Francois Camoin writes in “The Textures of Fiction,” a contribution to Words Overflown by Stars, edited by David Jauss, that fiction is:

little bits of action to keep us turning the page, to keep us moving through the landscape that is the point of the enterprise. The events and characters exist for the sake of the place; Madame Bovary is only there so Flaubert’s rainy, muddy, depressing provincial town can come into existence…

Setting is the entirety of a story’s locations and time periods, which introduce ambiance, and out of that ambiance comes a good part of the emotional message of a story. The “little bits of action” Camoin refers to happen in particular places. Every character speaks and thinks from somewhere. What those somewheres look like and sound like, what textures, tastes and smells they contain help authors tell stories. Characters inhabit scenes through their senses, and they make readers notice what they are noticing, projecting onto, or overlooking. What characters are doing and thinking– whether that takes place on a park bench, in a train compartment, on a cafeteria line, camping in the woods, sitting in a particular room at home, or working in an office cubicle–includes the objects and sensations from the place they inhabit.

 The writer must give readers enough sensory information in a scene to answer questions like “Where is this taking place?” “What time of day is it?” “Does the character like or dislike the place he or she inhabits?” If the writer doesn’t fully imagine the story’s scenes, readers will feel uninformed, confused or inattentive. The writer must incorporate what the character touches and sees, hears, tastes and smells in a scene and imagine what in the environment helps or interferes with what characters want and can do. And writers must seek out what in an environment catches or escapes their characters’ attention. When a character has a reflective moment, the writer figures out how what the character takes in through the senses becomes part of the character’s thinking.

Jack Grapes Image-Moment Exercise
To help students begin to build strong scenes, Los Angeles poet, writer and master teacher Jack Grapes advises them to create scenes he calls image-moments. He says to remember that when listening to others, people tune into elements of their location. These elements can be called set, set dressing, props, lighting, ambient sound, costumes and people, In these moments, people (and thus characters) associate to other remembered times and things and also make commentary to themselves. Jack Grapes teaches writers to choose a moment in the life of a character in which another character says or does something. The writing assignment is to introduce this moment with part of the dialog or part of an action and then write about the scene in terms of the space as a set with textures, light, sound, and objects, as well as people and what they are wearing; the character’s associations and commentary in the moment are included, too. Then the moment is closed out with the rest of the dialog or action from the opening.

Here’s an example of an image-moment by Debbie Gaal, one of Jack Grapes’ students:

He sat down next to me and placed his hand on my knee. [An action that begins a conversation] “I need to talk to you”, he said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time. I’ve been in a relationship with another woman for 11 years. She’s also happily married. Having this relationship with her makes me realize how much I love you. You have always been my priority, and you always will be. I’m so lucky to have you.”

I looked around the room at the evidence of our romantic weekend. There were a dozen red roses on the table (sent courtesy of YPO), starting to fade slightly. A couple of the stems were bent at the head, bowing, like the roses were embarrassed to witness the scene in front of them. The half drunk bottle of champagne and two fluted crystal glasses were standing at attention. The bed sheets were crumpled, no longer crisp and fresh. There were wads of Kleenex strewn on the carpeted floor next to his side of the bed. Remnants of his latest allergy attack in the middle of the night. I studied him. I had never noticed before how Steven was looking every bit of his age. His skin looked slightly yellowish and was beginning to sag around his face. His chin looked almost receded, not completely yet, but you could see the direction where his face was headed. He wasn’t going to be a distinguished looking man with a strong face and graying temples. He would have deep folds around a thinning face with no strength or solid line to it. No character. His blue eyes were too gentle and they were imitating innocence, staring at me waiting for the response; waiting for kind words of forgiveness and absolution. “Forgive me father for I have sinned”, those eyes were saying. They were asking forgiveness but not really from me, from someone or something else. He needed to blow his nose again. It was starting to drip. [This paragraph contains the tangibles of set dressing such as crumpled bed sheets, roses with some stems bent, champagne glasses and a close up of the other’s face. It includes commentary like, “you could see the direction where his face was headed. He wasn’t going to be a distinguished looking man, and “No character.”]

