Lecture 20: Building Scenes

Building Scenes ..............................................................................

Lecture 20

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riters approach the day-to-day process of composition in many

ways, and of course, what you do as a writer each day depends

on the overall shape of your narrative and on the purpose of

the particular passage you’re working on. Writers also differ on what they

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ideas to be conveyed, the crafting of elegant sentences, and so on. In the end,

no matter how you approach the day-to-day process, every writer is faced

with the prospect of making the whole thing hang together. We’ll talk about

that in our next two lectures, but in this lecture, we’ll discuss what a writer

does each day, that is, creating individual scenes.

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through space from one place to another, as long as there isn’t a big

jump in time. In other words, a scene shows more or less everything

that happens to a character, or between two or more characters, during a

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z There are, of course, many types of scenes, ranging from brief scenes

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scenes that show many characters in a vast setting. There are scenes

that are merely transitional, scenes that are pivotal moments in the plot,

scenes where we learn the thoughts of only a single character, scenes in

which the only action is conversation among the characters, and scenes

full of violent, thrilling action.

z Deciding what you make into a scene as opposed to what you choose

to reveal through exposition—in other words, what you choose

to dramatize rather than summarize—is generally fairly easy. You