Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 20: Building Scenes

suspicious death, a suicide attempt, and a fortune in gold, all of

which happened two weeks before Moody even arrived.

o Catton runs the risk here that the reader might feel

overwhelmed, rather like Moody himself does, walking into a

group of people he’s never met before who are talking about

something complicated that happened before he arrived.

But she constructs this opening scene so expertly, with such

attention to the detail, that she hooks the reader into a mystery

that isn’t fully explained until 800 pages later.

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transitioning into one. Once the main purpose of the scene has played

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point has been made—you generally want to wrap it up as quickly as

possible. For some kinds of narrative, you might want to end with a sort

of punchline—a witticism from a character or a sudden revelation—but

even with narratives that aren’t driven by plot, you don’t want to linger

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z There can also be transitions within a scene, such as when a writer

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scenes, but because the plot is so complicated, Catton often

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exposition about a character’s history or psychology.

o Because the novel is written in the style of a 19th-century novel,

sometimes Catton directly addresses the reader in a manner

that calls attention to the transition itself. At other times, she

slips effortlessly from drama to exposition with hardly any

transition at all.

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character, you can simply write something like, “Leo thought back to the