Layering Your Scene -- Endings

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing the content of a workshop I gave for the C2C chapter of the Romance Writers of New Zealand. We’re nearing the end – and appropriately this blog is about the scene ending.

So let’s look at the ending.

• Does it have a hook?
• Is the hook fresh and interesting?
• Does it move the plot in a different direction?
• Does it have a “Shrek moment”?

Not sure whether your scene has a hook? Read your last few paragraphs to a partner. Get feeback on whether the hook’s working.

Every scene should have a hook.

Most paragraphs should have a hook.

Most sentences should have a hook (I’ll talk about how to do this in the next blog).

First draft writing looks something like this, from my WIP, Exiled in the Sweet Land of Liberty. This scene is from a chapter that I eventually cut entirely from the book. In it, Sophie and her father are at the beach discussing her brother Marion’s tragic death.

Dad slapped at a mosquito. Like Marion, he was blond and gray-eyed with the finely chiseled features of a handsome man. Mosquitoes loved him.

“Time to go home.” 

It’s not bad, but there’s nothing about it to make the reader turn the page. Mary Buchanan, in one of her workshops, says that every scene should end with a hook that drives the reader to go on to the next scene.

Usually, however, the first draft of any scene ends on something that would put a potential reader to sleep. That’s because beginning writers have the urge to feel closure. It's what happened with this scene. You know what’s going to happen next. They’re going home. I could have shown them packing up their picnic and loading the car, but by the time I wrote this I’d gotten past writing most of what Margie Lawson calls “walking the dog”.

Signs of walking the dog at scene endings include:

•  Saying good-bye (unless there’s something about the good-bye that spins the characters on their heads)
•  Putting things away
•  Any of the rituals of leaving (putting on clothes, shaking hands, opening and closing doors, walking away.)

While this is logically how the action in the scene would play out, there is no conflict in any of these actions. Without conflict it is dead.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use good-byes to end a scene. But if you do, they have to be laden with conflict. Last night I was curled up in bed with Margaret Mahy’s YA Alchemy. Look how she turns a good-bye into a page-turner:

Roland, the hero, has been pressured by a teacher into getting to know Jess, a classmate who has no friends. Roland sums up the courage to visit her at her home, where he’s welcomed with the warmth of an Antarctic winter. Here’s the end of the scene:

Jess thrust his game of Viper towards him, then walked on to fling the front door wide. Stepping out onto the porch, Roland turned, shooting an apparently casual glance over her shoulder as he did so. There was no one and nothing on the landing. All the same, a moment earlier, he had seen – he had seen – he knew he had seen…

Of course, the reader wants to know, what has Roland seen? Mahy, right at the end of her scene, sets up a story question that propels us into the next part of the book.

My favourite “good-bye” at the end of scene – one that works dramatically well – is the penultimate scene from Gone with the Wind, in which Rhett walks out on Scarlett with the famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”.

But if you look at the scene itself, you’ll see that although he tells her he’s leaving, we don’t actually see him walk out the door. Not until the next – and final – scene in which Scarlett picks herself up from the disaster, determined to go back to Tara, which always gives her strength, and figure out a way to win him back.

As a writer you don’t need to begin or end the scene where the character enters or leaves the setting. Begin it as close to the central conflict of the scene as possible and end it as soon as possible after the scene reaches its climax. In the Gone with the Wind scene, the climax is the line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”.

 

The ending to the GWTW scene twists around not just love scene we as readers expect (Scarlett entered the scene determined to tell Rhett she finally realized she loves him), but the whole the Happily Ever After ending, as well.

As a hook, the scene works magnificently, setting up at the last minute a new story question that leads us to read the last scene, which is not action, but introspection. GWTW is one of those novels in which the novelist doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but the author has painted such a vivid portrait of a young woman who always manages to get what she wants, that the reader know Scarlett will somehow find a way to win back Rhett. On the other hand, it does leave open the question of how. If Margaret Mitchell had chosen to write a sequel, it, like GWTW, would have been a runaway best seller.

We can learn a couple more things from this scene:

• Good hooks often set up story questions – things the reader is dying to know.
• Good hooks surprise the reader.

Look at your scene ending. Is it predictable? How can you twist the scene and make it different?

Lori Wilde, to whom I am indebted for much of what I’ve learned on layering, suggests a couple of ways to do this:

• End the scene the opposite of how you begin it
• Look for a different motivation for the character’s behaviour
• Add what Lori Wilde calls a “Shrek Moment”. A Shrek Moment – taken from the animated film Shrek – turns a cliché on its head. Shrek is filled with these. Most of them take iconic Disney conventions and give them an ironic twist. My favourite is the morning after Shrek has rescued Princess Fiona from the dragon. They are still in the forest. She hears birds singing and spots a mother bird on its next. In a typical Disney animation, this is a cue for the heroine to burst into song. Instead, the next scene shows a frying pan full of eggs.

Alexandra Sokoloff says that a good scene ending should contain a “disaster”. Like the ending I quoted earlier from Margaret Mahy, it should swivel the protagonist and the plot around in a new direction.

To create a disaster, ask yourself:

•  What surprises can occur?
•  How can I make things worse?

Next week: Layering Your Scene by Enriching the Language

Scene Layering -- Character Arc and Scene Structure

Last week I blogged on adding texture to your novel by layering each scene. The goal is to up the emotional impact of your novel – which is what readers want and editors buy. We looked at the top level, the Plot Level, and asked the questions does this scene either

•  advance the protagonist towards her/his goal?
•  or add to the conflict?

