Scene is showing!.
For fiction, standard advice runs, “Show, don’t tell.”
For memoir, telling is used more often.
After all, you are telling about your
life.
Still, there should be a mixture
of scene and summary.
Scene is showing,
summary is telling.
In fiction, stories allow us to love, condemn, condone,
hope, dread and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily
involve. Writers show the emotional
impact of experience through or with characters. The attention is not so much
on the words but through the words where the vitality of understanding
lies. It’s not enough to tell the reader
that your character is in love – you must show it. A scene must be an integral part of the
story, an important detail that will surface later in narration or in developing
character. There are techniques for
accomplishing this – for making scenes vivid, moving and resonant – which can
be learned and can always be strengthened.
By scenes and scenes alone do writers show not tell. So what constitutes a scene?
Everything slows down or stops. There is dialogue, or actions that display
character, that change the course of the story in some way, advance the plot or
change the way we feel about this character or that character.
Get to a good scene as quickly as possible in your
writing. How about this one:
“Some killers are born. Some killers are made. And sometimes the origin of desire for
homicide is lost in the tangle of roots that make an ugly childhood and a
dangerous youth, so that no one may ever know if the urge was inbred or induced.
“He lifts the body from the back of
the Blazer like a roll of old carpet to be discarded.
The soles of his boots scuff against the
blacktop of the parking area, then fall nearly silent on the dead grass and
hard ground.
The night is balmy for
November in
Minneapolis.
A swirling wind tosses fallen leaves.
The bare branches of the trees rattle
together like bags of bones.
“He knows he falls into the last
category of killers.”
-- ASHES TO
ASHES by Tami Hoag
Or – or a character can be thinking, talking to himself or
the reader such as: This is the start of
John Grisham’s THE TESTAMENT:
“Down to the last day, even the
last hour now, I’m an old man, lonely and unloved, sick and hurting and tired
of living. I am ready for the hereafter; it has to be better than this. (What a
first sentence!)
“I own the
tall glass building in which I sit, and 97 percent of the company housed in it,
below me, and the land around it half a mile in three directions, and the two
thousand people who work here and the other twenty thousand who do not, and I
own the pipeline under the land that brings gas to the building from my fields
in Texas, and I own the utility lines that deliver electricity, and I lease the
satellite unseen miles above by which I once barked commands to my empire flung
far around the world.
My assets exceed
eleven billion dollars.”
Catherine Alexander
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