Five Ingredients of the Scene for the Fiction Writer, Introduction, Conclusion 3, by Emily Hanlon

CONCLUSION THREE: FICTION WRITERS DON’T NEED A LOT OF DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES


This series begins on this blog page on January 27 and continues on February 7, 2004

After a lifetime of writing and twenty-five years of teaching writing, I’ve boiled them down to five. Everything else builds on these five techniques. Everything else is artistic growth and subtlety that comes as you develop as a writer.

THE FIVE INGREDIENTS AS BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE SCENE:

1. Point of View
2. Dialogue
3. Dramatic tension/Action
4. Mood
5. Flashback

These five techniques are the building blocks of the scene. Most stories and ninety-nine percent of novels grow from scene.
The scene leads to chapters, the chapter leads to parts, and the parts to the completed novel. To my mind, everything else is a variation of this theme.

A WORD TO THE WISE:

These five techniques alone do not a fiction writer make. Fiction writing is more than a craft; it is a creative art. Learning these techniques will, however, go a long way toward filling up your writer’s Bag of Tricks. But most important, learning, embracing, owning technique gives you options as a writer, And having options makes it easier to fall down the rabbit hole into the cosmic landscape of your creative unconscious, which is where the passion and the juice lies. (To explore the falling down the rabbit hole as well as the passion and the juice, also see Emily’s book and tapes, The Art of Fiction Writing…)

MY GOAL:

My goal is to keep this book simple. Technique should not be complicated. The more simple, the more apt you are to discover the power and beauty of the techniques.

HEY, WHAT ABOUT WORDS AND STRUCTURE?

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t discussed either words or structure. And I won’t, except for this: suffice to say, we love words or we wouldn’t be writers. But if you focus on words when you are beginning your story, you will stay in your mind, which is where your ICK lives. (Ever spend a couple of hours, even days, trying to find precisely the right words. You spend half the time in the thesaurus or dictionary – not to mention thinking you are going to lose your mind!
Words do not drive a story. Characters drive a story. Words are the vehicles, gorgeous, tantalizing vehicles but vehicles none the less. So my advice to myself and to you: forget words. Your best writing in terms of language happens when you give yourself over to your characters and the joy and passion of your Inner Writer.

As for structure, that’s far too varied and complicated to boil down into anything simple. I don’t think about structure in my own novel until I have a fairly decent draft. So, if anyone tells you there’s a blueprint for structuring a novel, don’t believe them. Novels aren’t screenplays. And we’re not talking about formula writing. As far as I’m concerned, laying a structure on your book before you begin is like trying to fit a circle into a square hole. It is my experience that structure is a mystery that reveals itself. Once that happens, you begin to explore and play with it. So structure is important but beyond the venue of this book.
And now onto the work of the book. After exploring the five ingredients of the scene in detail, we’ll move on to ways to develop and refine them by weaving them into the concept of writing as a process. We will explore how to create a story from nothing but an image called up from the unconscious, how to mine your first drafts for the jewels that lie there, the difference between rewriting and editing and how to develop point of view, passion, story and suspense by interviewing your character.

By the time you finish, you will understand in a visceral way what Madeleine L’Engle meant when she said, “My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.” However, with the writer’s Bag of Tricks you’ll be carrying by then, you’ll have the tools to let your characters take the lead!

The Five Ingredients of the Scene, (which will appear in installments on this blog site over the next few months) is a companion to The Art of Fiction Writing or How to Fall Down the Rabbit Hole Without Really Trying ( a workbook and two audio tapes). The Five Ingredients of the Scene will explore technique and craft, the “rational” aspects of the creative process. This will be more powerful for you if you have learned to quiet your Inner Critic, have fallen down the rabbit hole and have become at home in your own creative unconscious. If you have not read The Art of Fiction Writing, I urge you to do so.

Click here to explore The Art of Fiction Writing.


Next Installment: An Exploration of Point of View...


© Emily Hanlon, www.thefictionwritersjourney.com, 2004
emily@emilyhanlon.com

This series on The Five Ingredients of the Scene for the Fiction Writer can be passed on to a friend but cannot be reprinted on another site with written permission from Emily Hanlon. Any reprint must have the copyright, a link back to my site: www.thefictionwritersjourney.com. My bio as well as other articles by Emily Hanlon can be found by clicking here.

