does not yet have an answer for.
In Sheila Kohler's psychologically tense novel Crossways, protagonist Kate has been forced to leave her life in Paris and return to her childhood home in South Africa due to a tragedy: A car accident has killed her sister, Marian, and left her brother-in-law, Louis, injured and in the hospital.
Louis, a surgeon, is used to being in control of everything in his life—including his wife and their three children. Now that he is injured, and his sister-in-law, Kate, is around to question him, he has a difficult time controlling the rage he usually could suppress publicly.
The nurse leans over his bed. She pats the back of his hand. He has a sudden, strong urge to smack her across her pretty face with it. It is the same urge he had when his wife would ask him what he was doing.
The reader begins to question what it is in Louis's past that causes him to behave so badly toward people less powerful than himself, and of course, the answer is eventually provided and brings with it the final piece of the plot that explains Marion's death.
Foreground and Background
Scenes can have backgrounds the same way that paintings do, and backgrounds refer to more than just setting. While you draw the reader's attention to what is happening most noticeably in the foreground, you can plant subtle messages and emotional layers in the background through actions. For example, if a couple is about ready to make love in the scene at hand—the foreground—while another couple is fighting in the next room— the background—not only is this a great setup for comedy or drama, but it
plants the idea that perhaps the loving couple is moving toward the fate of the fighting couple. You can add suspenseful texture to your scenes without having to resort to narrative summary or intruding into the narrative with statements about how this couple might be destined for failure.
Jane Hamilton's novel A Map of the World opens when protagonist Alice, a school nurse, agrees to babysit her neighbor's two little girls. When Lizzy and Audrey arrive, however, Alice's own daughters, Emma and Claire, are giving her such grief that she takes a moment of respite to recollect herself, barely a couple of minutes. It is enough time for young Lizzy, a toddler, to make her way down into the pond and nearly drown.
In the next scene, Alice is at the hospital waiting for Lizzy's family to arrive and for the doctors to tell them of the child's prognosis. She has no idea if Lizzy will live, and if any of their lives will be the same from here on out. Hamilton sets us up for the direction of Alice's (and Lizzy's) fate by throwing this into the scene subtext:
I remember glancing across the room and noticing Robbie Mackessy's mother. Robbie was a kindergartner at Blackwell Elementary. ... He was frequently sick, because of his mother, I thought, because of her negligence. She was leafing through a magazine looking, not at the print, but at me. She was squinting, as if she couldn't stand to have her eyes wide open, to see all of me at once. . It was her ugly mouth, her sneer that made me feel like crying.
The talk of negligence, the details about not being able to "see all of me at once" are all subconscious suggestions of a dark and tragic turn for the worse for both characters.
Each scene is a multidimensional creation. Don't forget the many ways you can deepen and add complexity to it by enriching subtext, a subject that will be addressed in each of the scene types discussed in part three.
Imagine you're watching a game of tug-of-war between two strong men. Between them is a length of rope stretched over a pit full of angry, poisonous vipers. One man pulls the rope his way and the other man teeters on the brink of falling in. Then the teetering man pulls back and soon it's the first man whose life is at risk. This is a visual analogy for the effect of one of the most crucial core scene elements of all: dramatic tension.
Dramatic tension is
In Sheila Kohler's psychologically tense novel Crossways, protagonist Kate has been forced to leave her life in Paris and return to her childhood home in South Africa due to a tragedy: A car accident has killed her sister, Marian, and left her brother-in-law, Louis, injured and in the hospital.
Louis, a surgeon, is used to being in control of everything in his life—including his wife and their three children. Now that he is injured, and his sister-in-law, Kate, is around to question him, he has a difficult time controlling the rage he usually could suppress publicly.
The nurse leans over his bed. She pats the back of his hand. He has a sudden, strong urge to smack her across her pretty face with it. It is the same urge he had when his wife would ask him what he was doing.
The reader begins to question what it is in Louis's past that causes him to behave so badly toward people less powerful than himself, and of course, the answer is eventually provided and brings with it the final piece of the plot that explains Marion's death.
Foreground and Background
Scenes can have backgrounds the same way that paintings do, and backgrounds refer to more than just setting. While you draw the reader's attention to what is happening most noticeably in the foreground, you can plant subtle messages and emotional layers in the background through actions. For example, if a couple is about ready to make love in the scene at hand—the foreground—while another couple is fighting in the next room— the background—not only is this a great setup for comedy or drama, but it
plants the idea that perhaps the loving couple is moving toward the fate of the fighting couple. You can add suspenseful texture to your scenes without having to resort to narrative summary or intruding into the narrative with statements about how this couple might be destined for failure.
Jane Hamilton's novel A Map of the World opens when protagonist Alice, a school nurse, agrees to babysit her neighbor's two little girls. When Lizzy and Audrey arrive, however, Alice's own daughters, Emma and Claire, are giving her such grief that she takes a moment of respite to recollect herself, barely a couple of minutes. It is enough time for young Lizzy, a toddler, to make her way down into the pond and nearly drown.
In the next scene, Alice is at the hospital waiting for Lizzy's family to arrive and for the doctors to tell them of the child's prognosis. She has no idea if Lizzy will live, and if any of their lives will be the same from here on out. Hamilton sets us up for the direction of Alice's (and Lizzy's) fate by throwing this into the scene subtext:
I remember glancing across the room and noticing Robbie Mackessy's mother. Robbie was a kindergartner at Blackwell Elementary. ... He was frequently sick, because of his mother, I thought, because of her negligence. She was leafing through a magazine looking, not at the print, but at me. She was squinting, as if she couldn't stand to have her eyes wide open, to see all of me at once. . It was her ugly mouth, her sneer that made me feel like crying.
The talk of negligence, the details about not being able to "see all of me at once" are all subconscious suggestions of a dark and tragic turn for the worse for both characters.
Each scene is a multidimensional creation. Don't forget the many ways you can deepen and add complexity to it by enriching subtext, a subject that will be addressed in each of the scene types discussed in part three.
Imagine you're watching a game of tug-of-war between two strong men. Between them is a length of rope stretched over a pit full of angry, poisonous vipers. One man pulls the rope his way and the other man teeters on the brink of falling in. Then the teetering man pulls back and soon it's the first man whose life is at risk. This is a visual analogy for the effect of one of the most crucial core scene elements of all: dramatic tension.
Dramatic tension is
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