Make A Scene (15 page)

I regarded him closely. There was an ominous ring to the phrase. "What new departmental office?"

"Ah — sorry. Must get along. Headmaster's briefing. Can't be late." That's a joke. Gerry's late to everything. "What new office? Has someone died?"

"Ah — sorry, Roy. Catch you later."

All that has really transpired in this bit of a scene is that Professor Roy Strait-ley has learned about the creation of a new department at the school where he teaches. Yet it feels tense because Roy is a longtime professor at St. Oswald's School for Boys and it is very atypical for him to be uninformed about a major decision. The reader instantly wants to know why Roy hasn't been informed, and the way that Gerry hems and haws makes it clear that the answer to come will not be pleasing to Roy. Harris could easily have made that a boring scene, or just cut to the chase of Roy finding out, but she creates dramatic tension over the simplest interactions because it sets a tone of intrigue, which she follows through on.

You can do the same thing in your own work by throwing change at your characters that they don't have an explanation for.

It's not useful, however, to throw in change just for the sake of it or out of the blue. Change without explanation must have a basis in your plot. It must motivate your protagonist to learn more, and to take his fate into his hands.

Tension comes from the stakes you set for your characters. If there is little or nothing at stake, there will be little tension.

An important way you keep your protagonist from wandering aimlessly about your narrative is to give him an intention in every scene—a job that he wants to carry out that will give purpose to the scene. The intention doesn't come from nowhere—it stems directly from the significant situation of your plot and from your protagonist's personal history. To clarify, an intention is a character's plan to take an action, to do something, whereas a motivation is a series of reasons, from your protagonist's personal history to his mood, that accounts for
why
he plans to take an action. In every scene these intentions will drive the action and consequences; they will help you make each scene relevant to your plot and character development. Intentions are an important way to build drama and conflict into your narrative, too, because as your protagonist pursues his intention, you will oppose it, thwart it, intensify his desire for it, and maybe, only at the end of your narrative, grant him the satisfaction of achieving it.

Every time you begin a scene you want to ask yourself: What does my protagonist want, need, and intend to do? To answer this, you'll need to consider the following:

1. What are the most immediate desires of the character?
An intention is often a character's desire or plan to do something, whether it's

to rob a bank, propose to a woman, go to the store for cigarettes, or tell off a misbehaving family member.

2. When will your characters achieve their intention or meet with opposition?
A scene intention should meet with complications to build drama and suspense. Therefore, try not to allow your characters to achieve their intentions right away, or too easily. Know when and where you will complicate or resolve things. Some intentions will have to be achieved, or else your plot will stop cold.

3. Does the scene intention make sense to your plot?
Be careful not to take tangents and side paths that, while fun to write, don't contribute to the drama already unfolding. Every intention should be related to the significant situation and its consequences.

4. Who will help your characters achieve their goal?
Who will oppose them? Decide what other characters or conditions will support or thwart your protagonists' intentions, and try to keep some resistance in the scene so that intentions are not achieved too soon, nor delayed beyond what feels realistic.

These basic questions will help direct you when you begin thinking about the actions your characters need to take in a new scene. Now we'll look at the kinds of intentions you'll want to focus on: plot-based, and scene-specific.

PLOT-BASED INTENTIONS

The first imperative any character has in any scene must always be tied back in one way or another to the significant situation of your plot, or else your scenes will feel free-floating, like vignettes. An intention, at its most basic, is a course of action your protagonist plans to take (and sometimes
needs
to take) in the scene that arises first out of the significant situation, and then from the consequences that ensue.

For example, Tess Gerritsen's thriller
Vanish
launches its significant situation when medical examiner Maura Isles prepares to do an autopsy on a Jane Doe—an unidentified female corpse—and the dead woman opens

her eyes. No, this isn't a zombie story—the woman is alive, though barely. Maura's overarching plot-based intention, no matter the scene she stars in, is to figure out who this woman is, and what has happened to her—how did she end up in a body bag in the morgue when she wasn't dead! The consequences of the significant situation get underway very quickly, creating new intentions for Maura: For example, the press gets wind of what happened and begins to harass Maura and misquote the medical examiner's office. The nearly dead Jane Doe, once she's in the hospital, turns out to be livid with rage and violent in defending her own life. These are the consequences that spin out from the significant situation, and they drive scene-specific intentions (discussed in the next section).

So, here's an example of Maura Isles engaged in a plot-based intention. Maura is visiting the hospital after Jane Doe has been admitted:

"I'm here to visit a patient," said Maura. "She was admitted last night, through the ER. I understand she was transferred out of ICU this morning."

"The patient's name?"

Maura hesitated. "I believe she's still registered as Jane Doe. Dr. Cutler told me she's in room four-thirty-one."

The ward clerk's gaze narrowed. "I'm sorry. We've had calls from reporters all day. We can't answer any more questions about that patient."

"I'm not a reporter. I'm Dr. Isles, from the medical examiner's office. I told Dr. Cutler I'd be coming by to check on the patient."

