 Drama: May 02, 2018 Issue [#8865] |
  Drama
This week: Exploring the Types of Scenes .I. Edited by: Joy  
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“You can’t write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren’t good old familiar short stories. Novels aren’t built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.”
Orson Scott Card
Every scene is a challenge. There are technical challenges, but often it's the simplest challenge where you feel a sense of achievement when you pull it off.
Roger Deakins
I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.
George R. R. Martin
Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
Nora Roberts
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is the first part of the types of scenes.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to the third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
After reading stories and novels practically all my life and then writing some, I took scenes for granted. I didn’t make much of them as long as they fit the plot’s basic needs and they had characters and action in them. Imagine the surprise when I found out that many kinds of scenes existed and a writer couldn’t put together a scene according to a set template.
In several of the earlier editorials, I touched a few of the factors that had to do with scenes. "Drama Newsletter (May 3, 2017)" , "Drama Newsletter (June 28, 2017)" , "Drama Newsletter (May 31, 2017)" , "Drama Newsletter (June 1, 2016)" , "Drama Newsletter (February 8, 2012)" , "Drama Newsletter (March 4, 2015)" . This time, we’re going to look into the many types of scenes and hope that we can use at least several different types of scenes in one long story or novel. Thinking of the types of scenes to use comes in handy and enhances the success of the work greatly if we especially think of them while we are creating an outline or a roadmap for our text.
These scene types are:
• First scenes: They introduce the story’s set up, mention or show the protagonist (usually), and orient the reader to the setting. Most important: They create a hook or imply a consequence of the action. Here is the beginning of the first scene from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head.”
• Emotional location or lay-of-the-land scenes: They acclimatize the reader to the protagonist’s new location, emotional or physical. Most important: they show the differences and similarities between the old and new worlds and what the protagonist notices at the time. Here is an excerpt from such a scene from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.
“The public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open. By degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people were met with. Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to their work; then, men and women with fish-baskets on their heads; donkey-carts laden with vegetables; chaise-carts filled with livestock or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with pails; an unbroken concourse of people trudging out with various supplies to the eastern suburbs of the town. As they approached the City, the noise and traffic gradually increased; when they threaded the streets between Shoreditch and Smithfield, it had swelled into a roar of sound and bustle.
• Transition scenes: They are the connectors between two possibly longer scenes. They are usually good for filling in the gaps in the reader’s understanding as they may contain more explanation or summarization rather than other action-or-dialogue-filled scenes. Here is a transition scene from White Oleander by Janet Finch.
“I don’t let anyone touch me,” I finally said.
Why not?”
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (…) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
• Climax scenes: They are highly intense and they hold the highest stakes. In them, the protagonist faces his foes, his fears, or himself, and discovers the previously hidden resources. For example, in Disney’s Beauty and The Beast movie, when Gaston and the townspeople come to attack the beast, Belle admits her love for the beast.
• Resolution scenes: They find the answer to the conflict, resolve problems in relationships, strengthen the ties between the allies, or bring in new allies. As an example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while opportunities arise for Hamlet to kill his uncle, he always finds a reason to delay. When the uncle plots to poison Hamlet and succeeds and Hamlet learns that he himself has been poisoned and will die, he finds the courage inside himself to kill his uncle.
• Epiphany scenes: In them, the protagonist finds new answers or gains surprising insights. An Epiphany scene may follow a crisis scene and a character change may happen in the protagonist. The new insights gained may point to the theme elements. Here is an example from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. In this scene he is describing fate.
“There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
• Final scenes: They often have a reflective tone after the end of the major plot action. They may also connect or point to the first scene in some way. If a book is part of a series, they may even present a cliffhanger.
In Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in the final scene, Robert Jordan is in the forest the same as in the opening scene.
“Lieutenant Berrendo, watching the trail, came riding up, his thin face serious and grave. His submachine gun lay across his saddle in the crook of his left arm. Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”
Another example is from A Carlswick Affair (a first book in the series) by S. L. Beaumont. At the end of the novel, just when Stephanie finally manages to solve the story problem in the plot, she gets notice from her arch enemy, her boyfriend’s brother:
~Halfway through the second song, her mobile phone chimed with an incoming message. She picked it up off the coffee table and flicked it open. The sender was unknown but the message very clear; “Don’t get too cozy with my little brother – this isn’t over.”~
• Contemplative scenes: They are the slower, internal, possibly soul-searching scenes, providing emotional context for what happened or will happen. With interior monologue and slower pace, they may aid the decision-making processes of the characters. Here is an example from An American Childhood by Annie Dillard.
"She was turning on ice skates inside the streetlight’s yellow cone of light—illumined and silent. She tilted and spun. She wore a short skirt, as if Edgerton Avenue’s asphalt had been the ice of an Olympic arena. She wore mittens and a red knitted cap below which her black hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the street’s packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.
I stood at the tall window, barely reaching the sill; the glass fogged before my face, so I had to keep moving or hold my breath. What was she doing out there? Was everything beautiful so bold?"
In the next editorial, we’ll continue with seven more scene types, and those will be Crisis Scenes, Love Scenes, Dialogue Scenes, Recommitment Scenes, Escape Scenes, Suspense Scenes, and Twister Scenes.
Until next time! 
Note: This editorial has been written with the help of the following publications:
Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich
Writing Deep Scenes by Martha Alderson and Jordan Rosenfeld
Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias
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 This Issue's Tip: A thematic detail that can be of great importance in characterization is when every character (other than the protagonist) reflects back in some way on the protagonist to reveal elements he sees on others, though not himself or herself.
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