Hi Friends. It’s been a while. I’m excited to jump into the new year with a steady line-up of Write On newsletters headed your way. But first, some news: I’ve transferred this newsletter to the Substack platform, which means readers can now like and respond to these missives. I’m hopeful this feature may foster a sense of community and eventually lead kindred spirits to find one another in the comment threads. Writing buddies are good things to have.
On to today’s topic, which can be summed up in this way:
Beware the conditional tense when writing scenes!
Something I bump into with surprising frequency in student writing is confusion about what, exactly, constitutes a scene. The most common problem is lack of specificity.
A scene happens in a specific place, at a specific moment in time. If there’s dialogue, specific words are spoken. For instance, you might write a scene about a teenage protagonist eating a tuna sub with their best friend on a sunny afternoon after they’ve cut class together. In this scene you might describe the way the sun slants through the trees on that particular afternoon, and how the guy behind the counter at the sub shop seems to be in a bad mood. The teenagers might discuss something that happened that morning. You might describe the way those particular sandwiches taste. Maybe they’re a little too salty… You get the idea.
But let’s say these two characters cut class and go to the sub shop on a weekly basis. Then you might be tempted to talk about how the two of them always used to get tuna subs on Wednesday afternoons. How they would always ride their bikes into town. How the friend’s laugh would sound whenever they raced ahead. And that’s perfectly legit. That’s fine. It just wouldn’t be a scene. What you’d have then would be more a “state of affairs description” (let’s call it a SOAD for short). And while a SOAD can sometimes be a kinda-sorta-scene, it’s crucial to understand that it’s not actually a scene. There are a couple of reasons why this is important.
1. If you write too many SOADs, things will start to feel abstract, rounded off at the edges, not quite real.
2. If you’re not clear on the difference between a SOAD and a scene, you’re likely to blur them together. The result? A weird kind of time-slippage, often accompanied by mixed up verb tenses.
Fiction writers can lean too heavily on SOADs, but memoirists are especially prone to making this mistake. I think this is because the urge to communicate the way things used to be, to get across the general vibe of the time in question, is so very pressing for the memoirist. The problem is that general vibes don’t carry a memoir (or a novel, for that matter). You need bona fide scenes to let your readers into the story. Too many SOADs and you’ve got a foggy, soggy construction.
Let’s look at an example of each. Both passages below are taken from Anita Brookner’s slim and subtle novel Hotel du Lac.
Here’s a SOAD (a “state of affairs description”):
At this time [in the evening], she knew, her neighbor’s child, a child of heartbreaking beauty whose happiness and simplicity were already threatened by a crippling speech defect, would come out to see if she were there (but she was always there) and would slip through the hedge to say goodnight. And Edith would watch her wrestling with the words, her thin little body juddering with the effort to unlock them, and she would smile and nod as if the words were perfectly intelligible, and would put her hands to the child’s jerking head to still it, and would whisper, “Good night, my little love. Sleep well.”
As you can see, this passage paints a very vivid almost-scene. But technically speaking it’s not a scene because it describes only a general state of affairs. How do we know this is the case? Because the conditional tense is all over the place. And because of the little phrase “she was always there.”
By way of contrast, consider this scene from Hotel du Lac:
She made a pot of very strong tea, and while she was waiting for it to draw she opened the kitchen door to inspect her garden. But there was a small and niggling wind which blew a tiny shower of dust around her ankles, and the door kept swinging backwards and forwards, interrupting the curious light, bringing intimations of cloud, although there was no cloud, and a cessation of things to be taken for granted.
Can you see the difference? The SOAD, though certainly beautiful, feels almost as if we’re looking through a vaseline-coated lens at the older woman and stuttering little girl in the garden. Whereas in the scene above, you can practically feel that weird dust shower. You can almost hear it—a mysterious, tiny, glittering sound. The wind blowing the door back and forth, the ominous light in the sky… All of these details thrum with particularity.
I think writers often rely on SOADs (or unwittingly slip into SOADs) when they should be writing scenes because SOADs approximate the general nature of memory better. When we live through an experience, we’re left with a kind of experience-echo. A concentrated essence. That essence haunts us. But as writers, it’s our job to reconstruct the experience itself—scene by patient scene. Why? Well, so that our readers can absorb what we’ve written and go through the distillation process for themselves. Because if you’ve done a good job, your readers’ hearts and minds will distill what you’ve written, and your work will live on in them as a kind essence.
So why not just do a direct “essence transfer” and write SOADs day and night? Because essences are generally speaking non-transferrable. Yes, you can get away with a few of them, as Brookner does above, but if you go on and on, SOAD after SOAD, your reader will get locked out. Things will feel too personal to you, the writer. Too distant to your reader.
Your job is to transmit that which comes before memory, before essence: experience itself. With all its immediacy and vibrancy, its particularity. That’s scenework.
An exercise: Write a SOAD. Then, using the same basic material, write a scene. I think you’ll find the SOAD is easier to get down on the page. To write a scene, you’ll likely have to make some interesting, perhaps difficult choices. It may feel artificial at first. But the thing about specificity is that it opens up a story. SOADs, even really great SOADs, tend to feel hermetic, whereas scenes are like oxygen. They let a story breathe.
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Best wishes for a happy 2022.
Kim