"May I see some identification?"

Maura dug into her purse and placed her ID on the countertop.
This is what I get for showing up without my lab coat,
she thought. She could see the interns cruising down the hall, unimpeded, like a flock of strutting white geese.

So, referring to the points mentioned earlier:

1. What is Maura Isles most immediate, plot-related intention?
To

interview Jane Doe and determine her identity, and discover what, if anything, she remembers of how she came to be left for dead.

2. Will she achieve this intention or be thwarted?
The reader doesn't know when in the scene (or if) Maura will achieve her intention, but Gerritsen does—and in a moment, I'll show you how she complicates this intention unexpectedly, creating drama and action. Though the exchange with the clerk may seem inconsequential, it's quite crucial to building tension. If Maura walked unobstructed into the hospital, which is thronged by press clamoring to get in, and went straight to her patient's room, the scene would lack any element of dramatic tension. Here, the reader wonders if she's even going to get in to see the woman, and since the reader is as curious as Maura as to the identity of Jane Doe, thwarting Maura's intention keeps the reader on his toes. On a larger scale, in the novel, other law enforcement officials will aid Maura, and members of the press and Jane Doe herself will thwart her.

3. Does the intention make sense to the plot?
Yes, absolutely—nat-urally Maura will want to speak to the woman who survived death. For the plot to move forward, something new will have to be revealed about Jane Doe.

4. And finally, who helps Maura achieve her intention?
In this scene, after questioning her and scouring her ID, the clerk lets Maura through, helping her achieve one part of her intention—she gets into the hospital. But will she get to interview Jane Doe? Who will help her? In this scene, as it turns out, no one.

Gerritsen ups the ante on the plot in this scene when Jane Doe, who is more than awake—in fact she's volatile and has to be restrained—gets hold of the guard's gun and shoots him, then takes Maura as her hostage. Afraid of the woman, no hospital personnel want to get involved. Maura ends up relying on her own wits and skills to keep from getting shot.

Complicating intentions is a crucial part of building suspense and tension. Remember that if you allow your characters to achieve their intentions too early in the scene or in the narrative, you dissipate any tension or suspense you might have created.

Plot-related intentions can be demonstrated by the protagonist's direct responses to the significant situation through:

• Interior monologue that shows his thoughts and feelings

•Actions he takes to try to change or influence the outcome of the significant situation

• Dialogue in which he expresses his feelings or thoughts about the plot

SCENE-SPECIFIC INTENTIONS

Now, while your protagonist has an umbrella set of intentions related to the plot that will drive him no matter what is happening in the scene, he will also have more immediate scene-based intentions, like to find shelter after his car has been bombed, or to contact a friend he can trust before the cops find him. These immediate intentions still must relate to the plot, but they are more likely to be related to
consequences
—the many smaller actions and events that stem from the significant situation. Scene-specific intentions keep your characters from being aimless.

Let's look at an example from William Trevor's novel
Felicia's Journey,
about a lower-class Irish girl named Felicia on a trip to England. Her plot situation is that she's pregnant and on a journey to meet up with "a friend" (as she tells customs) who is actually Johnny, the father of her child, with whom she hasn't had any contact since their whirlwind dalliance. She doesn't have his address and he doesn't know she's coming, but Felicia, who is desperate to get out of her small-town life, chooses to believe he is going to marry her when he hears the news.

Now, in an early scene, she has arrived in England. Her plot intention is to get Johnny to marry her and provide a father for her baby. Her scene-specific intention—her most immediate need or desire—is to find the lawn-mower factory where Johnny works:

A man in a Volkswagen showroom is patient with her but doesn't know of a lawn-mower factory in the vicinity. Then an afterthought strikes him as she's leaving and he mentions the name of a town that he says is twenty-five or -six miles off. When it occurs to him that she's bewildered by what he's saying he writes the name down on the edge of a brochure. 'Not the full shilling', is an expression her father uses and 'Nineteen and six in the pound': she wonders if the man is thinking that.

So her intention in the excerpt was to find the lawn-mower factory where Johnny works, but since she doesn't know the town or have an address, she goes to a place that is as close to a lawn-mower factory as she can think of: a car dealership. Driven by her overarching plot intention to be with Johnny, her scene-specific intentions are directed by whatever information she obtains that will help her find him. In this case, she receives for her trouble the name of the town the factory may be in.

Her scene-specific intention then quickly becomes complicated, as the town she needs to go to is twenty-six miles away and she has very little money and no form of transportation. Her next scene intention, therefore, is to find transportation to this city (which, of course, leads to more trouble).

The simplest way to put this is: Scene intentions lead to complications, which lead to new scene intentions, and so on, until you begin to resolve your plot toward the end of your narrative.

Intentions give your protagonist a purpose on a large scale (plot) and on a present-moment scale (scene) so that you get to the action at hand and don't leave the reader wondering what is going to happen next. They help you structure your plot and direct your characters. Then, by complicating the intentions through opposition or some other kind of twist, you build tension, drama, and energy, and create new intentions.