Maureen McHugh – Story Kitchen Studio

Shaping the Scene: Ways to Approach Scene Structure in Prose

There’s no real standard for scenes or even chapters. The rule is really ‘if it works, it works’. William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, has a chapter in his novel As I Lay Dying, that is five words long. “My mother is a fish.” So how do you know how long your scene should be? The answer is, you don’t. There are novels that don’t have chapters. They’re just one long continuous story.

But there are ways in which scenes are often structured. If you’ve got a scene that isn’t working for you, then you can try structuring it.

First, if you don’t mind, go watch a ten minute short film. It’s animated, and it’s about a puppy. It’s called Feast and I swear, it’s charming. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2icqx7

I’ll wait.

Charming, right? It’s made up of several scenes (a scene in a screenplay changes every time there is a change in location or a jump in time, but scenes in prose work differently.) But it’s structured in a classic way.

It opens with the lost puppy who is adopted by a Dudebro. Dudebro and dog live an idyllic life and then Dudebro falls in love with a girl who makes him eat healthy. A scene starts with two characters wanting different things. The dog wants to eat all the good stuff but the girlfriend wants everyone to be healthy.

A scene progresses with obstacles. In this, the dog wants both all the food AND the Dudebro to be happy. When Dudebro and girlfriend break up, dog gets all the food. But that’s an obstacle to Dudebro’s happiness. Dog makes active choice to help Dudebro and girlfriend get back together.

Dog gives up pizza for happiness. Dudebro and girlfriend get married. Then they have a kid who is messy and feeds dog junk so dog gets happiness and pizza, and meatballs and cupcakes.

So how does this particular structure work?

Set up a situation with obstacles to resolution. A good way to do this is by having two characters who want different things. But any situation will do: the Jack London story “To Build A Fire” is about one guy trying to get a fire started. In winter. In Alaska. In the middle of nowhere. It’s a life or death situation. But really, fiction is easiest when you’ve got two characters who want different things. In this story, the Dudebro wants his girlfriend and even to be healthy. The dog wants French Fries.
Play out the negotiation between the main character and what they want/need. In the case of “Feast”, the dog wants what feels like incompatible things. He wants Dudebro to be happy because he loves Dudebro. But he also wants Fettucine Alfredo. His obstacles are internal (want versus need) and external (how does he get them back together?)
Resolve the situation. The best resolution does two things. It sets up the situation for the next scene. Since “Feast” is a complete short, it doesn’t do that, but if this was a scene in a longer work, imagine that the resolution involved a further complication—maybe as the kids are running around, we see that the wife is pregnant and the boy is upset and jealous. A good scene both provides an immediate resolution but reminds us that the overarching issue isn’t solved. The other thing that the end of “Feast” does is it is inevitable but unexpected. We are surprised by the baby, not because it’s completely unexpected that a married couple might have a child, but because we’ve been concentrating on something else. So the ending of “Feast” surprises us, but in an ‘oh! Of course!’ kind of way.

Often a scene does that with a ‘button’, that is a line that feels like the end of a scene. So in a heroic quest, a scene might end with a line that reminds us of the stakes of the story. ‘It was a wonderful moment, but she remembered with a chill that the Dark Lord was still out there.’ Anything that feels like it ‘buttons up’ the scene is good, and there are an infinite number of ways to do that.

Another way is a cliffhanger. Endings of scenes and stories is an art, and at the end of the day there are suggestions, but no real rules.

To sum up, one way to structure a scene is to set it up, play it out, and stick the landing. But that’s not really a formula so much as a guideline. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story or book where every scene was structured this way. Doing this, it’s hard. Endings are especially hard. Good endings are amazing and have a strong effect on the reader.

I said I’d show you a way to structure a scene. I didn’t say it would be easy.

The Advantages and Pitfalls of Camp Nano

NaNoWriMo in November is the challenge to write a draft of a novel in a month. Lots of people have done it and communities have sprang up to talk about how to prepare for the challenge, how to do the challenge, and how to join with other people to do it.

Camp Nano, in April and July, is a similar challenge but instead of writing a novel in a month (because face it, some people just can’t, whether because for example, they have a job and a toddler, or because writing 2,000 words a day doesn’t work for them) the writer sets their own goals. The goals usually involve a daily practice.

Is it a good idea? Depends.

Camp Nano has some really cool aspects.

Community. It’s easy to find people setting goals and supporting each other. It’s a giant group effort and humans a social animals. It’s why some of us care about our local sports team, even though there is rarely a moral difference between Manchester United and Real Madrid. We thrive on connection.