When writing literally saves your life: An Obituary of Janet Frame

This from an obituary by New Zealand Writer, Janet Frame, who died in January at the age of 79:

"For almost a decade, Miss Frame moved in and out of institutions. Since electric-shock treatment did little for her, it was decided in 1952 that she needed a lobotomy. She had often seen such patients returning from the hospital, “with plaster over their shaven heads...and the pupils of their eyes large and dark as if filled with ink.” Now she, too, was to be “changed” into someone biddable and quiet.

But she had also been writing while in hospital. In the nick of time, “The Lagoon”, a collection of short stories, was published and won New Zealand's highest literary prize. “I've decided that you should stay as you are. I don't want you changed,” said Seacliff's chief surgeon. As Miss Frame later agreed, “My writing saved me.”

It was to go on doing so. “Faces in the Water” was written as a therapeutic exercise on the advice of her psychiatrist at London's Maudsley hospital, where she admitted herself as an outpatient in 1957. To the end of her life she used writing as therapy, not caring whether she was published. Her autobiography (which was made into the film “An Angel at My Table” in 1990) was meant to set the record straight and show that she was not disturbed. She loathed being labelled a “mad genius”.

Yet as her fame spread abroad, leading last October to her nomination for the Nobel prize for literature..."

From the Economist Magazine

Five Ingredients of the Scene for the Fiction Writer, Introduction, Conclusion 2, by Emily Hanlon

Conclusion Two: Creativity is a subtle and magnificent dance between the rational and the intuitive, between the left and right parts of the brains, between technique and imagination.

(This series begins on the January 27 blog)

Both partners in this dance are absolutely necessary and are needed in equal proportion, which means that imagination is not more important than technique and visa versa. If you only live in the imagination, you will never get organized, you will never complete your story. However, if you start from the rational, linear, organizational part of the process, ( ie. Gotta have the perfect opening sentence and first paragraph… better yet, an outline…) you will never fall into the rich, passionate imagination or what has been called the “great seething sea of the unconscious”.

However, the main problem I have seen in my twenty-five years of teaching fiction writing is over-dependence on the rational part of the equation. A prime example of this is the adage, “Write what you know.”

Write what you know? How boring! Especially for the fiction writer. As Gertrude Stein said, “What will be best in your writing is what you really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”

Paradoxically, when we write from the imagination we are writing what we “know” but from such a deep level of knowing that we don’t know that we know it until it is revealed in our writing.


I AM NOT I

by Juan Ramon Jimenez

I am not I.
I am walking beside me
whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit
and at other times manage to forget.
The one who forgives sweet when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who remains silent when I talk,
and the one who will remain when I die.


This I who is not I represents the deeper knowing and is, in fact, the powerful engine of the creative unconscious. It is also the truer aspect of self, often the part that we do not readily show to the world, and sometimes do not show even to our self – at least not consciously.

So how do we access the deeper knowing? Remember I said that creativity is a dance between the known and unknown, the rational and intuitive. Here’s a perfect example of the give and take of the dance: start with the known but use it as a jumping off point, as a doorway into the unconscious. The key is not to be slavish to the known. This is especially true when you are working with autobiography, where what is “known” is largely based on memory. And memory is often faulty. In addition, autobiography is only your point of view. How about alternative points of view?

Here’s an exercise: take an incident from your life in which you are absolutely certain that you are the injured party. The easiest way to do this is to use an argument or a fight, which automatically holds dramatic tension.

1. See the argument or fight in your mind’s eye as a scene from a movie.

2. Write the scene keeping to your point of view (POV).

3. Put that scene aside and write another scene, this time using the other person’s point of view.

Remember that writing from the other person’s POV means that you disregard your POV. It is the other person’s inner thoughts and feelings that count. In this version, your feelings can be expressed only through dialogue and action.

It is important to be clear on point of view, which means getting inside the main character’s head, heart and gut, literally seeing the world through the character’s POV. So when you are in the “bad guy’s” POV, be as true to that POVas you are to your own. An excellent example of this is Crime and Punishment where Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov, who is not a criminal, put an ax into his landlady’s head. Thus begins one of the greatest novel ever written. Did Dostoevsky have to put an ax into anyone’s head to write this? Clearly not. And neither do you.

William Faulkner wrote: “... the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself...
alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the
sweat and the agony.”

