Question.243 - Unit 1 Forum 1. Begin a new thread for your response. 2. All forum posts are to be submitted as Word documents. You may respond to student posts in the text box provided. 3. Respond to at least two other student forum posts. Unit 1 Forum In our lecture notes, I discussed scene building. When a seven-year-old tells you about her trip to Disneyland, any grown-up listening is hard pressed to figure out what it is she is talking about.? It goes something like this:? I liked the rides, but my favorite, wait, Mom got sick on that one ride and then we had to go back to the hotel. I didnt like the food there. Johnny peed in the pool, but Daddy said not to tell anybody because wed get in trouble. I got sunburned.? Everything we write is designed to reveal our characters and move them forward through conflict. This we do by writing well-crafted scenes. It is essential that you understand a scene has a beginning, middle and end. I may tell you my sister is a crackpot, but unless you know her or someone exactly like her, that doesnt tell you much. If I put her in a bowling alley wearing a wedding dress she stole from a boutique, now we are getting somewhere. Maybe she argues with the guy who gives out those gross bowling shoes and threatens an elderly woman who asks about the groom. The reader starts to get the picture that my crackpot sister is just that.? Whatever happens in that bowling alley is confined in a scene. Does the character hike up her dress and bowl a few frames?? Maybe she orders a pizza. Does she sit down and cry? The reader needs to feel something for this character and we, as writers, have to create that.? ?Forum: In Mitch Weilands podcast, posted below, he discusses a scene from Anthony Doerrs short story, The Hunters Wife. I have highlighted this scene in the copy of the story that is provided for the forum. Choose a different scene from the story and in a one page double-spaced paper following MLA guidelines, comment on these three points provided by Mr. Wieland as they relate to the scene: 1.??Scenes need to have shape or structure. They are dramatic units. They are often mini-stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They have an arc that rises to a turning point. 2.??Scenes are often built around an event, large or small. Something?happens?in them. Usually a kind of change or shift has occurred by the end of the scene. Something interesting has transpired. 3.??Lastly, scenes have a purpose or function in the narrative. There must be a?reason?you are showing this moment to your reader. Scenes advance the story or reveal something about the characters. ?Mitch Wieland's Podcast Publication Date: October 15, 2011 Citation Information Mitch Wieland. "Fiction Writing: Building Vivid Scenes"?Boise State - Beyond the Blue Faculty Podcasts?(2011) ? ? ? Boise State Podcast ? Fiction Writing: Building Vivid Scenes ? The following is a podcast with Mitch Wieland from Boise State. Mitch is a master at writing scenes, so for time reasons, I have put in bold the parts of this that are essential to scene building. ? ? Hello, my name is Mitch Wieland. Im a full professor of English here at Boise State, and I teach fiction in our MFA Program in Creative Writing. My latest novel,?Gods Dogs, was recently named the Idaho Book of the Year. Currently, Im a 2011-2012 Boise State Arts and Humanities Research Fellow. During my year-long fellowship, I will be finishing my new novel about Japan. Ill be visiting Tokyo in the spring to research the culture and setting. ? ? For todays mini-lesson, we will discuss how to build scenes in novels and short stories that capture the readers heart and mind. We will also look briefly at the core elements that memorable scenes usually contain. ? Fifteen years ago, a wildfire broke out behind our house. My wife and I lived in the high desert country, surrounded by sage and chaparral. As we watched the flames roil against the night sky, I remembered another moment when Id witnessed a wildfire in the dark. The scene before me was exactly like one Id watched before: the red glow of the flames, the heat and smoke distorting the colors into a surreal dream, the foregrounded silhouettes of fire trucks with their flashing lights, and small figures running back and forth. The trouble was that I could not remember?where?or?when?Id ever been remotely close to such a fire. ? Flash forward a few months. I am teaching an MFA seminar on fiction and we are halfway through the collection?Rock Springs?by Richard Ford. In the story Empire, Victor Sims and his wife Marge are traveling by train across the Idaho panhandle when the train is stopped on the tracks in the dead of night. Here is a passage I read to the class: ? ? When he let himself into Marges roomette, Marge was awake. And out the window he saw the center of everyones attention. A wide fire was burning on the open prairie. Out in the dark, men were moving at the edges of the fire. Trucks were in the fields and high tractors with their lights on, and dogs chasing and tumbling in the dark. Far away he could see the white stanchions of high-voltage lines traveling into the distance. Its thrilling, Marge said and turned and smiled at him. The tracks are on fire ahead of us. I heard someone outside say that. People?are running all over. I watched a house disappear. Itll drive you to your remotest thoughts. What about us? Sims said, looking out the window into the fire. I didnt think of that. Isnt that strange? Marge said. It didnt even seem to matter. It should, I guess. The fire had turned the sky red and the wind blew flames upwards, and Sims imagined he felt heat, and his heart beat faster with the sighta fire could turn and sweep over them in a moment, and they would all be caught, asleep and awake . . . A sense of powerlessness and despair rose in him, as if there was help but he couldnt afford it. The worlds on fire, Vic, Marge said. But it doesnt hurt anything. It just burns until it stops. ? Ford ends this intense moment with the following paragraph: ? Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around, as if stars held the only light. ? This passage is the so-called memory Id had the night of the fire. It was not, of course, a memory at allnot something Id witnessed firsthandbut, rather, something Id simply read while living in Tokyo in 1987, the year?Rock Springs?was published. My mind had processed and stored Fords scene as?lived experience,?as if I had been physically present on the train that night. Here then is the power of scene: the ability to transport the reader into dramatic real time, to place them there among the characters, seeing and feeling what they are seeing and feeling, a type of virtual reality created not with special equipment but with words. Richard Ford had tricked my mind into thinking I had personally watched that fire burn. ? Lets take a closer look at the use of real time in narratives. ? First the very basics: scenes are made of concrete details that engage the senses. ? If I had only one tip to leave with you today about writing dynamic scenes, it would be to build them from concrete and sensory detail. ? The simple truth is that readers respond more fully to the particular, to precise concrete detail, than generalizations and abstractions. In addition, we humans are sensory creatureswe take in the world by seeing and hearing, by tasting and smelling, by feeling. There is no faster way to engage the reader than via details that invoke these senses. A single tactile detail can pull the reader into the scene faster than any number of beautifully worded abstractions. With this in mind, the writer is trying to create on the page what the late George Garrett called a sensuously affective texture. George defined his term as a sculptural surface that, so far as the minds experience of it is concerned, is virtually indistinguishable from reality. As writers, then, our goal is to convince the reader of the sensory experience being offered on the page. ? Years ago, as an MFA student at Alabama, I had the good fortune to study with George in a form and theory class. George, with his big sly grin and jolly laugh, had the audacity to suggest that we lofty graduate students write,?I have five senses?at the top of our blank pages. We did this until he felt we were adequately employing a range of sensory possibilities in our scenes. It worked. ? Madison Smartt Bell, another student of George Garretts, speculates that contemporary readers (and writers) have been heavily influenced by watching movies, that they have been trained by the cinema to desire scene in written narratives. As avid film watchers, we now prefer to witness the action firsthand in our fiction, to have the actors onstage before us. We derive a distinct satisfaction from forming our own opinions about the meaning of what we are witnessing on the page. This act, of course, replicates how we operate in real life: each day we watch and listen to the people who inhabit our world and reach our own conclusions about them. ? As a result, writers of fiction over the decades have moved toward a more cinematic approach in their work, offering us moments in real time that allow the actions and dialogue to do the work. We readers are left to interpret what is happening before our eyes. Bell speculates that another reason for the frequent use of scene in todays fiction is that since the 19th?century we have grown weary of being told what to think about our characters, that we resist authorial guidance and direction, that we dont want to have people and events explained to us in summarized fashion. ? While serving as the fiction editor of?Black Warrior Review,?and as the current editor of?The Idaho Review, I have seen thousands of manuscripts over the last 18 years. Each year, I tell my new staff of MFA students that there is no better teacher of narrative technique than to sit in the editors chair and read submissions. They soon learn this to be true. When faced with a stack of stories to read that lack in immediacy, my students quickly understand the importance of engaging the reader and drawing him or her into the fictional world. ? If forced to hazard a guess, I would say the number one reason stories are rejected outright by the?Idaho Review?staff is weak rendering of scene, which in turn creates a lack of connection to what they are reading. Instead of being treated to a distinct stage with flesh and blood actors, my readers encounter a hazy or obscure setting, disembodied voices, thoughts and emotions arriving from all directions. Rather than watching people at one particular moment in one particular location, a moment?anchored?in time, my readers drift through some generalized time and setting where there are people, sure, and things are being said and felt, but everything seems to exist in some ghostly dimension. Quite simply, my readers are not treated to a sufficient exterior view to visualize the unfolding narrative. ? Now lets look more closely at how scenes are built, at the nuts and bolts of scene, at their component parts. ? At the most basic level, what elements are used to create moments of real time in narratives? What are the building blocks of scene? ? They are: ? Action (What the characters do while onstage.) ? Dialogue (What they say.) ? Description (This can be descriptions of the setting. Or descriptions of the characters appearance, for