Make A Scene (13 page)

Even if you were never an A student in school, you're probably someone who gives everything your best try; after all, you're reading a book on scene writing. At the very least, you can follow the recipe in chapter one and combine all your ingredients to create a rudimentary scene. So don't get discouraged now when you learn that you can write a competent scene that still falls flat.

Scenes often need depth or subtext, texture that links the scene to the themes and larger plot of your narrative, and fleshes them out. A theme is the underlying message, idea, or moral of the narrative. Building in this subtext may take a second draft or more, because you are bound to know your story and characters far better after you have already written them into being.

Scenes that lack subtext read as if they've been dictated by a court reporter: "Bailiff had to escort the defendant, in pearls and red sweater, out of the room. Sunlight filtered in. Courtroom was quiet."

There is nothing wrong with the details above, but a scene full of sentences like that will be guaranteed to lack dramatic tension and emotional complexity. A good scene should ideally have a surface—all that is visible and palpable, from setting to physical descriptions of characters to heard dialogue—and an underbelly, a subtext, where your characters' emotional baggage, agendas, painful secrets, and unconscious motivations lie.

TECHNIQUES FOR CREATING SUBTEXT

Think about the deeper layers of your scenes. The subtext is the layer that contains unconscious information, clues to behavior, even elements of backstory. You can use several different techniques to draw out your story's subtext.

Thematic Imagery or Symbols

In order to work with thematic imagery, naturally you need to know the theme of your book or story. A theme can be thought of as the overall message or large idea of the narrative, as opposed to the plot, which refers to specific events and new pieces of information that take place or are dropped in the narrative. For many writers, theme is determined after the first draft is done. Thematic imagery, then, is images that metaphorically and symbolically conjure your theme.

Some thematic imagery will find its way into your narrative through the magic of the unconscious without you realizing it, but most of it will require conscious application upon revision.

Mary Gaitskill's award-winning novel
Veronica
deals with some dark subjects involving the sordid life of a young model, Alison, and her friend, Veronica, who contracted AIDS in the 1980s. Yet the book is also about redemption and healing. Gaitskill uses images interspersed throughout the book to add subtext to her scenes, like this:

There were small flowers sprouting on bushes growing alongside the path. They were a flat tough red that paled as their petals extended out, changing into a color that was oddly fleshy, like the underside of a tongue.

Comparing the flowers to a human tongue creates an appropriate subtext for the scene they appear in, in which Alison is facing the reality of her friend's illness. The flowers represent Veronica, who is tough and tender but also only human. And they represent Alison, who is known to most people as a glamorous model, but who is also just human, and suffering under the pressure to be beautiful.

Images can also be simple, just tiny highlights in your larger scene: A tree in the night could suddenly look like a face, portending danger; a character who longs to be pregnant could see the faces of babies in her mashed potatoes, and so on.

Of course, you can always opt to work with the more abstract world of symbols. The great mythologist Joseph Campbell said, "The function of symbols is to give you a sense of 'A ha! Yes. I know what it is, it's myself.'"

Symbols elicit meaning without having to be explained; they add a subtle touch of texture to your narrative.

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was very fond of using symbols—like labyrinths, hexagrams, and even a book itself—to represent the complexities of human thought and spiritual mystery.

If your theme is about finding peace, you might plant a dove in the eaves outside a scene, or use an olive branch or a white flag somewhere along the way. The key is to plant your symbols subtly so that the reader doesn't feel as though this subtext is being waved in his face in an obvious manner. You don't need your character to say, "Look, a dove, that makes me think of peace!" A symbol could just turn up as a design on a character's shirt, or on the cover of a book on a desk in someone's office.

Innuendo

It is inevitable that characters in your fiction, as in life, will come across truths that they don't want to admit to themselves or others. Sometimes, this information is obvious to those around them first.

It's important when developing each scene that you plant seeds of things to come later on. Innuendo is a great way to deal with plot developments that haven't come to pass yet; it also helps round out your characters, since innuendo can come in the form of teasing or accusation and usually elicits high emotion.

For instance, say the princess of a medieval kingdom cannot let on that she is in love with a peasant boy because it is a match that can never be. There's nothing more wickedly juicy than a scene in which this piece of information, which she can't accept, is pointed out to her by someone she'd rather not hear it from—perhaps one of her ladies in waiting, who is supposed to keep her opinions in check; or the princess's sister, who will inherit the crown if the princess abdicates it.

