The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting March 22, 2016

Here you go. Take a set of characters, and have them deal with their home being taken away, by a forced move. Maybe the landlord has decided that the apartments are going to go condo, or the government has chosen to put a road through right here, or something or other has come up. Your protagonists have a month, more or less, at your choice, to pack up and move.

Do they pick up stacks of boxes at the grocery, and pack, and pack, and pack? Consider having them digging through the stuff that's been stacked in the closet, and what hidden memories and treasures do they encounter there? What goes in the boxes, and what goes in the trash?

What do they do with those old VCR tapes of the Brady Bunch? How about 45 RPM records? Or what about all those ancient photographs of people that they don't quite recognize in some cases?

Anyway, have your protagonists pack up and move. With all the regrets, the memories, and the piles and piles of boxes.

Just one of those changes that life brings us. Write about it!
tink

Original Posting 14 Jan 2010

An easy one for the weekend. Take one or more literary folks -- Shakespeare, Milton, Papa Hemingway, whoever you pick. Now, assume that they are living now, and are looking at the wonderful world of wriitng as we know it -- publishers pulling their hair out, blogs and other online outlets running rampant, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest looking at 10,000 submissions in a month, videogames, movies and all that jazz.

What would they do? Would Shakespeare post his sonnets in a blog? Would Leaves of Grass be a podcast? How about the music video Inferno by Dante?

Go ahead and dream. How would the masters of olde deal with the media of today and tomorrow?

You might even want to give us some examples of what happens when literary luminaries hit the modern stage?

Write!

Original posting 27 July 2008

[In case anyone hasn't been paying attention, this is another chapter from Make a Scene by Jordan E. Rosenfeld. We're wandering through various specific kinds of scenes at this point. And today, we've got . . .]

Chapter 14: Dramatic Scenes

Rosenfeld says that dramatic scenes are where you bring emotional content to the readers. When you deliver stunning emotional consequences, pushing the protagonist and the plot into new territory, you use dramatic scenes.

Rosenfeld says the goal of drama is to get the reader's feelings involved, not fancy writing or even the characters' emotional range. Dramatic scenes often lead up to epiphanies or climax scenes and usually include:

• a focus on emotional intensity
• heavy relationship-oriented interactions, deepening connections or sometimes breaking connections
• actions that push the protagonist into reflection on inner consciousness
• indications of an upcoming turning point

There are lots of forms of drama, but they all push characters into change. Drama forces characters to make decisions and face complications that makes them think about their own behavior and actions and beliefs.

Dramatic scenes often counterbalance contemplative scenes or dialogue scenes, bringing out the emotional confrontation. Since they push protagonists into change, they're more likely in the middle and the end of the narrative than in the very beginning

Structure of Dramatic Scenes: dramatic scenes often open and close at a slow pace, although the emotional intensity and pacing should grow higher and faster until there is some sort of climax, and then may back off again. Often there are three parts:

1. Slow opening, with exposition, setting details, and interior monologues
2. Rising pace and emotional intensity, with dialogue, actions, and emotional content rising to a crescendo.
3. Slow down for reflection, with increasing interior monologue or exposition

Rosenfeld suggests thinking about emotions as hot and cold. Hot emotions such as anger and passion erupts and spillover, they're loud. Too much hot content leads to melodrama. Cold emotions like shock and hurt often results in silence and withdrawal. Too much cool emotion though can make the scene flat and frozen. You need a balance of both for a good dramatic scene.

Dramatic Scene Openings

Dramatic scenes often builds slowly towards the real crisis. Dramatic tension, the potential for problems and conflict, often needs a setup. Narrow the focus down, bring in actions and characters with a sense of foreboding and emotional intensity. Introduce the interaction with another character or with a larger force of opposition.

Then, through escalating events and their actions, push the protagonist to change. "Dramatic scenes put the pressure on your character to transform so that your plot can move forward." Some examples of emotional complications in dramatic scenes include:

• confrontations
• reunions
• borrowed or limited time
• crushed expectations
• the threat of bodily harm or death

"What matters most is that at the end of a dramatic scene, your protagonist has had a new or enlightening emotional experience that causes her to behave, think, or feel differently."

Keep in mind that dramatic scenes need to be based in the overall plot. Intense emotional conflicts should push this story forward.

Closing the dramatic scene: given the emotional intensity of a good dramatic scene, you don't want to end with a cliffhanger. Give the protagonist, and the reader, a moment to reflect on what happened.

