After a very full first day at FyreCon, I’m ready for a nap. But first, I wanted to take this time to share an idea that perhaps shouldn’t have been new to me but was. And maybe it will be new to you as well. That is that scenes can (and should) be treated like a book.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
According to Ryan Decaria (author of Devil in the Microscope)–and I’m paraphrasing here–any advice for writing a novel also applies to writing scenes.
Yup, you read that correctly. And thinking back on that, it’s so obvious. In his class today at FyreCon, Decaria compared the structure of a novel to the structure of a scene. In both, there is a(n):
- beginning
- middle
- end
In both a scene and novel as a whole, there should be:
- escalation
- try/fail cycle
- yes, but; no, and
- success
- failure
- and other important devices
With this newfound knowledge in mind (thank you, FyreCon!), I have a feeling it will take me far less time to construct scenes from here on out. Before, I knew what needed to happen to help the plot, story, character arc, etc., but I never really sat down to think about it at such detail. Don’t get me wrong, I have been writing scenes this way for a while now, but I’ve never actually considered what I was doing. It’s like a child that grew up cooking hamburgers on the grill. Sometimes the burgers burn. Sometimes they’re undercooked. After years of this practice, the child knows instinctively when to flip the burgers so they’re at the perfect internal temperature. Then, one day while cruising the Internet, this kid (now an adult) stumbles across a popular cooking site that gives a cook time for burgers of varying thickness in order to reach the perfect internal temperature. The kid (man) has been cooking burgers like this for years! It was only now he discovered there was an actual process to it.
Alright, so that was a HORRIBLE analogy, but we’ll work with it. I’ve been writing for so long that I have been treating scenes like I would treat an entire book. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not quite at that perfect internal temperature, but I’m not so far off, either. But now, with this bit of information at my disposal, I can speed up my scene work and really focus on what would be best for each scene.
Welp, I hope you were as flabbergasted at that news flash as I was. If not, I at least hope you were able to glean something from this. And now, it’s nap time.