Set, clear goals: Setting goals is often a good idea. A goal means that progress is measurable—either you’re meeting goals or you aren’t.

The commitment can make someone write and as they write, they can learn about what works and what doesn’t work for them, not only in their writing technique but also in how they write—better at night or better to get up at 5:00am before work and write then?

Discovering that it’s possible to write and hit a goal! Four short stories in a month, or 20,000 wds in a month! It can teach the lazy and recalcitrant brain that it’s really possible to write.

Camp Nano Drawbacks

Setting up an artificial schedule and sticking to it for a month can be a little like a crash diet. It’s unrealistic, and if it doesn’t fit your life, it can create unsustainable habits. Just as a 1200 calories a day diet is a bad idea, thinking that writing ‘x’ number of words a day (or whatever your goal is) is ‘the right thing to do’ can lead to burn out and a belief that if those goals aren’t hit, it’ means that you’ll never be a writer.

Life is complicated, and predicting what someone is going to be able to do in three weeks is a bit of a crap shoot. Remember March of 2020? The world has a way of reducing plans to rubble.

Camp Nano and NaNoWriMo might be just the thing someone needs. If you want to do them:

Take control. Figure out what you want from the experience, and set expectations accordingly. Even if you’re doing NaNoWriMo you don’t have to write 50,000 words. Set your own goals.

Be thoughtful about balancing commitment and flexibility. If the goal is to write a publishable novel, well, writing fast may mean not writing well. The work of revising the novel may be much harder if 75% of the draft has to be pitched.

Think about what you want.

Camp Nano is a great thing for a lot of writers.

Set goals that are easy, you can always do more, but you’re going to feel shitty if you do less. And use it for who you are, where you are, and getting to your own goals.

Build Only the World You Need

There are a lot of ways to build a world. We tend to think of worldbuilding as something for science fiction or fantasy. I don’t think of it that way. Mysteries are often tied to a particular place, like Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries[1] or the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn, set in the world of English aristocracy of the 18^th century.

Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is a lovely example of creating a very specific world in a very specific time, the waning days of Dublin’s economic boom and bust—and as good worlds do, it grounds her series in an authenticity that convinces the reader that this world is real and makes the stakes of the story feel real.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

There is a lot of advice on the web for worldbuilding. Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin has a masterclass on worldbuilding and (https://www.masterclass.com/classes/n-k-jemisin-teaches-fantasy-and-science-fiction-writing/chapters/elements-of-worldbuilding ) Brandon Sanderson has a technique for building magic systems that you can find in his lecture series on YoutTube.

I will state up front, I don’t like Rendezvous With Rama. I tried it several times and just not my thing. It’s a book that has really meant a lot to a lot of people, so I assume that it’s like licorice, which my husband loves and which I hate. It’s not a case that Rendezvous With Rama is not good writing, it’s a matter of preference.

Thinking about worldbuilding in the way mystery and romance writers think about it can be a different and sometimes useful way to worldbuild. I’ve created four prompts that can help bootstrap both setting and worldbuilding. Also, they give me an excuse to research and I love research. So much easier than writing.

[1] Linda Rodriguez, indigenous American writer, discusses Tony Hillerman and issues of appropriation in a post http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2012/04/literary-mystery-noveliststony.html She feels that Hillerman was respectful but points out that not all indigenous writers and readers agree.

What is a world?

When you build a world, you should think about language, customs, and culture. Think of a story set in a horse racing track.

The horse racing track has its own language—in English, there are words we use at a track that we don’t use much of any place else. Horse races are described in miles but also furlongs. There are stakes and claim races, win, place, and show.

There are different kinds of people at a race track. There are the people who come to watch the races; some of them sit in the stands. Rich people and companies have boxes where food and alcohol are served. Serious gamblers may stand at the edge of the track instead of being in the stands. Then there are the horse people—trainers, grooms, exercise boys, veterinarians. And there’s another group that works at the track—they take the money, work in the office, or serve food.

There are customs—the ‘call to the post’ where a trumpet fanfare is played, the winner’s circles. For the Kentucky Derby, women wear fancy hats and people drink mint juleps. The winning horse gets a blanket of roses (which the horse probably either ignores or wants to eat.)

There are uniforms—the ‘silks’ that the jockeys wear.

It’s a complex world and if your story is, say, a mystery involving a horse racing track, knowing this is the world of your story.

What is the goal of worldbuilding?

