Studio Writers Share Process
“For dramatic impact we must be grounded in place and experience the illusion of real-time passing, which only occurs in scenes. We must live the moment along with the characters, especially in moments of change…While summaries supply the connective tissue, scenes are the blood and breath of fiction, narrative essays, and memoir.”
From Showing vs. Telling by Laurie Alberts
It went on for sixteen weeks. This teaching on scene. I was studying with Tom Spanbauer in his Dangerous Writing Workshop in SW Portland. In the basement of his rickety old house, the table littered with candles, sugary offerings of brownies and cookies, and various phallus and religious icons, Tom told me and all the other writers to write in scene or moments in time.
“Stay present,” he would say. “Stay close to your moments.”
Others were doing this thing, this “scene writing,” and I knew that they were creating amazing work that held me close and left me with an unnamable longing. But I couldn’t do it, or maybe I wouldn’t for a long time because the specifics of the teaching didn’t make sense.
I’d stumble out of those classes bemused and later, would tell my husband I was never, not ever, going to get it. Scene made no sense.
Then, four months into my studies, I read what felt slow, boring and tedious words.
“You did it! There it is,” Tom said. “A scene.”
That was it for me. Though I still had no idea what I was doing, I continued to write scene after scene and never went back.
Scene is difficult and the learning curve brutal, but once you get this, you are set.
Now it’s your turn…when did you finally manage to write a scene? Share in the comments and know you are helping writers who still struggle. Sharing your process helps everyone. XO J.
I become so wrapped up in, wanting to tell the story, that the butler did it with a lead pipe in the library. I forget the excitement of the butler, hidden behind the library door hearing the footsteps get closer and closer as he raises the lead pipe, higher and higher.
Fortunately/unfortunately, I need to redo what I just spent the last two weeks working on. Rather than offering me the opportunity to learn, why couldn’t God have just made me smart?
John
You are smart and you are getting better, and better, at scene. Actually…scene writing is about being a little less intelligent because you are “getting out of your head” in a scene and into the body of the narrator. You are agreeing to enter experience.
I don’t know that I have totally done it yet! But I think I’ve at least mostly gotten what writing in scene is. Partly thanks to studying at the Studio, and partly thanks to being asked to read Dickens! I know that learning about scene has changed my writing. I do not write the same as I did last year. I look forward to further changes as the power of scene continues to seep into my brain.
Scene, scene, scene! I’m learning how to write them, now I have to learn how to join them together without so much ‘telling’. I so want to ‘tell’ my story and have written thousands of words to do so, now I’m going back and grabbing ‘chunks’ of material and making scenes. It is a process, for sure 🙂
I’m just discovering how appealing scene is for readers, even though I’ve enjoyed many books with scenes. I have a nasty conditioning of trying to tell my story as the facts ramble in my head in an efficient, abbreviated manner. This strikes me as a kind of laziness on my part, or aversion to being in the present and staying close to the moment, like Spanbauer’s quotes above. I think my first real attempt at scene was in the pages I read last Tuesday of what happened in the Kabul airport. I felt transported back there and the feelings overwhelmed me.
I am incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon Jennifer’s Scene vs. Exposition class last year. I’m relatively new to creative writing, so getting to start off with this teaching has helped me drive right in and write like crazy! I joined the studio in the fall of last year and began submitting my work. It only took a few submissions before I submitted a scene for feedback after following (nearly religiously) Jennifer’s Scene Recipe Card I’d gotten from her class. I felt like all I had done was tell the story of what happened to me but with the added flare of various location details, dialogue, people and personality, and the sparkle of sensory detail. It was like magic! I got my readers to laugh! It was a total “high” and I’ve been chasing it ever since!
I know I’m doing it probably too much sometimes because I don’t stay present enough in the moment. I change time and place too frequently so it is still very much of a challenge but when I started writing dialogue I think is when I finally understood what it meant to be in the scene. Now if I could just stay there longer and embellish rather than moving forward it would be a much better reading experience.
I definitely agree with Julia about the scene recipe card which is posted right above my laptop and is it constant reference.
In the beginning, this piece of paper read Scene Recipe Card. There were specific instructions that I followed. At first, it seemed very technical. But there was a point when I realized that everything I was being asked to do to write the scene actually told my story, and I didn’t need to explain everything. For a while during this learning process, I would get it and then lose it. After a lot of writing and following Jennifer’s teaching on Scene vs. Exposition, I became more comfortable with writing scenes. I can’t tell you that my scenes are perfect or that I don’t fall into telling vs. showing, but I do understand the process now, and that is an amazing feeling that has deepened my appreciation for the art of writing and has given me more self-confidence to tell my story.
Yes, Jennifer’s scene recipe card is such a worthy tool. When I first read it, I thought, this is brilliant! Why hasn’t anyone ever done this before? In fact, I need to dig it out again and put it where I write to make sure I’m including all the ingredients.
Scene became clear to me once I realized that movies are just a bunch of scenes sewn together. Scenes make us feel like we’re there and that’s what the movie goer and the reader want. A good movie, a good story, makes us feel.
XO XO XO