I looked down at his hand on my knee. [Return to the action that opened the scene.] How delicate his hands were. Small, slender, no calluses, no evidence of hard work. They were a woman’s manicured, weak hands. I didn’t want them touching me anymore. [Commentary]

There was no air in the room. The thick red velvet drapes were still closed over the windows, making the room dimly lit and creating a feeling of heaviness. It felt muggy, which was odd in February. I needed air and sun light. I wanted to get out of that space. [Character’s interaction with the room, its air and its light.]

I looked back at my husband. “If I’m your priority, then you will end it,” I said. “Now, let’s go home. I miss my kids.” [Closing out the conversation]

In Debbie Gaal’s exercise result, the reader puts together the inner feelings of the character–what was supposed to be a romantic weekend has suddenly turned sour, as sour as the sallow color of the husband, as pathetic as his allergy attack during romance.

When I was involved in revising my memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, I remembered this exercise. It allowed me to start a difficult scene:

Curtains closed against the brightness of sunlight on snow. Respirator whooshing and clunking in the dim light. Seth’s chest rising and falling to its rhythm. I cross the threshold of my son’s Denver area hospital room quietly, as if trying not to wake him. Kristen, his fiancée, sits in a chair drawn up to his bedside, her thin frame curved over him like a question mark. Tears spill from her eyes as she massages his hand, letting him know she is there. The sparkle on the engagement ring he’d given her in the summer dips in and out of view as her fingers work his hand. I know she is trying to rub their connection, his spirit, back into him. Her mother, Jackie, rises to hug me, leaving the chair she’s occupied all night. “I am so sorry this is happening to you.”

Although I don’t return to the curtains blocking the brightness from the room, the ending line of dialog is about an inner darkness and is in that way parallel to the opening. When a writer uses the images available in a scene, fictional dream (what readers place themselves into as if it is their own life they are reading about) becomes convincing.

Before I used Jack Grapes advice, my scene went like this:

What does a mother remember about the moment she sees her son, once animated and full of life, in a coma he won’t come out of? Curtains closed against the brightness of sunlight reflecting off the snow outside. Respirator whooshing and clunking in the dim light. Her son’s chest rising and falling to its rhythm.

On December 28, 2000, I crossed the threshold of my son Seth’s hospital room. To find a context for how to enter that room, I think I pretended it was a sick room and Seth was asleep, not as was almost certain, brain dead.

You can see that exposition such as “To find a context for how to enter that room” and posing the question I planned to answer both dropped out of my writing when I revised using more images; there is little need to explain when you are showing. As an author, I didn’t have to say, “I think I pretended…” because I can show this by saying, “as if trying not to wake him.”

Kinds of Scenes:
Now that you’ve thought about the images you can harness for writing scenes and ways to plunge right into a scene that contains high emotion using image-moment, consider that most stories have a variety of kinds of scenes.

In Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Josip Novakovich names three kinds: 1) summary, 2) silent and 3) big. Summary scenes and silent scenes lead up to the big scenes, the ones that use the most dialog and/or description, the ones that happen uninterrupted by the author filling in information. That information is delivered in the summary and silent scenes that precede the big scenes.

The summary scene sets up an action we can expect repeats itself over time:

She talked to her mother every Sunday evening on the dorm floors one phone; she curled into the cement block wall, her right heel popping out of her untied Clark’s desert boot, as she talked and hoped not to be overheard.

The silent scene contains a description of actions that aren’t repeated ones but help move the story along. Here is an example I’ve written:

I am so close to him that I feel his breath moving my hair. My whole body wants to be his but we do not touch. I hear the bell of the elevator arriving at my floor. I hope he is looking at me as I walk in what I imagine is a sultry fashion through the open doors, glad I’ve worn the black skirt with the high slit over my calves. As I exit the elevator, I smile at a man holding the door for his office mates who are still down the hall, thought I am miffed as I walk ahead to the water fountain; the man I want so desperately will have a harder time seeing me through the doors when I bend over for a sip of water, swiping my hair over my shoulder.