Avoiding Melodrama

One of the concerns of many writers is that their dramatic scenes will slide over the line into melodrama. Melodrama, with over-the-top excessive emotional intensity is hard to believe. It's usually a result of a writer not quite trusting the readers to get the point. So to avoid falling into that trap, be subtle. Let your readers figure things out, let them put together the puzzle of the hints and images that you provide.

So where does melodrama happen?

• sentimentality, with cliches, trite, and corny dialogue and sentiments
• hysterics, too loud, too emotional, too far out
• grand or unrealistic gestures, with changed characters acting out their new understanding in bigger than life ways
• silver screen speeches, with the characters suddenly sounding more like actors than actors. When the reader wonders who is writing this dialogue, you're in trouble.
• knee-jerk reactions, with characters changing too easily
• an overabundance of descriptors, a.k.a. purple prose. A heavy layer of adverbs and adjectives sometimes contributes to melodrama.

Reducing the Melodrama Quotient

1. Check the emotional intensity. Are there sufficient grounds for the emotional responses?
2. Fine tune dialogue. Read it aloud, get someone else to read it, and work on it until it sounds like real people talking, not puppets for the writer's voice
3. Adjust character behavior. Make sure the motivations and the actions line up and are natural.
4. Keep gestures human scaled. Your characters need to do things, but they should seem possible.
5. Balance your characters. All of your characters need to be roughly in the same scale. Villains that are so much stronger, interesting, and so forth than the protagonists can make a scene unbalanced.

Checklist for dramatic scenes

1. Does the scene focus on characters' feelings?
2. Does the scene have an emotional climax that pushes the protagonist to change?
3. Are character relationships and interactions the focus of the scene?
4. Are the reactions intense without being melodramatic?
5. Does the dramatic scene introduced an epiphany or contemplative scene?

[Hum? Interesting that we had a whole chapter on dramatic tension that focused on delayed conclusions -- the truck barreling down the alley towards the protagonist, and postponing showing exactly what happens for a while. But now we're talking about dramatic scenes, which I sort of thought might be those that fill in that waiting time, and we've gone off into the emotions and feelings? Oh, well, I shan't let the hobgoblin of small minds hold me back :-]

So instead of Sergeant Friday's "just the facts," we're going to get some emotion into our dramatic scenes, right? One suggestion from me -- think about times that you've felt the emotions and feelings. Pick up details and bits that helped make you feel that way, then transform them for your stories. Maybe that picture of a mother frantically digging into the rubble where a child was buried in an earthquake makes you gulp? Okay, now how can you use that in your story? Or the proud stance when you listen to a song with a someone chasing that impossible dream? Put that into your story!

Assignment? Well, the obvious one is to check out a dramatic scene in one of your stories, and feel free to do that. But . . . let's find that song that makes you sniffle a bit. Might be someone lighting up the sky on Independence Day, might be someone saying "You can let go now, Daddy" or whatever, but take that song. And write up the scene. Go ahead and make it melodramatic if you want to, this is practice. Then tone it down. Can you make that tearjerker just hints and images? Just an impression that makes the reader sigh?

Go ahead, write!

The writer's job is to help readers see the invisible.

Experiences That Change Us Profoundly

In discussing a science fiction book recently, I pondered why one of the small scenes felt rather powerful. Basically, one of the men had killed someone deliberately as a soldier, and the scene is his first meeting with his wife after this. There is a little bit of dialogue, and they share the hurt or concern about how he has changed.

The fans discussing this felt that the experience of a soldier, of killing someone, makes a profound change which cannot be set aside or forgotten. They are right, there is a difference between learning two plus two equals four and learning that I can kill someone.

Then I got to thinking about other experiences that offer the same kind of profound change, that reach down into our souls and make us different. Of course, one of the lessons from the shootings this week has been that some people are affected while others really are not. Sometimes it's because we know someone, sometimes it's just how we look at the event, but we don't all get the same kick from the events. Anyway, I thought about:

1.  The soldier, that knowledge that we can kill someone or have killed someone.
2.  Our own mortality, where we realize that we can (and will) die.
3.  Sexuality, the realization of our own sexual urges and orientation.
4.  Love, learning that we are lovable and can love.
5.  Heartbreak, when we find out that someone else does not feel the same way we do.
6.  Catastrophe, the tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, forest fire, etc. that remind us that sometimes we aren't in control, that our human powers only extend so far.

Obviously, this isn't a complete list. But maybe something to contemplate. What are the events that cause such profound changes in our lives? And what are the changes? How can we capture or show those in a story?

Write!