Ingredients for delicious stories.
It’s something I’ve heard from many writers and I’ve complained about myself. How do you write dialogue that sounds realistic? Maureen, leveraging some of her screenwriting experience, offers some unexpected advice in the latest Story Kitchen newsletter: How to Write Dialogue that Sounds Realistic.
Check it out and if you’d like these kinds of tips delivered to your inbox twice a month, join the newsletter below!
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?
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.
I’m a big fan of writer youtubers. There’s something about seeing and hearing a writer talk to me, with a shelf full of books behind them, that I find soothing and inspiring. A few weeks ago I came across a new-to-me writer on Youtube, Shaelin Bishop, who posted a video which shared their top 12 writing tips.
There are great tips in the video, but the one I’d never heard before and which really stood out to me as something profound and interest was this one:
Find the despair in the hope, and the hope in the despair.
Shaelin describes this (as related by a writing professor) as a source of tension: “If a scene is only despair, there’s actually no tension because there’s no possible way forward.”
This made me stop and think a lot. I’ve heard people talk about scene craft as driven by objectives — as in, your protagonist wants something! And other people (or elements) in the scene want something else! But this idea of the tension between despair and hope is a big picture, more holistic way to think about it, something that transcends character goals. It suggests that each scene is a microcosm of the despair and hope in the entire story: will the main character resolve the story question, or not? Where is the hope that they will? And where is the despair if they don’t?
This framing also suggests stakes, which I like, since that’s something that I often forget to illuminate for my reader. What do readers hope for? And what do they despair about?
Based on my thinking about this this week, I decided to give myself an assignment: go through a couple of scenes in my current WIP, a novella, and look for the hope and the despair. How can I play those against each other? Can I use this question to highlight stakes where I need to?
Happy writing!
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 18th 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.
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.
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.
Your world is not interesting in and of itself. Your world is interesting because it
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:
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.
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
Story Kitchen came about because Maureen and I met while both teaching at a university, and we started getting together to talk about writing, fiction, and teaching. Pretty soon we had a critique group and a couple of weekly co-writing dates. We also had ongoing conversations about craft and books and how to help other writers.
Add to that mix the fact that we both love to cook, and Story Kitchen was born! We conceived of a place that was like getting together with your friends around a kitchen table, sharing stories, tips, techniques, commiserating and celebrating.
In our view, the way we learned to write was similar to the way we cook. Recipes are a good starting place, but what really changed the game for us was learning techniques and how to apply them in different contexts. Learning to handle POV is a technique. Voice is a technique. Literary devices are techniques — and once you understand how they work and what impact they deliver, you can create your own recipes for stories, knowing that each one is going to be different, too.
We’re planning lots of exciting stuff coming out this summer and fall! We’d love it if you’d stay in touch by joining our newsletter, where we’re also going to feature a ton of useful context, including tips and craft essays and a recipe (naturally!). Sign up for our newsletter, and get a free PDF guide, 10 Things to Try When You Feel Stuck.
Happy writing!
-Jane