And the big scene, Novakovich tells us happens when you know your characters and their conflicts and put them in harms way (whether that’s meeting the teacher who is down on them, fighting the bully, walking out on a jealous husband or giving into intimacy with a peer at work). Here you will write, no matter what point of view you’ve chosen and what tense, what the action is by having the characters speak and do things in the course of the scene: Here’s a “big” scene I wrote for a short story:

The lights went up slightly, signaling the last dance. In five minutes homecoming would be over. Well. Natalie sucked in her breath. It’s now or never. As the band began their rendition of Love Me Tender, she strode across the gym-turned-dance floor, her heels clicking determinedly along the hardwood floor.

“Steven, this is definitely our dance,” she announced to the skinny boy with more than a little dab to do him on the lock hanging heavy over his forehead. The boy she’d hoped all semester would ask her out now met her earnest gaze with a look of terror.

“I don’t…can’t….not a good…,” he stammered, looking around as if to find someone who would agree with him.

She took hold of his hand and yanked him from the metal folding chair, spilling the cup of punch he’d put beside him on the table.

“I don’t dance. I mean I can’t…” his voice trailed off like the puddle spreading under the table.

Afraid if she let go of his hand he’d flee, Natalie kept her grip and tried to lead him in the waltz. He was the only boy who seemed to notice that she was alive and now that she had his hand, she wasn’t going to let go. She ignored the mess on the floor, red as his cheeks had become.

“I….I….I can’t,” he stammered again, shuffling his foot a couple of inches forward, which turned out to be just far enough for Natalie to waltz onto it full force.

Embarrassed by her clumsiness and her forward behavior, Natalie blurted, “You keep staring at me in biology and in math! Why don’t you talk to me? You can take me to a movie or something. Why don’t you ask me out?”

Steven’s eyelids fluttered. Waiting for an answer, Natalie noticed Brylcreem smudges on his forehead like fingerprints on a slide.

In building scenes we learn to use direct dialogue, physical reactions, gestures, sights, smells, sounds, and thoughts. As Jerome Stern writes in Making Shapely Fiction:

When you want to make a scene in your writing, render the sensations fully so that readers cringe at the slap in the face, hear the whimper of pain, see her elbow hit the blue chair, and feel your character’s rage and frustration.

Combining Ingredients
Jordan Rosenfeld, author of Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, thinks of scenes as using different amounts of the same ingredients, depending on the use of the scene toward the story’s goals. One ingredient is action. Something has to happen in a scene. “Scenes function as a bit of a chain reaction; one scene builds upon another, upon another, upon another until we get a full sense of the world inside” inside the story. Another ingredient is what the characters want, both overall in the story and in any particular scene. A third ingredient is subtlety. The reader needs enough to enter the scene read between the lines rather than be hit over the head with things. In the examples above we’ve seen a woman not wanting to lose it though she loathes her husband for what he is telling her, a woman wanting attention of man she rides the elevator with and a girl angry and embarrassed that her overtures toward a boy she thought wanted to date her weren’t received well.

Your Turn

1)    When you are revising what you have written, go through your work and see where you might slow time down and build scenes rather than summarize or move through events too quickly for the reader, who wants to feel as if he or she is in the scene with the characters.

2)    Think about which of the scenes you have written may lend themselves to a Jack Grapes style image-moment that will allow you to slow time down. Try rewriting these scenes as image-moments to move the reader closer to the emotional core of your story.

3)     Look for places that you have created repetitive scenes when one summary scene can let readers know something about your character’s personality or dilemma but only need be written about once.

4)    Look to see if you emphasized scenes with dialog when they would serve the larger story better as silent scenes.

5)    Finally, locate the places where protagonist and antagonist face off or where an insight is arising for the protagonist. Practice combining dialog with images from the place the scene is happening to build a long scene that reads as if the action is happening in the now of the story. You might even put an “image-moment” into the big scene and see what happens.

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Next week we’ll discuss subplots and then tone. In the next year, we’ll also feature articles from time to time by several fiction writers on their practice with the elements of fiction.