 If neither, then the scene isn’t pulling its weight. Either cut it or revise it to make it pull its weight.

This week we’re going to look at the second level: the Character Arc Level.

In most novels (there are a couple of exceptions), the story is essentially about how the character changes, in other words, the Character Arc. The character starts with one idea about him/herself and the world (Lori Wilde calls it the Mistaken World View). As long as he/she holds onto this philosophy or world view, it blocks her/him from achieving his/her goals, which includes a happy union with the love interest. The action of the story (i.e., the plot) is basically a series of experiences that steer the character into change. No change, no Happily Ever After ending. (For those of you who feel a little unsteady about developing a Character Arc, check out my blog post.)

So when you’re looking scenes on the Character Arc Level, you need to have clear, first of all what your Character Arc looks like, for both the hero and heroine. (In a romance, both have to change.)

Start by writing out for each major character (and any minor characters who have their own subplots):

    • Original character flaw (mistaken world view)

    • Change needed to succeed/have a HEA

Then look at the scene. How does it contribute to character development? Write out:

    • Character strength or weakness/vulnerability the scene reveals

    • What happens in the scene or sequence to upset the character’s equilibrium and move her/him further

        on the road to change?

Have you shown the change? (It should be a micro-change.) Is the micro-change justified by what just happened?

As you’re working through the rewrites of your novel, this is also a good time to step back and look at the novel as a whole in terms of the stages of character development.

• Is each leap forward incremental?
• Or has the character made some huge leaps forward that aren’t justified by the action in the plot? (This is one of the signs of melodramatic writing.)
• Do you need to add a scene that shows the missing bit of growth?

One final, very important question to ask yourself: Does your scene work in terms both Character Development and Plot? In other words, does the plot point provide impetus for growth? Or did that growth come from something totally superfluous to the plot? If it did, then you’re in for more major rewrites, because the two have to connect.

Once you’re satisfied with how the scene works in terms of the book’s overall structure (Plot and Character Arc) it’s time to look more closely at the scene itself. I usually start with the internal structure of the scene – the Scene Structural Level.

According to Dwight Swain, author of Techniques of the Selling Writer, there are two kinds of scenes, which he calls Scene and Sequel. In the “Scene” something happens. In the Sequel, the character reacts to what has just happened (and its result) and formulates a new plan.

Both types of scenes have three parts, but what happens within those parts is slightly different.

In a Scene:

• Character goes into the scene with a Goal (what he/she wants to accomplish in this particular scene.) For example, in the armory scene in my Arthurian novel, The Deadly Peace, my heroine’s goal is to figure out a way to get her father, the Regent, to set a date for her Coronation.
• Something happens to block the character from achieving her/his goal. This is the Conflict. In my scene, my heroine and her friends come up with a plan, but it involves sending out invitations. None of them has handwriting good enough to write out official invitations, and everyone in the castle who does is in her father’s employ.
• The character takes action or makes a decision and there is a Result (sometimes called the Disaster) which sets back the character or somehow causes him/her to change direction or try a different tack. In my scene, my heroine is forced to seek help from someone she considers her enemy. 

In a Sequel:

• Character Reacts emotionally to the Result or Disaster. Swain suggests this should be a visceral response, which I’ll discuss more in a later blog.
• Character considers his/her Options, none of which are particularly good. This sets up a hard choice, which creates more tension or conflict.
• Character makes a Choice or Decision, which then creates the Goal for the next scene.

 Your scenes need to follow one of these two patterns. If they don’t, nothing is happening. Chuck that baby. (Or at least put it in the Outtakes folder). Scene and Sequel can be compressed into one scene, but all the parts need to be there.

In addition to the two types of scene patterns, there’s also an emotional structure experienced by the reader – that rising tension that makes a scene work well. No matter which of the two scene patterns you have, the tension of the scene itself is actually structured the same as a novel, with an introduction/set up building to a climax and culminating in a resolution, which is the hook for the next scene. As you read your scene to yourself, you should experience the same growing tension as you would in reading the novel as a whole.

More questions to ask yourself regarding scene structure:

• Have I set the introduction/opening of the scene as close to the action of the scene as I can? Or is there time wasted doing things like getting the character into the room, making polite introductions, pouring tea, etc?
• Does the scene build to a climax in which the protagonist is forced to take an action he/she may not have wanted to take?
• Is there a disaster in the outcome? (This provides your hook.)
• Did I get out of the scene immediately after that, or does the scene peter out and lose its tension?

OK, what if your character actually manages to achieve his/her scene goal, as happens in the chapter of my YA that I was revising today. It’s about three chapters from the end. I need for my protagonist to achieve this goal (it’s part of her character growth and a plot point) but the minute Sophie achieved her goal, the tension went out of the scene. Definitely not what an author wants happening right at the climax. The solution came from something I learned from Diana Gabaldon’s early books: turn a victory into a disaster. Sophie achieves her goal, but that puts her in a position where she now has no excuse not to do something she’s been trying to avoid. I added a final line of dialog that puts her on the spot.

Disaster equals a hook.

Margie Lawson, whose EDITS course (in fact all her courses) are must-dos for serious writers, makes a great point about chapter breaks. End it where you don’t expect a break and it will create a hook. Don’t have the scene where the debutant is rifling through the antagonist’s desk during his ball end with her having found the evidence she needs. End it with him coming into the room before she’s completed her search.

Next post: Scene Layering and Show and Tell