The Making of a Scene
This post was originally published December 7, 2023.
Mondays. Like Garfield and many others, I’m not a fan of them, but over the last year, they’ve grown on me. It’s 7:30 pm, I just finished cleaning up after dinner and I take a seat at my desk, put on my headphones, log onto Discord, and start the voice call under the same weekly event: Write In.
My friend is driving home from work in the cascading shadows of the Colorado mountains, and I wait for her to join me, as I open up a new shared google document for us to write in. At the time of writing this blog post, there are 63 documents.
The weekly writing session began as an opportunity for us to spend time together, despite being so far apart. We both share a love for writing and the same stubborn resistance to actually doing it. While trying to get back in the habit of writing my book, I asked her to sit with me virtually and hold me accountable. She would work on her writing, and I would work on mine. Over time, we developed a new purpose for the event. We’d learn to write together because why not?
Every now and then, authors will write together (a famous example of this being Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman), and though I have no idea how they do it, I was open to the idea of trying it out myself. Afterall, it seemed like a good skill to develop, a fun exercise, and an opportunity for us to learn how to write better together.
She joins the call and we break out our dice, which has become a custom way for us to begin our sessions together—a nod towards how we met by playing dice games together online. We’ve randomized our prompts, and we’ll see which one we’re going to write tonight. The only thing that’s certain is that it will be a stand alone scene, and we will alternate writing in it three times each.
Tonight we turn to a list of genres ranging from Action to Romance to Mystery. The numbered list sits with a collection of many others in our discord server under a category my friend eloquently named “Quit Being an Indecisive B- and Write.” The decision is out of our hands as we roll our dice and find the corresponding genre on the list.
We roll satire before turning to a list of original characters we have come to enjoy writing repeatedly. For that we roll two automatons pulled straight out of a fantasy sci fi setting.
The most valuable writing lesson I’ve learned from these sessions is how to block a scene. Each scene in a story requires a few things to be successful. The ones I focus on identifying first are the setting (where and when the scene takes place), the goal (what I as the writer want the reader to take away from the scene), and the conflict (what makes this a full scene and not just a statement). After identifying those three things, I can flush out the scene much more easily, imagining opportunities to support the portrayal of the goal and conflict.
My friend and I identified a neighborhood block party as the setting with the goal being to show how out of place two automaton characters were at an ordinary human event. The conflict naturally became the automatons misunderstanding the human customs present, such as party games and how to make small talk (which turned into events that would take place during the scene).
This has helped me tremendously with all my other writing. Like all things, breaking down large tasks into smaller ones makes it more manageable. Even when writing this post, I jot down some key beats I want to hit—the identification of these 3 parts of a scene, the origin of this discovery, the pay off it’s had on my writing as a whole.
Whenever I have resistance towards writing, I coax myself with this strategy. Just outline the scene. Just write the first beat. Now, just write the second. Eventually, it gets done.
My friend and I both agreed that our scene was not our best work. Satire is not a genre we often write in, but it was good to give it a try. Having a space to explore writing without expectation or judgment has been liberating. I’m surprised by how much I’ve learned by writing these scenes.
As I edited my novel, I could tell the difference between the writer I was when I first started it and the writer I was when I finished. The second half had more purpose, more clarity, and more indirect character development. Polishing the first half became so much easier after making this realization.
I scheduled the next writing event for next Monday, where we’ll sit down and do it all over again. Who knows what we’ll roll? Who knows if it will be any good? We may write the best thing we’ve ever written next week or maybe it will be the worst, which is okay. Writing well has never been a prerequisite for being a writer.