Setting the Scene

What is a scene? In short, it's that place in the narrative where something actually happens. A scene is a little story, in and of itself, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—an event that occupies time and space. A scene is sharply focused and generally held together by a single idea, a single driving force.

Scenes are those places in your narrative where your storytelling slows down and pulls in for a front row seat on some action that’s unfolding. It's the backbone of any good novel and it seems to me that without scene, it’s almost impossible to actually tell a story. Even writers like Joyce and Woolf create scenes. I write scene by scene. It’s been my instinctive way of telling a story, and until I learned to write in scenes, I couldn't figure out how to construct a novel. Good scenes are almost always built around dialogue.

According to Sandra Scofield's The Scene Book, scenes are made up of four basic elements: 1) Events or Emotions; 2) Structure (beginning, middle and end); 3) Function and 4) Pulse. Events and/or emotions seem pretty obvious. And, to be honest, I’m skeptical about getting overly involved in structure. I think in terms of beginning, middle and end, but beyond that, I find it more valuable to let a scene evolve organically. You might see a more complex structure, with beats and crescendos, in the final analysis, but I think it’s dangerous to write to it, kind of like getting stuck in a five-paragraph essay for school.

Let's focus on Scoflield's Function and Pulse. Function is the reason for a particular scene, its purpose in the narrative; what the scene accomplishes in being a scene. Pulse is its sine qua non, the "condition without which there would be nothing." Scofield calls Pulse "the vibrancy that makes the scene matter," and says it's an emotional component.

She mentions a scene from E.M. Forster’s Room With a View that I'd like to expand upon.

For those of you who don't remember this turn of the century British tale, Lucy is a prim, but curious young woman who travels from England to Italy under the watchful eye of a chaperon, only to meets George a melancholy, young Brit who generally fails to obey the unwritten rules of society. His rebellion both fascinates and repels Lucy.

Forster brings these two potential lovers together in a piazza. They barely know each other and arrive separately only to witness a knifing that kills a man. Lucy is faint and George rescues her. She dropped some photographs in the turmoil and asks George to fetch them. He insists on walking her back to the pension where they're staying. The knifing creates the logic of their encounter. Indeed, its “function” is to justify their sudden intimacy, which arises from their mutual emotional turmoil; they’ve just witnessed violence and turn to one another for familiarity and comfort. Social expectations don't matter, life does.

What happens is simple: they walk and they talk, stopping on a bridge when they reach the Arno. Right before they stop, we see George toss Lucy’s photographs into the river, and like Lucy, we're shocked. Why would he do that after she asked him to get them? Could he be such a bad guy? Lucy starts to get angry until George explains. It turns out he tossed them away because they were covered with blood.

The scene introduces George and Lucy in all their innocence and complexity. It is the beginning of their intimacy, the bonding that brings them into relationship with one another. The emotional thread weaving through the scene is what Scofield calls Pulse. Essentially, the content that defines the Purpose. In other words, the emotions that fly in the scene over the photos, over the stabbing, over being alone together without a chaperon, even the fact that they are in Italy—all this defines the scene, without it, the scene would have no reason to exist. One could say, the Pulse of the scene is in their sexual attraction, but it's only through the specific events that we see their attraction as real. Lucy and George have shared something—their attraction deepens with mutual experience.

Now, we're looking at the scene after the fact, studying it after it's been written. If we were to sit down to write it, we might think: "Okay, I need a sexy scene to bring Lucy and George together." The danger, of course, is falling into some he's-handsome-she's-beautiful generic cliché—genre romance.

Forster avoids this by taking advantage of Italy. He uses its rawness, the way it's not the genteel life of English aristocracy that Lucy and George know. Italy is disconcerting because it's foreign. The language is different, the cultural norms confusing. Forster walks Lucy into this otherness, and shows it to us through a scene—taking us right to a stabbing. We see a curious, naive girl who ran off on her own to have a taste of "quaint and charming" Italy. Boom—all of a sudden it's shocking and frightening Italy. Along comes George who doesn't quite know how to act, but he's been waiting for an opening. The stabbing gives them a reason to cut to the chase, so to speak, and get real with one another. A lot happens. They fall in love. Bottom line: Function and Pulse work together in a scene, and keeping them in mind can help you shape it clearly.