"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."~ George Bernard Shaw
Week Four| Art of the Scene: Bringing an Interior Scene to Life
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Hi, friends.
In this season of thanks, I find myself flooded with gratitude for all of you, and for this beautiful community we’re building together. It’s my honor to do language together.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
As for Week Four of the Art of the Scene intensive, I’m offering you a simple one this week—simple, but not easy, because what is ever truly easy? Anyway, I’ll get to the scene part in a moment.
First, I want to tell you that by the time you receive this post, I will have departed for a spontaneous, very last-minute holiday with Jon, Billie, Z, and Frannie. We decided to do a little trip on account of the way the rest of the family’s various plans and travel schedules lined up, which led to our moving our main kid/grandkid gathering to Saturday, and leaving us with a choice of cooking twice, or … setting off on an adventure.
We chose the latter.
We’ll be staying at an old lake cabin that’s part of an historic family summer camp in Wisconsin. It’s a quirky, one-of-a-kind place that I’ve had my eye on for several years as a potential retreat gathering space—and more recently, as a potential site for Writing in the Dark: The CAMP. Thanks to an array of stars coming into some kind of complicated alignment, it became possible to tour Wednesday and stay over until Friday, which is what we will be doing!
Like I said, this summer camp is a quirky, vintage place, and only after being on site for myself will I know if/how it might work for Writing in the Dark—I can’t wait to find out. In the meantime, it will be a fun adventure in the woods either way!
Now for this week’s scene work.
A few of you have been asking about writing a “scene of indeterminate duration,” as mentioned in the Rachel Beanland essay,1 in which she wrote:
In fiction, we sometimes write scenes of “indeterminate duration,” which were made famous in the 19th century by writers such as Henry James. Characters sit at a window or maybe they wander across a grassy knoll. Are they occupied for a few minutes, an hour, the duration of an afternoon? It’s hard to tell because the physical action in which they engage is repetitive or continuous.
With scenes of indeterminate duration, we become interested not in the character’s movements, which are mundane, but in their mental processes, which may be anything but. We throw time markers out the window because they distract from our desire to know the character’s interiority, and when change occurs—and it always does—it comes from within.
The scene we’ll look at together this week as a model for how this kind of scene might work is one from a Jane Hamilton novel.2 I chose this scene for a few reasons:
The part we will look at seems to me to match Beanland’s definition of “indeterminate duration” while also being a launch scene, since it opens the novel
While the dramatic inciting incident does not occur until the end of chapter one, Hamilton nonetheless captures the building energy of the launch even in the quieter very first paragraphs of “indeterminate duration” that we’ll look at together, which are rich with exterior detail and powerful foreshadowing
Hamilton’s scene of indeterminate duration demonstrates interiority that holds my attention (your experience may differ!)
It’s interesting to note that we’ve moved, over the course of the past three weeks—with these three separate novel openings—from almost no interiority in the Tyler opening to a weave in and out of interiority in the Miller opening to this week’s excerpt being almost entirely interior. And while we did speak last week of how such slow starts might be tough sells by today’s conventions (both the Tyler and Miller novels are more than 20 years old), I started a newer Tana French novel this week which also has a slow start similar to the ones we’ve seen last week and this week. You’ll find a preview in the footnotes.3 This is fascinating to me, because Tana French is considered one of the greatest crime writers of our time, as well as one of the greatest novelists in general, and this particular book I just started has been described as, among other highly laudatory things, “taut, chiseled, and propulsive.”
So what does this tell us?
It tells us is that, as usual, you can do it if you can do it. That is to say, you can write interiority if you can write it well enough to hold our attention (which is subjective, you’ll never hold everyone’s attention, but you know what I mean). We know interiority is hard to write in a way that compels a reader to keep going, but it is still very much in our best interest to learn to write interiority as well as we can.
Why?
First, because it’s one brick from which our writing is built, and the stronger all the bricks, the stronger the writing overall. But perhaps even more important is the issue of truth in self-discovery.
What I mean by that is that when we reach harder, stretch farther, push longer to capture interiority that is richer, realer, and more solid with exterior details (yes, interiority can be full of exterior details, as we see in the Miller opening, this week’s Hamilton opening, and the Tana French opening, as well), we inevitably uncover a greater depth of understanding into our own inner life and/or that of our characters. Writing this kind of interiority requires that we go beyond what is easy, we get under the surface of the “thoughts and feelings” version of interiority, and instead plumb the depths of what lies beneath, the strange and meaningful objects and artifacts to which Adrienne Rich refers in her genius poem, “Diving Into The Wreck.” There, in those artifacts, we find a truer story about ourselves and others.
But how? A few strategies come to mind. First, ensuring that the interiority leans heavily on the devices of well written exteriority (concrete specific detail, action, and even dialogue) versus solely thoughts and feelings. Second, by ensuring that the interiority is never extraneous, but instead crucial to the story. Third, by using, whenever possible, foreshadowing of crucial events ahead to ground the interiority in plot and narrative drive.
So, I hope you enjoy this opportunity to play with an interior scene of indeterminate duration—possibly also a launch scene—because next week, we’ll try our hand at the complete opposite by turning to “slowed scenes,” or “time extended narration,” or “the stretch.” Whatever you call it, that kind of slowed writing is meant to highlight and give weight to the most crucial moments in our stories, searing them into a reader’s mind. And my intent is for us to look at such a scene in a nonfiction work.
But first: scenes of indeterminate duration.