Your world is not interesting in and of itself. Your world is interesting because it

Creates an emotion
Supports the story or interaction

Some people want to build a consistent world from the very beginning. I’ve always thought of Tolkien as this kind of writer, but Tolkien turns out to have been more of a pantser than I ever realized. There’s a letter to his son (http://hedgepickle.blogspot.com/2013/02/trotter-description-of-development-of.html) where he describes writing a scene where there’s a character sitting in the corner in an inn who he calls Trotter. Tolkien had no idea who the character was—eventually it would turn out to be Aragorn, who you would think was pretty essential to both world and plot.

I build my worlds the way theatre sets are built—that is, you can see a door at the edge of the set and the yellow flowered wallpaper that suggests a hallway, but if you go backstage, there’s no hallway. I want everything the reader sees to feel lived in, as if it has history. But I want to evolve my worldbuilding, as Tolkien did, to fit my story, so I don’t try to plan everything out at once.

When I’m thinking about worldbuilding, I’m rarely thinking about geography or even buildings. I don’t really world build systematically. I like things to feel messy because my everyday life is messy. When I first saw Star Wars, I had never seen a science fiction movie where things were dirty, and it just made everything more real.

When I’m teaching worldbuilding, I suggest that the writers think about:

Language
Classes
Culture
Dress and architecture (Styles)

By language I mean jargon or language. (Junot Diaz has very interesting things to say about using English and Spanish in his works. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/nyregion/outsider-with-a-voice.html ) But everybody uses jargon. If your world is a university, there is tons of language; GPA, required courses or GDEs, Fraternity, Sorority, tenure. At my university, D Clearance is a big issue (it’s a hoop some students have to jump through to get into certain classes.)

There are social classes in university, too. Students sort into lower classmen, upper classmen, graduate students, PhD candidates, scholarship kids, frat and sorority kids. People have opinions about Business Majors versus Theater Majors. Then there are professors; tenured, part time, TA’s. There are administrators who work in admissions, or residence life (more jargon there) and the working-class folk (in the US, often BIPOC in a mostly white landscape) who keep the place running; landscapers, cashiers, housekeeping. Each of them experiences the university in a different way.

There are a lot of weird cultural rituals; ‘rushing’ for fraternities and sororities, homecoming, commencement, school colors.

Dress and architecture come in, too. A lot of universities in the US strive to echo the architecture of Oxford or Cambridge—brick or stone buildings, ivy, walks through grassy lawns.

When you are thinking of where your story is set, if you have trouble with setting, maybe jot down a few notes about these four categories and see if they help you build out your world.

Writing Exercise:

Make a list of half a dozen ‘worlds’—like the race track, or Junot Diaz’s Dominican-American working class New York high school kids, or of the world of the high school marching band. Think of places you either know, or are interested in.
Create two characters who are in that world and want different things. If your world is, say, the homicide division of a police department, maybe both your characters are detectives, or maybe one is a detective and one is a witness.
Write a scene—1,000 to 2,000 wds—set in your world.

I Have an Idea, How Do I Start?

A lot of the things on this blog are geared towards people who have been writing long enough to have questions about technique. That said, I often teach people who are not writers. I’ve taught everything from MFA workshops to intro classes. I teach a class in developing stories for interactive forms like video games and Augmented Reality and the class ranges from people who have a degree in writing to people who have computer science degrees and no interest in writing. I try to make writing lessons that are flexible enough to teach something no matter what your skill level is.

This question is a hard one for me and yet I see it a lot. How you start is such a hard question to answer because I don’t really know where you are starting from.

Do you outline your idea or just write?

Even if I did know where you were starting from, how anyone starts is different from person to person and from style of writing to style of writing. For example, if I’m doing a project for hire, I do a high level outline, then a comprehensive outline. Then I write the project, often changing the outline and consulting with whoever hired me.

When I write a short story, I just write it. I don’t outline at all. Most people I know don’t outline a short story, but there are people who do, and there are people who, say, jot down a phrase for the beginning, a phrase for what they want to do in the middle, a phrase for the ending. I would recommend writing a short story without an outline, but outlining is not wrong if it works for you.

When I’m writing a novel, I write ten or twenty pages and then I do a high level outline. My last novel I used the writing software Scrivener, and listed my outline points as chapters, then fixed that as I wrote. But my first published novel wasn’t even supposed to be a novel, it was supposed to be a short story. It has an overarching character arc, and all that jazz, but it wasn’t planned ahead of time. The structure of the novel grew organically from finding that I wanted to write more. The structure grew organically from my desire to figure out what happened. My other writing decision was I didn’t want to do what I thought of as ‘connective pieces’—the boring parts of the novel. So, I skipped everything I thought was just ‘getting to the next part’ and wrote the next part I wanted to see.

