Writing For Energy and Impact
Week Six| Art of the Scene: How to Make Things Happen Fast
Before we jump into our scenes work, some announcements!
`Have you noticed our re-design? If you missed the rollout yesterday, you can read the story of my imperfect Olivetti typewriter here!
Do you want to ignite or reignite your writing practice in the new year? Please join us for our 12-week intensive, “For the Joy & The Sorrow,” a time for writing the world. We start January 8 and you can read all about how it works here if you want, but all you really need to know is that it all happens on Substack; posts come out for 12 Wednesdays in a row; and we’re going to write the ordinary extraordinary details of the world as inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. You need to be a paid member to participate. Here’s what one member said yesterday about writing with us: “Writing has become one of the most important expressions of myself and this, for the most part, is possible only through your encouraging lived example of deep listening within and seeing what surrounds us. Everything is always there for us. Thank you so so much.” So, we hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be beautiful, and if you need to upgrade, you can do that here, or read more about the intensive here. A good way to start a hard new year.
We have a live on Zoom open mic salon coming up this Friday at noon Central! At our open mics, you can read anything that emerged from any of our last intensives or our Wednesday exercises. Salons are fun, informal, friendly, and inspiring. Get lots more details here. You need to be a paid member to attend. More 2025 events for paid and founding members TBA soon.
Now, onto our last post of our scenes intensive.
I don’t know about you, but wow, I’ve learned a lot.
Over the last six weeks, we’ve explored different kinds of scenes in fiction and essay—scenes that are more interior or exterior, scenes that slow time, and scenes where narrative time matches real time versus scenes that leave narrative time for flashback, etc. In fact, we’ve talked a lot about time. You can check it all out here if you’ve missed anything.
Until this intensive, I must say I have never thought quite so deeply about the relationship between time—both real time and narrative time—and scenes.
I knew that scenes were inherently connected to time—that scenes are defined by putting one or more characters into a specific place at a specific moment in time and then moving them through a specific span of time from that moment to a future moment, whether it be five minutes, five hours, or five days (and yes, that would be a very long scene, but it could certainly be done).
But I didn’t know, or fully understand, how even within the framework of the scene, time is in many ways the ongoing decisional dilemma in terms of how we’re going to approach that scene. How we’re going to build it and shape it for maximum effect.
I’ll be thinking about the role of time in my work in exciting new ways going forward, and I hope you will, too. It is so empowering to have this new awareness. I continue to believe that being able to see and name what we are doing on the page, and to identify (even retroactively) why we are doing it, is a kind of superpower when it comes to developing our writing.
And speaking of the role of time, our focus this week is on the art of making things happen fast in a scene. We’re going to look at three scenes (fiction and nonfiction) from published work—a fist fight from an Elena Ferrante novel, the opening of a Cheryl Strayed essay (one of the best openings of any essay or story I’ve ever read), and a very short scene from one of my own short stories.
We’re going to quickly break down how these scenes work and why, for very specific reasons grounded in the writing itself, like sentence and paragraph structure, pace of events, interior vs. exterior details, and more. From there, we can more easily and effectively test some of these same techniques in our own work (and I am excited to read what you share in the comments!).
For the close reads, I’m going to start with my own scene, because I know it best, then we’ll look at Strayed and Ferrante, then we’ll try our hand at action—the art of making things happen, at a faster pace than most of what we’ve done so far in this intensive.
I can’t wait to see what we can conjure. Let’s get started.
In this scene from my short story, “Family, Family,” first runner up in the Masters Review fiction contest a few years ago, a new teacher, heavily pregnant, comes back to her classroom to find the children teasing a little boy named Leo by tossing around a yarn doll named Yarnie that he has been carrying around under his sweater, like the baby in his teacher’s belly.
What I wanted in this scene was for readers to at first experience some of the active chaos of a first-grade classroom gone rogue, so that’s what I tried to set up at the beginning of the scene as the children circle the desks throwing the doll to each other.
However, I wanted the scene to end in a kind of breathless build up of quieter action that hastens ever faster to the last sentence, where the teacher has regained (temporary) control, with the final two sentences of the final paragraph being six long lines each:
One afternoon at the end of October, I came back to our room after Miss Marla’s Spanish lesson—she was teaching the children a darling verse for our Hallowmas festival the next day—only to find Leo at his desk in the middle of the second row, rocking back and forth in his chair. The other children had formed a circle around the outside of the desks. “Throw it to me!” they shrieked, and, “My turn!” and, “Now me!” Cara was jumping up and down and grabbing at the air and then clutching her fists to her chest, and Foster was snatching back at the air screaming, “No! I caught it!” All of them were jumping and throwing and grabbing frantically at nothing at all.
“What in heaven’s name is going on?” I said. But none of them even pretended to stop themselves. My voice had lost whatever slim magic it had ever had.
“Throw it this way!” Maddy yelled.
“No!” Darren yelled back. “You dropped it already! Do you want Leo to get it back?”
“You’re all lying!” Leo cried, slapping his palms on his desk. “You don’t have her! None of you do! She’s not born yet!”
“First grade!” I yelled, my voice higher and shriller than I liked ever for it to be. “To your seats, now!” I began rubbing the palms of my hands together, and Lila Baxter, bless her heart, began immediately to do the same. Her eyes looked heavy, about to spill, and so I rubbed my palms faster and harder, and soon half of Sun Row had joined me—Milo and Joeng and Cara were already in their seats and the others were filing in too—and the sound of their hands was lovely. I began to snap my fingers, left and right, and the children in Moon Row, which was behind Sun Row, followed suit—Travis and Katie and Polly, but not poor Leo, whose head was on his desk. By now the children knew exactly what was happening, and they were all scrambling to their desks. Foster was climbing over Ian and Maisie in Star Row to get to his seat faster, and just as he plunked himself down, I looked straight at him and began to clap my hands, while the children in Sun Row continued rubbing their palms together, making that nice soft whirring, and those in Moon Row continued snapping, and only in Star Row did the children clap with me, softly at first, but then with more and more force, until finally I looked to the very back, Planet Row. I began stamping my feet then, and those children followed suit, stamping harder and harder, until the symphony of wind and rain and thunder we were conjuring became so transfixing, so hypnotic, that the temperature in our classroom dropped by several degrees and the scent of wet pine rose from the skin of our palms, and we were in awe of ourselves, and we never, ever wanted it to stop.
The idea in this scene was to use fast-paced dialogue between the children and each other, and the children and their teacher, combined with the actions of throwing the doll and climbing across the desks, combined with the even faster—but paradoxically quieter—action of the rain game that builds to what I hoped was a surprising kind of crescendo.
Oh, and in terms of action as defined by what actually happens in this scene, what movement occurs: the children chant and scream and throw a doll, the teacher commands them to stop, they don’t, she compels them back to their desks another way, they comply, scrambling over each other, and fall into the rhythm of a familiar clapping and stomping game played seated at their desks, a game that sounds like a rain storm.
Now let’s look at Cheryl Strayed, and Elena Ferrante, and write a mini-scene of our own.