In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to perhaps the most elemental and often the most challenging element of story: plot. We will learn what keeps it moving, how it manipulates our feelings, expectations, and desires. We will examine the choices storytellers make to snag our imaginations, drag them into a fictional world, and keep them there. We will learn how to outline and structure a plot, discuss narrative arc, pacing and reversals and reveal the inevitable surprise: connecting the beginning, middle and end.
Examples of Effective Scenes
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot
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From the lesson
A Scene in Motion
Scenes are the building blocks of storytelling. But what is a scene? And how does a scene move plot forward? In this module we'll learn about the difference between telling and showing, the five key elements each scene should have, offer some examples of effective scenes, and have a conversation about how setting and description can make a scene come alive.
Meet the Instructors
Brando SkyhorseVisiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
English
[MUSIC]
Welcome to segment 2, examples of effective scenes.
In this segment, we're going to take a closer look at what makes an effective
scene by analyzing a section of text in two forms, the rough draft version,
where it told the events that happened, and
the finished published version, where it shows what happened in the scene.
In our last segment, we talked about the five points that make an effective scene,
starting with an action, dialogue, specific intimate details, an inner voice,
or the three Rs, react, reflect, reveal, and a definite starting stopping point.
But how do these points look in practice on the printed page?
And what are some specific examples of show instead of tell?
Well, I'm going to show you using my own work as an example.
I'm the author of two books, The Madonnas of Echo Park,
a novel, and Take This Man, a memoir.
I worked on the memoir off and on for about 18 years.
Part of the problem was that I kept telling the reader what happened.
Now that text wasn't bad, as you're about to hear in a second, but
there was nothing for the reader to see, no picture to form in your mind's eye.
An old writing professor of mine, Judith Grossman, used to say,
this is good Brando, but is it right?
This material was good, but in no way was it right.
Now, it's a little embarrassing to read rough draft material, but I'm doing so
to illustrate what exactly I mean when I say show, don't tell.
So as long as we keep this between us I won't be too embarrassed, all right?
Here's my first paragraph of chapter one of my memoir,
as I submitted it to my editor in December, 2011.
Echo Park, California, where I was born, raised and lived for eighteen years,
was in the 1970s a fragile tapestry left to deteriorate in a sun so
bright it'd crease your corneas.
It was an area with a history awash in silver nitrate.
Mack Sennett built Keystone Studios here, and many of those studios' early Keystone
cop comedy shorts were shot in Echo Park's sloping Irish green hills and valleys.
Its silent era stars migrated west.
Wealth always moves west out here, to the ocean.
But the land stayed behind, its colors bleeding into a Kodachrome Instamatic
patina of terra cotta roof tiles, tall open fields of weeds
bleached to a white wine finish, and palm trees whose fronds beckoned
in the strong Santa Ana winds, with a kissing, hissing, campfire sizzle.
In a documentary about Sunset Boulevard, whose beginnings run through
the neighborhood, Echo Park was pronounced the most beautiful ghetto in America.
Now, think about everything I said a scene needs.
This opening paragraph is missing most of those bullet points.
Over the course of two additional years, I had to learn how to show instead of tell.
Today this is how chapter one of my finished book opens.
Look at what's changed and listen to how many points on my scene checklist I hit.
My grandmother's breath.
Racing across my baby shoulders like western clouds.
I'm propped against the sofa between my grandmother's thick varicose calves
dressed just in toddler shorts, like an oversized stuffed bear.
A phalanx of whirring plastic fans don't cool the soupy air as much as shuffle
it in a circle around us.
Shhh, Grandma says and blows on my hot neck,
rustling the pouty tips of my shoulder length hair off my back.
Some days, my grandmother's breath blots out the violent heat.
Some days, it blows the storms ashore.
My mother's voice forms over our mountain range of a couch.
It could shower a loving rain, tickle me with a sing along for
the summer ants crawling up my legs, or
change the air above into a run home to mama sky, like a russet storm.
Where's my pappas, Mom asks, shovels me into her arms and
blows a raspberry on my tummy.
Pappas means potatoes in Spanish.
Shhh, be quiet, my grandmother says, and hold him like a mother.
My grandmother's breath.
My mother's voice.
My whole world.
My every happiness.
First, this scene opens with an action.
My grandmother blowing across my back to keep me cool.
Next, there's dialogue from both my grandmother and my mother.
Next, there's specific intimate details, the fans that shuffle air around,
my grandmother's varicose calves, and there's also an inner voice that reveals
and reflects about this earliest memory of my mother and my grandmother.
Finally, there's a definite starting and stopping point.
The starting point is my grandmother's breath and the stopping point
is explaining how happy my grandmother's breath made me as a child.
Now let's look at another example.
This here is the first paragraph of my rough draft of chapter four where I talk
about my first live in stepfather, Robert.
I can see my first live in stepfather Robert if I slow down time enough
in my memory.
He's hard to spot because he reveled in the thrill of being in motion.
He demonstrated this to me one smog crusted afternoon after a backyard
game of catch, hanging me over the neighbor's fence by my ankles
over a gully filled with broken glass.
I swung in the breeze like a pendulum, the tips of my hair standing on end as if
electrified by a current, while they grazed shards of busted mirrors.
I swayed aloft in midair laughing and screaming,
watching my reflection dangle from an unseen force that could cut me to pieces.
That crash never came for me.
I was lifted back over the wall.
It didn't come for Robert either.
That was the thrill he ran after, to always be one step ahead of the crash.
Now, let's take a look at that same opening from my finished book,
published three years later.
You want to play catch, son, Robert asked.
My first live in step father Robert took me into the backyard with a baseball and
a pair of gloves, one smog crusted afternoon when I was ten years old.
Bored with the repetitive play, he roughhoused me atop my shoulders, and
then hoisted me over the neighbor's fence, dangling me by my ankles,
above a gully filled with broken glass.
Say catch, he said.
Catch, I said.
I can't hear you, he said, and dropped me down a couple of inches.
I swayed aloft in mid air like a pendulum, the tips of my hair grazing shards of
cracked windows, and howled with equal doses of giddy joy and shrieking terror.
My arm's feeling tired son, say catch.
Catch, I screamed.
Catch, catch, catch, I was lifted back over the wall.
He handed me my baseball, boring game he said and ran in the house.
Robert was a lightning flash.
Hot, blinding, and gone before the thunder came.
Okay, let's look at the differences between those two openings.
Now, unlike the last excerpt, these two openings cover the same material,
which is my first real memory of my first live in step father.
But look at how the first excerpt tells you what's happening.
I can see my first live in stepfather Robert if I slow down time enough
in my memory, versus how I show you using dialogue and
setting in the second excerpt.
Also note how dialogue in the second excerpt creates rising tension,
a concept I discussed in an earlier module, by building the moment, and
stretching it out, as opposed to simply telling you how the moment ends.
In the next segment we're going to talk about how setting and
description make a scene come alive.
[MUSIC]
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