example.) ? Interiority (This can be thoughts, feelings, and internal sensations of the character.) ? So these are the tools at our disposal: action, dialogue, description, and interiority. What should be considered when choreographing a scene? How should we mix these elements??What arrangement or patterning of these techniques should be used to create a memorable scene? ? Strong scenes often have a pleasing balance of these basic components. Effective scenes have a seamless, well-timed mixing of dialogue and action, action and thought, description and dialogue and so fortha satisfying movement from exterior details to interior response and back again. ? In addition, it is often the?timing?and?rhythm?of the switch from one component to the next that creates a vivid scene for the reader. Indeed, the arrangement of these elements will control the readers pace through the scene. For example, a run of pure dialogue without the surrounding stage business will speed up the scene, while extended interior reflection or ample description will slow down the scene to the point of elongating time. ? On the negative side of things, too much or too little of these elements can harm a scene. Too much interior thought or too much continuous dialogue can risk having the physical world disappear. The actors can suddenly lack bodies; the stage can go blank. Too much description and the scene can bog down; time can stall in unpleasing ways. ? Your favorite writers should be studied for their placement of dialogue and action, description and thought, et cetera. Their distinctive scene choreography, their orchestration of scene elements, can offer you a model that can be imitated to great benefit. ? Lets look at another excerpt to illustrate these points. Here is a scene from the short story The Hunters Wife by Anthony Doerr, an occasional visiting writer at Boise State. As you listen, consider not only Doerrs balanced mixing of action, dialogue, description and interiority, but also his satisfying scene choreography. Listen for examples of concrete, sensory detail. This scene takes place in the middle of a winter night in Montana. A man who works summers as a hunting guide has brought a young woman to his cabin on their first date. To impress the woman, he has decided to take her to a nearby spot where a grizzly bear is hibernating. ? Doerr example. ? Here we have an effortless blending of the elements of scene. Characters act and speak in a physical place. They respond internally to the exterior action. We also have the vivid and the sensory. We smell the rankness of the bear. Feel the soft tips of the fur. We hear the blood thumping through his veins. We watch meteors burn across the sky. We are, in effect, transported to this frozen night. We are physically present as the ice plates are lifted from the slumbering bear. As we place a kiss on the grizzlys chest, his curved rib flexes against our own nose. ? In our final minute or two, lets consider three larger elements that are important to scene building: ? 1) Scenes need to have shape or structure. They are dramatic units. They are often mini-stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They have an arc that rises to a turning point. Consider how the Anthony Doerr scene operates as a self-contained dramatic unit. We begin with the couples arrival at the dead tree. We end at a moment of heightened drama where the young woman has strangely gained access to the mind of the bear. Along the way, there has been a steadily rising arc of tension, a build-up of energy. The scene turns when the young woman wants to touch the grizzly, and peaks when she visualizes his dreams. ? 2) Scenes are often built around an event, large or small. Something?happens?in them. Usually a kind of change or shift has occurred by the end of the scene. Something interesting has transpired. When we finish visiting with our hibernating bear, we feel something out of the ordinary has taken place. ? 3) Lastly, scenes have a purpose or function in the narrative. There must be a?reason?you are showing this moment to your reader. Scenes usually must advance the story, or reveal something about your characters. Often its both. Test your scenes for their functionality. Many writers believe that?all?key moments in a narrative,?all?moments of crucial significance, must be rendered in scene. The flip side of all this is that non-essential moments should?not?be in scene. One of my teachers, the novelist John Keeble, suggested this simple test of whether a scene was crucial or not in your story: can the scene in question be cut without harming the narrative? If the scene is cut and the narrative doesnt unravel before your eyes, then the scene probably wasnt important. Keeble offered these three solutions if your scene doesnt pass this crucial test: ? Cut the scene. Revise the existing scene until it does matter. Replace the current scene with a new scene that is essential to the narrative. ? So, as you can see, scenes are?choices?the writer makes. What sequence of events will be shown to the reader to create a narrative progression that builds toward some satisfying end? Scenes are?events?that your characters pass through, events that test them, exert pressure on them, until their essential natures are revealed. ? To wrap up, having the ability to build a memorable scene is one of the biggest skill sets a writer can have. If you succeed, one of your scenes may remain so vivid and immediate that it lives on in the memory of your readers with the power of lived experience, one of the greatest compliments I can imagine as a writer. ? Thank you, and best of luck in your writing.

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