"We write the scenes that are most resonant, then rely on summary to pitch us forward in time, until we arrive at another important moment" ~Rachel Beanland
Week One | Art of the Scene: Moving Through Time
Dear WITDers,
This post does contain the first installment of The Art of the Scene seasonal intensive.
But first, I have to be honest with you. I had a very hard time getting out of bed this morning. I am having a hard time even choosing to send this post. It’s like, I didn’t quite know how to engage, how to do whatever comes next. So I didn’t even know whether to send it; it feels so meaningless. Hollow. Almost obscene.
Maybe I should just send a black square, I thought. Or like my friend
did yesterday, some kind of test of the emergency broadcast system. A message saying simply, “Help, help, help,” like Z used to say, with his emphatic little ASL sign, except he did it backward, with one hand pushing down into the other, instead of one hand lifting the other up.That feels fitting, too.
Oh, the children—their futures.
This planet.
In 2016, when we woke up to this, I cried most of the day. We had a crew working in our house, putting down new floors in our kitchen and bathroom. Among other major upheavals related to that, there was a toilet in our dining room.
Everything everywhere inside and out felt surreal and out of place.
Everything everywhere inside and out feels surreal and out of place.
I want better words for you. I want to do language better. I want to keep working to make language capable of telling the truth again, like Wendell Berry says. I want to keep doing that with all of you. I want to keep believing it matters—that it can be done.
This morning, that’s a hard sell.
But also.
I spent one summer during high school sneaking under a manual garage door to sleep secretly in my mother’s basement because I had nowhere else to go. I once, at age 13, found myself alone in some dusty, two-bit Greyhound bus station on the eastern edge of Wyoming with an expired bus pass, no money, and another 700 miles to go. In another Greyhound misadventure in 1984, I found myself in Juarez, Mexico with no passport, no other ID besides a Dayton’s charge card, about $50 USD, and a few dozen words of high-school Spanish, most of which I couldn’t remember in my state of terror. Later, in adulthood, during my pregnancy with my second child, my whole body woke up—terrified and broken and furious—from the long, drugged sleep of repressed, long-term childhood sexual abuse.
This is different, I know. Structural forces of government and society cannot be overcome with a dash of personal pluck. Personal pluck doesn’t count for as much, if it counts at all.
Except it kind of has to—because that’s all any of us can start with when it comes to slowly picking up the pieces of this devastating, nightmarish outcome. We just have to help each other do the next right thing.
After we get our wind back.
Getting our wind back will look and feel different for all of us. Some of us may need, before we pick ourselves back up, to find our way to what is still wild and real, as Wendell Berry says in his masterpiece poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”:
Whatever you need to heal, I wish it for you. I wish it for all of us. And I’m grateful, even in my despair this morning, to know you are here.
Below is the first installment of The Art of the Scene, which I’ve been working on for awhile and finalized Sunday and Monday. I am not rewriting it this morning to somehow recalibrate it to reflect the indescribably somber mood of this day. I just don’t have the heart. So, you’ll hear a different kind of voice in it, a more energized, hopeful voice—one that still believes wholly in the power of language and art, in the transformative energy of creation as a means toward a brighter and more beautiful world for us all.
I hope to find my way back to that voice sometime soon, because so much depends on it—collectively, I mean—for all of us.
Love,
Jeannine
P.S. This quote that I chose on Monday—"We write the scenes that are most resonant, then rely on summary to pitch us forward in time, until we arrive at another important moment" ~Rachel Beanland—reads so differently to me now.
It reads like a call to action.
We need to write the scenes that are the most resonant—yes, yes, we do. And: …then rely on summary to pitch us forward in time, until we arrive at another important moment—yes, that’s right, we must do that, pitch ourselves forward in time toward another important moment, a crucially important moment, a moment I need to believe, even if weakly right now, will indeed arrive, because it must.
ed. note: do as you will today with this post—if writing helps you find your way back to yourself, please write. If you just can’t, I get that. Take care of yourself and the people you love. Everything will be here whenever.
The Art of the Scene Week One
For our first week of this new intensive—The Art of the Scene—we’ll start with …. a short scene!
This one is from “Family, Family,” the longest (and best) short story I’ve written in my smallish fiction repertoire (as compared to my largish creative nonfiction archive, which is also full of scenes, since scenes are the backbone of both fiction and CNF):
Had the advent of my pregnancy—or at least, my knowledge of it—not coincided more or less with the birth of Family, Family, I may have been more aware of the slow unraveling of that game, who was being let in or left out of it. As it was, I was mostly focused on keeping my breakfast down while staying ahead, or at least not too far behind, with my lesson planning. You might be shocked at the great effort and time it takes to memorize all of the fairy tales and songs and number games and so forth that make up a first-grade day. Besides that, I can’t deny how charmed I was by Leo’s heartfelt fascination with all things related to my baby. “Ms. Mallery,” he said one day during lunch, not long after he was apparently orphaned in Family, Family. He was standing at the corner of my desk, eating his dried pineapple. “Do you think your baby can see us from inside you? Around your belly button, where the skin is thinner?”
“We can’t know for sure,” I said. You see, Waldorf teachers don’t believe in quashing the magical ideas of children too soon.
“I hope your baby can see me,” Leo said, “because then it might know me better when it’s born.”
