Hi and welcome back to part six of your second Flying Lesson. We are talking about scene which is the mother of all the tools for a writer.
For a while, I suggest you learn to write a scene “straight up” which means to keep the SRC close and follow the steps. Write up your location, describe your people, and then move methodically through the action in a straight line until you understand what you are doing. Try not to flash back, or over think, or explain, or take wide tangents from what your scene is about. Try to stay on point. And trust your moment to hold you because it will. If you let it.
Let me show you what I mean with the opening of Blackbird:
The only house I’ll ever call home is the one on Mary Street…it begins and for ten paragraphs, or about five hundred words…I give the reader a wide view of Carson City proper, fly by Auntie Carol and Uncle Bob’s house, and then make a hard landing at the house on Mary Street where you (the reader) come in the front door and go one of three ways. I give a brief layout of the house and use this to intro the people who live there (Momma, Daddy, and B.J.) all while keeping the focus on a mother sick enough to go to special doctors and to walk with the help of crutches.
The first scene, which is representative in that it is “every morning” begins: In the morning, I sit outside and listen.
Here, Jenny is with the cats and when the toilet flushes, she’s up and goes to the kitchen. This becomes the second representative scene where she prepares her mother a breakfast tray of toast and coffee. Presentation is everything.
The third and final representative scene is the delivery of the tray to the bedridden mother.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Momma says.
The stage is now set.
I am not doing anything but “moving forward in time.” And I pay attention to one thing: A sick mother.
A scene is a moment in time where something happens to move the story forward.
Yes, the reader gets tons of description and details about this family, this location, and these days of a daughter tending a mother, but the story doesn’t drift from the core issue or what’s at stake. We all understand, intuitively, that a sick mother is a big problem. A sick mother could lead to a dead mother and that, for a little girl, is a terrible thing. The worst thing in the world. I, the writer, don’t need to say these things in my writing because it’s thematic enough not to say such things. We all need our mothers. A mother is core.
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