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The Inside Story - A Blog

January 26th, 2015

1/26/2015

 

Does Your Scene Pop?

Writing a novel is a lot like home decorating. The blank page is like an empty room, like a white wall. My natural instinct when I sit down to write is to try anything – just get words on paper. This is not a good strategy for home decorating. Or writing. What connects one scene to the next is the plot, driven by each character’s conflicting motivations. Because I just moved, I’ve learned that what connects one room to the next is color. A color palette. Deborah, my co-writer, introduced me to this concept while we were at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

There’s this word that writers and decorators use. Pop. As in: Let’s make that character, or that color, pop. The idea is that everything is part of a blended whole, and yet one thing draws the eye and captures the attention. When the right color pops, the room looks vibrant. When the right character pops, a scene comes to life.

To make this work, the decorator and the writer know that the person viewing a room, and the person reading a novel are engaged at several levels all at once. The surface, the predominant color or plot, is what your eye lands on first. Then you begin to absorb the stuff beneath the surface, like subplots and accent colors. And then there’s the character that can’t be ignored, the unexpected plot twist, the color that pops in a way that delights and surprises. It makes people look for more. Good writing, like a well-coordinated room, is complex, using layers of color and texture.

This doesn’t come naturally to me. My instinct is to keep putting words on paper and shoving them around, the way you move furniture when you’ve bought things on a whim. Nothing really fits, but you’re going to make it work. Keep moving the sofa; maybe it will look better on the other side of the room. Keep rearranging the scenes – if each individual word, each sentence, each plot point is good, then eventually the whole thing will turn into a book.

Or not.

Smart shoppers bring a tape measure to the store. Deborah (a Realtor) keeps an industrial strength one in the trunk of her car. People who know how to decorate keep the whole home in mind. In addition to the color that pops, they use the same colors and similar textures to create a flow throughout the home. What happens is that the body, the psyche, and the emotions are drawn seamlessly from one room to the next. When it’s done correctly, it is sensed subconsciously.

In a well-written novel, the plot and the subplots work like fabric and patterns, capturing the mind and emotions and pulling them through each scene. Ideally, the reader becomes submersed in and feels at home in the story. They have a satisfying sense of it had to happen that way, and yet they feel surprised and delighted by those characters that pop and come alive.

Writing a book takes a lot longer than decorating a house. The characters get bossy. They wake up on the page and have their own opinions. This is like the sofa suddenly deciding for itself that it wants to go under the window. And it makes you move it. In a room, accent colors are useful because if you get tired of the way things look, you just swap out the pillows. Voilà! Same palette, but something else pops. But in a book, you can’t just toss another character into the scene the way you casually add a cushion, because that can change EVERYTHING.

In The Chamber And The Cross, right up until our very last draft, we had a nebulous intruder who threatened Laura in a vague way. He was always off-stage, and we were never really sure who he was. Some kind of vagrant, probably a guy with a drug problem. Dangerous, but not specific. Then Deborah made him pop. She gave him a name: Oliver. She gave him a reason for being in the story: he wants what Laura has. Suddenly the plot took a very creepy twist. Like good decorators, we shifted and moved other characters and scenes, and basically re-measured and restructured the book. That final rewrite took a long time. We weren’t just painting a room; we were rebuilding the story from the foundation.

The book took so long to write that we doubted we would do a sequel – until our readers demanded one. This time we’re planning ahead, working out the plot and creating our book’s color palette. This time, all the subplots will match. Our characters will pop, look good in their scenes and know exactly where they fit into the story. I’m certain of this the way I’m certain that I never want to make another change to my décor.
​

Oops – gotta go – Deborah has more coupons for Bed, Bath & Beyond.

January 22nd, 2015

1/22/2015

 

Scenes Should Work Hard
​- Like a College Dorm Room

Recently I visited the freshman dorms at a local university where my niece is in school. She lives in a small room about the size of the kitchen in my old apartment. Three young women are crammed in with three bunks, three desks, and ladders connecting everything floor to ceiling. One side of the room has a double bunk, and the other has a raised bunk with a desk beneath it. Visitors stand in the doorway. If you want to hang out, you have to start climbing ladders. In addition to her desk and closet, each girl has a computer, photos, knickknacks, and those plastic storage boxes purchased by helpful moms. The room works hard to meet the needs of its occupants.
When you’re writing a novel, each scene should work just as hard as a college dorm room.
When Deborah and I were trying to wrestle our unwieldy manuscript into a manageable size, we kept deleting scenes. At first we were trying to reduce word count, but that only caused trouble. We needed to build smooth transitions and cause-and-effect flow. Each scene was supposed to lead seamlessly into the next plot point, while also deepening our characters. Obviously you can’t do that if you keep throwing things away. That would be like a college freshman ditching her computer because her roommates wanted more elbow room. Writers can take a lesson from the dorms: there is a clever space for the stuff your story needs.
Every scene needs basic description, action and emotion. And then, like the desks and bunks, you add layers that do even more. Deborah and I have adopted an expression when we think a scene is shallow. We say it needs to work harder. Rather than cut it, we look for ways to build in more emotion, more actions that reveal character traits, and more details to add tension.
Whenever I don’t know what to do with a character, I send them into the kitchen. That’s my comfort zone; I know how to describe the utensils and actions. Naturally, there is a scene in The Chamber And The Cross in which Laura is cooking. The problem with the first draft was that she wasn’t doing anything but making supper. The scene wasn’t working very hard.
Deborah’s rewrite of the scene revealed a lot about herself. She added description of flow-blue china, something that she loves. For years she’s been collecting plates and platters, and her kitchen is designed to highlight the dishes on display. Clearly she likes traditional, yet homey décor.
The descriptive detail helped, but we still needed our kitchen scene to show more about Laura. To achieve that, we let the actions of cooking fade into the background, and brought another character into sharp focus. While Laura is preparing the meal, the housekeeper, Winnie, tells her stories and accidently lets slip an old family secret that adds to the tension. Through an innocent conversation, Laura (and the reader) gather important information. By adding more people, dialogue, and emotion into the same amount of space, the scene started working harder.
Deborah and I wrote multiple versions of most of our scenes. We also made some tough decisions to cut a few personal favorites. That old material reveals a lot about our process, and if you want to have a look, we’ve created a section on our webpage for CUT SCENES. Think of them like drafts of term papers that never got turned in.
Any college kid will tell you that they can always use more stuff. And experienced writers will tell you that a scene can always work harder.

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Between engaging dialogue, interesting characters and vivid settings,"The Chamber and The Cross" is simply the type of book you can't put down. - Jen Van Tieghem
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