Faulkner has given us a tough assignment, yet it an assignment at which we much excel as fiction writers. The best way to succeed at this is to leave behind what you believe to be “true” and, as I suggest in The Art of Fiction Writing, “fall down the rabbit hole where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible.” What is the rabbit hole? The magic chute leading directly to the creative unconscious, your personal Wonderland, wherein lies untold possibility and hence freedom for the fiction writer.

How do we do this? Here are some suggestions:

1. Take chances. Be a risk taker.

2. Learn to be at home amidst the unknown.

3. Trust that order will ultimately arise out of chaos.

4. Write without needing your writing to make immediate sense.

5. Think of something you could never write about and then write about it.

6. Find people, a community (like The Fiction Writer’s Journey) where you can find non-judgmental support for your creativity.

7. Understand that “falling down the rabbit hole” doesn’t mean that you’re childish, or worse, crazy.
Know that there, in your own personal Wonderland, you may well find the truths passions, characters
and stories for which your creativity hungers.

To end, I offer you this from Thomas Wolfe, a natural swimmer in the seething sea of the unconscious:

“It was a process that began in a whirling vortex and creative chaos and that proceeded
slowly at the expense of infinite confusion, toil and error toward clarification and the
articulation of an ordered and formal structure.”

The Five Ingredients of the Scene, (which will appear in installments on this blog site over the next few months) is a companion to The Art of Fiction Writing or How to Fall Down the Rabbit Hole Without Really Trying ( a workbook and two audio tapes). The Five Ingredients of the Scene will explore technique and craft, the “rational” aspects of the creative process. This will be more powerful for you if you have learned to quiet your Inner Critic, have fallen down the rabbit hole and have become at home in your own creative unconscious. If you have not read The Art of Fiction Writing, I urge you to do so.

Click here to explore The Art of Fiction Writing.

Next installment: Conclusion Three: Fiction writers don’t need a lot of different techniques. After a lifetime of writing and twenty-five years of teaching writing, I’ve boiled them down to five. Everything else builds on these five techniques. Everything else is artistic growth and subtlety that comes as you develop as a writer.

© Emily Hanlon, www.thefictionwritersjourney.com, 2004

This series on The Five Ingredients of the Scene for the Fiction Writer can be passed on to a friend but cannot be reprinted on another site with written permission from Emily Hanlon. Any reprint must have the copyright, a link back to my site: www.thefictionwritersjourney.com. My bio as well as other articles by Emily Hanlon can be found by clicking here.

emily@emilyhanlon.com
www.thefictionwritersjourney.com

Next Installment of Five Ingredients of the Scene

Coming Soon!!

See installment #1 on January 27th.

Bookmark this page!

A Writing from the Muse Quote from Nikki Price

Nikki wrote this in response to The Messages from the Muse that I posted
on Feb. 2.

"I to think we should not think of how we look, what we do or do not have, or worry about what other think so much. We live our whole lives worrying… So we put on that show for all the world to see. The outside wears the mask and shows how it’s suppose to be. We should be like our journaling -- one of my dearest friends is my Book! I don't have to think or worry or even dot my I's. Yes, it’s done in truth, what's inside me. The one who walks with us we tell it go and play. We don't have time for fun and games or to sit in the sun and dream. So we push and try to hide that part that wants us to be free. Instead we have trapped ourselves in to believing that what we see is real. But the real truth is the one we try to hide and the one who walks beside us waiting only to belong. That my friend is your joy, peace, hope that lies deep within your soul."

Nikki Price


Thanks, Nikki!
Emily


Have you looked at Emily's book, The Art of Fiction Writing yet?
You can do so and try some of the writing exercises and prompts by clicking here. The Art of Fiction Writing

Two Messages from the Muse

If the Muse inspires, put pen to paper and
write what these poems evoke in you. Then
you can post your writing on the Writer's Exchange
Blog page. If you haven't already signed on, send me your email so I can
log you on.


Two Messages from the Muse

Forget your profile,
all that is outer stuff.
But pay attention
to the one who walks beside you
and tends to be who you aren't.


by Antonio Machado




I AM NOT I

by Juan Ramon


I am not I.
I am walking beside me
whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit
and at other times manage to forget.
The one who forgives sweet when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who remains silent when I talk,
and the one who will remain when I die.

Click for more Messages from the Muse