"Nice tights," the sister might say to the princess when the peasant boy stops in to deliver a herd of sheep.

The princess, of course, will be shocked and outraged. "As if I'd noticed!" she might say with a rosy hue of indignation on her cheeks.

Innuendo can go further than teasing. You can use it to suggest that someone is responsible for murder or robbery, or to suggest that a character wants another character dead or gone. Innuendo is a way to subtly point fingers so that the reader's attention begins to move just slightly ahead of the scene at hand, layering complication into your scene.

Unconscious or Uncontrollable Behavior

Characters will do all kinds of things intentionally in your scenes, from tenderly caressing an injured animal, to jumping out of flame-engulfed buildings. But there is a whole world of behavior that you can employ in scenes that adds subtext not only to the scene at hand, but to the reader's understanding of the characters and your plot.

A character with a secret history of having been locked in closets for punishment as a child might break into a sweat each time he is in a confined space such as a car or an elevator. Perhaps you don't reveal this detail about the character's past until near the very end of your book, but you can plant seeds in the reader's mind through subtext. If your character sweats each time he's in the car, the elevator, or even a small New York apartment, this registers in the reader's unconscious without having to be plainly stated, thus creating a question that the reader is curious about (why is he sweating?), but does not yet have an answer for.

In Sheila Kohler's psychologically tense novel
Crossways,
protagonist Kate has been forced to leave her life in Paris and return to her childhood home in South Africa due to a tragedy: A car accident has killed her sister, Marian, and left her brother-in-law, Louis, injured and in the hospital.

Louis, a surgeon, is used to being in control of everything in his life—including his wife and their three children. Now that he is injured, and his sister-in-law, Kate, is around to question him, he has a difficult time controlling the rage he usually could suppress publicly.

The nurse leans over his bed. She pats the back of his hand. He has a sudden, strong urge to smack her across her pretty face with it. It is the same urge he had when his wife would ask him what he was doing.

The reader begins to question what it is in Louis's past that causes him to behave so badly toward people less powerful than himself, and of course, the answer is eventually provided and brings with it the final piece of the plot that explains Marion's death.

Foreground and Background

Scenes can have backgrounds the same way that paintings do, and backgrounds refer to more than just setting. While you draw the reader's attention to what is happening most noticeably in the foreground, you can plant subtle messages and emotional layers in the background through actions. For example, if a couple is about ready to make love in the scene at hand—the foreground—while another couple is fighting in the next room— the background—not only is this a great setup for comedy or drama, but it

plants the idea that perhaps the loving couple is moving toward the fate of the fighting couple. You can add suspenseful texture to your scenes without having to resort to narrative summary or intruding into the narrative with statements about how this couple might be destined for failure.

Jane Hamilton's novel
A Map of the World
opens when protagonist Alice, a school nurse, agrees to babysit her neighbor's two little girls. When Lizzy and Audrey arrive, however, Alice's own daughters, Emma and Claire, are giving her such grief that she takes a moment of respite to recollect herself, barely a couple of minutes. It is enough time for young Lizzy, a toddler, to make her way down into the pond and nearly drown.

In the next scene, Alice is at the hospital waiting for Lizzy's family to arrive and for the doctors to tell them of the child's prognosis. She has no idea if Lizzy will live, and if any of their lives will be the same from here on out. Hamilton sets us up for the direction of Alice's (and Lizzy's) fate by throwing this into the scene subtext:

I remember glancing across the room and noticing Robbie Mackessy's mother. Robbie was a kindergartner at Blackwell Elementary. ... He was frequently sick, because of his mother, I thought, because of her negligence. She was leafing through a magazine looking, not at the print, but at me. She was squinting, as if she couldn't stand to have her eyes wide open, to see all of me at once. . It was her ugly mouth, her sneer that made me feel like crying.

The talk of negligence, the details about not being able to "see all of me at once" are all subconscious suggestions of a dark and tragic turn for the worse for both characters.

Each scene is a multidimensional creation. Don't forget the many ways you can deepen and add complexity to it by enriching subtext, a subject that will be addressed in each of the scene types discussed in part three.