If you’re asking ‘How Do I Start’ you may not even be at the point to join the argument over which is better, plotting ahead of time or letting the novel take you where it will. You may not even know if you’re writing a novel or a short story.

At a certain point, I’d say just start writing. The way to learn to write is to write. Chances are your first piece won’t be great for pretty much the same reasons that your first game of tennis, or basketball, or baseball, wasn’t professional level. Let’s face it, the reason I write stuff is because I want to read certain stories and since they don’t exist, I have to write them. Even if your story isn’t a great read, you’ll have written it and chances are very good you’ll feel the story more vividly as you write it than anything you’ve ever read that someone else wrote.

What about characters?

I am a character driven writer, so I would say, as I almost always do, start with character. Very few books or stories are about a single person who never interacts with another person although some very good stories are, in fact, just about one person, it’s not like you can’t do that, but stories are, at their heart, about things going wrong and whether or not they get fixed or dealt with. It’s easier to have things go wrong when there are two people because two people are always going to have different things they want and need. If you’ve ever tried to decide where to go to lunch with someone, you’ve probably done the dance of ‘I don’t want to just say a place because what if they don’t like Chinese food, but they think I want to go there?’ Two people are going to have conflicts whether that’s ‘I don’t really like that kind of food’ or ‘I want the other person to like me so I’m afraid to say the wrong thing.’ (That’s an internal conflict, that last one, but it counts.)

Put a couple of characters into a situation from your idea. You might say, I don’t know yet! It’s just an idea. Yeah, having an idea is the easy part. A lot of writers have way more ideas than they will ever be able to write. I probably have at least one idea (often a bad one) a day that I think, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to write that.’ I also think, ‘I should exercise more’. I think a lot of things. But if you want to write, then I say, write.

You can write for yourself. You can write for an audience. You can write for both. Writing for an audience isn’t better than writing for yourself. Writing can be cathartic and can be consoling. It can be personally engaging. The nice thing is, as hobbies go, it’s cheap. It’s not like boating, or owning a horse, or even collecting something. So if you want to start something, I say, just try.

Next week, Jane will talk about how she works with her ideas.

Jane here with a quick message. We've been working on getting a podcast together! Our dream is that this podcast be interactive, kind of like a radio show but not exactly. That means we'd love to hear from you all: send us any questions you'd like us to address in the podcast by filling out this form. We can give you a shoutout or you can remain anonymous. Thanks so much! -J

Art and Craft of Writing

Jane here with a quick message before today's blog post! Maureen and I have been working on getting a podcast together! Our dream is that this podcast be interactive, kind of like a radio show but not exactly. That means we'd love to hear from you all: send us any questions you'd like us to address in the podcast by filling out this form. We can give you a shoutout or you can remain anonymous. Thanks so much! -J

I’m a writer and I’ve been teaching writing in one form or another since the early eighties. I love technique. When I started learning to write, I loved workshops. Who doesn’t love a workshop? Is there any other time in your life when a group of people will spend a big chunk of time talking about you? Other than your funeral when all that talk is great for the participants but frankly wasted on the dead.

I love books on writing. Writing is hard and reading books about writing makes me feel as if I’m working. I’m not writing, exactly, but I’m reading about it and that should count for something.

Writing books were fun, insightful, made me think. But the ones I read mostly talked about prose. They talked about consistent p.o.v. and not using adverbs. What they didn’t tell me was how to write a story or a novel. I had a lot of problems.

Finishing something
Keeping it from being interesting
Making myself write
Figuring out how to revise
Knowing if it was any good or not

What I wanted was something like a carpentry class where they would announce that we were going to make a table. We would select wood and learn how to measure and cut, how to do dove joints, how to sand it. At the end we might have a bunch of tables that looked pretty much alike, but I would understand how to do stuff. And next time, I could use the techniques to make something more individual.

Jane says: May's newsletter addressed how to get started when you aren't eaxctly sure! Also, Maureen included a very practical, nuts-and-bolts exercise she uses in her classes that will get you launched into writing something with legs. Sign up below if you haven't already!  :)

Jane and I are both teachers, both writers, and we’re both very interested in the process of writing. And we’re interested in how people learn writing.

We’re hoping that we’ve learned some things we can teach and that you can teach us.

What are the things you struggle with? What do you most want to know? What sorts of tools or support do you wish you had? What are your questions about your writing?

Let us know!