January 22nd, 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.