JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #43
March 11, 2021
Fiction writers, especially writing longer narratives, often worry over writing the boring pieces, the interstices between action, those connecting passages that bring us from exciting event to exciting event. This week I’d like to discuss the connective tissue in a narrative.
The whole point of fiction is to create an experience for the reader. Every scene builds up that experience, establishing and carrying forward an emotional journey, and the connections between scenes need to help the reader go from one state of mind in order to set up the next. From this, the fundamental dictum behind the broad show/tell advice is that we must dramatize anything that is necessary to the development of the story, and everything else can be left to summary or interstice, a bridge from emotional development to emotional development.
Sometimes, this can be as simple as saying eventually or soon or then. Scenes that follow immediately one from the next can be connected in this way. In fact, if you hit an emotional moment in the first scene, you can smash-cut to the next in media res with an emotional resolution of that moment. More often, we need to introduce elements to the reader in order to set up the next scene. It can be as simple as telling how much time has passed, as in That afternoon or At the beginning of the next month. Or there may be an intervening event that does not need to be dramatized but that sets up the circumstances of what follows: After the meeting or When Jabril got home or At last the door to the chamber opened. The intervening event can sometimes be elided, but if there is some necessary plot detail, that can be easily summarized: Later that evening, Olivia finally got a chance to search her office. It only took ten minutes for her to find the file tucked away behind a box in the bottom drawer. She pulled it out and set it on the desk....
If there’s a question about whether some intervening event can be summarized or if it ought to be dramatized as a scene of its own, one easy test is to ask whether or not the character or dramatic situation changes within the summarized events. If the character undergoes some change that creates a new dramatic question--if their motives have changed, or if they’ve come to a realization about the true nature of their adversary, or they’ve run out of ideas and are now merely desperate, it’s likely a new scene that dramatizes that change will need to be added so that the reader can experience the full development of the story. In these cases, the key to making it exciting is to dramatize the change by showing the reader how it came about. Show us the exigencies that affect the character and situation and whatever exciting thing might have happened to bring about that internal change in the character.
A story is the intersection of plot and character, the external events that drive a character’s internal changes, and fiction depends upon the dramatization of these moments so that the reader can experience them alongside the character. If we focus our scene-writing on those important moments, none of it should be boring enough that we won’t want--and need--to write it.
Next: On Lie and Lay