heard dialogue—and an underbelly, a subtext, where your characters' emotional baggage, agendas, painful secrets, and unconscious motivations lie.
TECHNIQUES FOR CREATING SUBTEXT
Think about the deeper layers of your scenes. The subtext is the layer that contains unconscious information, clues to behavior, even elements of backstory. You can use several different techniques to draw out your story's subtext.
Thematic Imagery or Symbols
In order to work with thematic imagery, naturally you need to know the theme of your book or story. A theme can be thought of as the overall message or large idea of the narrative, as opposed to the plot, which refers to specific events and new pieces of information that take place or are dropped in the narrative. For many writers, theme is determined after the first draft is done. Thematic imagery, then, is images that metaphorically and symbolically conjure your theme.
Some thematic imagery will find its way into your narrative through the magic of the unconscious without you realizing it, but most of it will require conscious application upon revision.
Mary Gaitskill's award-winning novel Veronica deals with some dark subjects involving the sordid life of a young model, Alison, and her friend, Veronica, who contracted AIDS in the 1980s. Yet the book is also about redemption and healing. Gaitskill uses images interspersed throughout the book to add subtext to her scenes, like this:
There were small flowers sprouting on bushes growing alongside the path. They were a flat tough red that paled as their petals extended out, changing into a color that was oddly fleshy, like the underside of a tongue.
Comparing the flowers to a human tongue creates an appropriate subtext for the scene they appear in, in which Alison is facing the reality of her friend's illness. The flowers represent Veronica, who is tough and tender but also only human. And they represent Alison, who is known to most people as a
If you find yourself stumped, you can run it through this criteria test. The next bite of plot information should:
• Involve your main character(s)
• Be related to the significant situation or one of its consequences
• Give the readers the impression of having more knowledge or clues, or that they're smarter because some new information is revealed
•Add complications or resolve an earlier complication
Even if you were never an A student in school, you're probably someone who gives everything your best try; after all, you're reading a book on scene writing. At the very least, you can follow the recipe in chapter one and combine all your ingredients to create a rudimentary scene. So don't get discouraged now when you learn that you can write a competent scene that still falls flat.
Scenes often need depth or subtext, texture that links the scene to the themes and larger plot of your narrative, and fleshes them out. A theme is the underlying message, idea, or moral of the narrative. Building in this subtext may take a second draft or more, because you are bound to know your story and characters far better after you have already written them into being.
Scenes that lack subtext read as if they've been dictated by a court reporter: "Bailiff had to escort the defendant, in pearls and red sweater, out of the room. Sunlight filtered in. Courtroom was quiet."
There is nothing wrong with the details above, but a scene full of sentences like that will be guaranteed to lack dramatic tension and emotional complexity. A good scene should ideally have a surface—all that is visible and palpable, from setting to physical descriptions of characters to heard dialogue—and an underbelly, a subtext, where your characters' emotional baggage, agendas, painful secrets, and unconscious motivations lie.
TECHNIQUES FOR CREATING SUBTEXT
Think about the deeper layers of your scenes. The subtext is the layer that contains unconscious information, clues to behavior, even elements of backstory. You can use several different techniques to draw out your story's subtext.
Thematic Imagery or Symbols
In order to work with thematic imagery, naturally you need to know the theme of your book or story. A theme can be thought of as the overall message or large idea of the narrative, as opposed to the plot, which refers to specific events and new pieces of information that take place or are dropped in the narrative. For many writers, theme is determined after the first draft is done. Thematic imagery, then, is images that metaphorically and symbolically conjure your theme.
Some thematic imagery will find its way into your narrative through the magic of the unconscious without you realizing it, but most of it will require conscious application upon revision.
Mary Gaitskill's award-winning novel Veronica deals with some dark subjects involving the sordid life of a young model, Alison, and her friend, Veronica, who contracted AIDS in the 1980s. Yet the book is also about redemption and healing. Gaitskill uses images interspersed throughout the book to add subtext to her scenes, like this:
There were small flowers sprouting on bushes growing alongside the path. They were a flat tough red that paled as their petals extended out, changing into a color that was oddly fleshy, like the underside of a tongue.
Comparing the flowers to a human tongue creates an appropriate subtext for the scene they appear in, in which Alison is facing the reality of her friend's illness. The flowers represent Veronica, who is tough and tender but also only human. And they represent Alison, who is known to most people as a
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