Another time that October, Leo drifted over during knitting hour—an hour that was especially trying for him. Not only could he not keep left straight from right, he also confused the back leg of the stitch with the front leg and the over the fence with the under. Mrs. Olson, our handwork assistant, was constantly helping him to cast off, untangle, and begin again, and Leo was losing motivation to care about the scarf he was failing to produce as he watched his classmates’ rows of red and yellow and blue grow stripe by proud stripe. So he drifted. “Ms. Mallery,” Leo said to me that day. “My dad says babies are boring when they’re brand new. Extremely boring. Is this true?”
I laughed. Thomas Whittaker, twice divorced, had two grown sons from those earlier marriages—but his third and current wife, Nan, had desperately wanted a child, since she hadn’t yet had one. Hence, Leo. “Well,” I said to Leo, who was gazing up at me so expectantly with those dark raisin eyes. “I think newborn babies are quite magical, because of how pleasant they feel in your arms, and how delicious they smell, especially their fuzzy heads. And because of how they look at you in a peculiar way, as if they have been searching the wide world for you forever with their deep-ocean eyes. But it’s true that they can’t walk or talk or play with toys—or, really, do much of anything other than sleep and eat and dirty their diapers. So, some people might call them boring, yes.”
“I guess I can’t know how boring they are until yours is born,” Leo said. “But when your baby grows big enough to for sure not be boring, I’m going to teach it all about the whole wide world. Also, I’m going to give it a present.” With this, he patted his argyled tummy. That’s when I saw how he had stuffed the waistband of his sweater into his corduroy pants—how the sweater bulged out. “I’m growing a baby,” Leo said, catching my gaze. “A baby for your baby. See?” He pulled the neck of his sweater out and reached down to extract a mass of brown and purple yarn. It vaguely resembled—if you really used your imagination—a small doll.
Over the next days, Leo divulged more and more to me about his yarn baby. “She’s a girl,” he told me. “Because I hope you have a girl. But even if you have a boy, I will be his friend.” Leo’s baby was made of the longest unbroken strands of discarded wool yarn he had collected from his many false starts on his scarf, those discards he’d stuffed into the bottom of his calico knitting bag. In that sense, Leo had fashioned this baby from his own failures. “I think I might wait to name her until your baby is born,” he said. “But I have six ideas so far for names in my notebook. For now, I call her Yarnie.” At all times, Yarnie stayed under Leo’s argyle sweater—except overnight, when she slept in Leo’s cubby inside his knitting bag to “keep us all safe.” Leo told me as much one afternoon while he watched me drawing a mountain on the chalkboard, its two purple peaks forming a perfect capital M. “But that’s a secret, Ms. Mallery. Don’t tell anyone. Because Yarnie is special. She’s like the starter in sourdough—or the mother in kombucha. She has extra life in her.”
Here, he paused and leaned far forward, resting his elbows on my desk. “And just because she’s made out of yarn doesn’t mean she’s not real,” he said. “You told us real is whatever we believe in.”
Okay, so we’ll circle back to the “Family, Family” excerpt shortly—it’s our entry point and stepping stone toward next week’s longer excerpt from the opening of an Ann Tyler novel, which is also a dialogue scene between two people.
In other words, we’re starting off with a clear, achievable form, emphasizing the structure and components of the scene more than the action in the scene. But in the last four weeks of our work, we’ll look at other types of scenes (including memoir/nonfiction) and try our hand at some action, too.
But first, let’s talk about the most basic craft of scenes for a minute so we can establish some shared vocabulary, which I think we’ll find very helpful. For example, if you’re a writer of memoir or fiction, and if you have ever sat through a writing workshop and/or received feedback on your own work from peers editors, or teachers, you’ve probably heard some version of the following phrase:
This would be a good place to drop into scene.
But, what does that really mean?
On the surface, it seems like such concrete, actionable advice, right? Just drop into scene. What could be simpler? We all know what a scene is, right?
Wrong.
In almost every workshop where I teach scenes, the writers—usually a majority—express some wobbliness in their grasp of exactly what a scene is and how to recognize and write one with confidence.
And the truth is that when I first started teaching creative writing to adults back in 2010, I also lacked a strong enough grasp on scene writing to be able to explain it clearly to anyone else. Yes, I had an intuitive sense of what makes a scene, and could (mostly) write one, but I struggled to articulate what a scene really is in plain and uncertain terms to my students.
In the fifteen years since I taught my first writing workshop, the wobbliness writers express about scenes has not changed—but, fortunately, I have finally learned how to talk about scenes in ways that are clearer, more useful, and more actionable.
In the simplest terms, a scene is:
A unit of writing in which the writer puts us into a specific place at a specific time and shows us what’s happening over a specific span of real time passing.
There are lots and lots of other ways to think about and define scenes, but … this is our first week of the intensive, so we’ll start at the beginning and wrestle a little with this pared down definition of a scene to see how far we can take it before we further complicate the issue.
This is the definition of a scene we’ll use to guide our writing exercise this week, too. And to do that, we’ll look more closely at the scene I excerpted from “Family, Family” to see how this simple definition operates on the page.
First, though, we need to first dispel a couple of myths about scenes and what differentiates scenes from other units of writing that are not scenes. This differentiation is actually a bit more complicated than it sounds, and part of why the topic of scene writing can be tricky.
For example, the idea that a clean line differentiates scene from summary