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Hey Saxon Scribes,

I hope you don’t mind if I splatter my not-fully-formed thoughts all over this page.

For a while, my writing conscience has nagged me about this topic I call Disposition. To me, it encapsulates everything that makes a scene matter. Having just stepped out of rewriting a scene where I did not use this principle, it got me thinking and I came up with an analogy that might help me explain it, so I’m going to share that and see if it makes sense to you.

First of all, let me try to write a definition of Disposition.

Disposition is the way the POV character feels toward the general world which is then explored through a segment of action (i.e. a scene.) There is also Narrative Disposition where the narrator has a strong voice (generally 1st or 3rd person omniscient) and the scene is used to explore his or her general feelings toward the immediate section of the world being viewed.

Don’t get confused into mixing this with mood. A mood would be something like “haunting” or “reminiscent”. Disposition includes the mood, but it is more than that. It’s something like a short-period worldview. A character’s disposition in a scene might be that everyone is out to get him and he shares the sentiment. I guess after typing that that a character’s disposition should always or almost always be both active and passive. There’s a way they see the world as applying to them and there’s a temperament with which they plan to react. As another example: The character sees the people around them as a danger to their own selves and their personal reaction is a mixture of sympathy, uncertainty, and frustration.

In my experience, a scene always works when its focus is on disposition. Whenever or wherever in a scene the disposition takes a back seat, everything loses its meaning. In a good scene, a general disposition is established as soon as possible, then the plot of the scene really begins. The plot tests or affirms the disposition and then the scene closes with the disposition somehow different — whether changed, deepened, or expanded upon. The only exception to a disposition based scene that I can think of is the “ambush scene” when the character is going about their tasks when something totally unexpected happens that leads to an intense back and forth conflict-laden scene. Even here though, after the conflict ends, the immediate effect is a strong new disposition, fired up by what just happened.

A few things disposition is not: endless scenes of introspection without action, the character splattering all their feelings on the page, a character going from one thing to another and reacting emotionally along the way (characters can react without showing a clear disposition), any external description, conflict, etc that doesn’t immediately tie into the POV.

From everything I’ve seen, I’m led to believe that this is possibly the most important factor in a book’s success. It is, essentially, the ground upon which the reader establishes themselves to get an emotional perspective. With that ground to stand on, bad plot structure, telling, stock characters, and a whole host of other sins can be forgiven. With this ground to stand on, your story might have problems but it will be resonant. This doesn’t excuse you from those other things since they can make a HUGE difference, but I still think this is the most important factor.

Now, that analogy.

Pick a scene or chapter and think of it as a painting. Now, think of what makes a good painting.

Everyone knows this one. It’s the eyes and the smile.

In this one, the outside world is a symbol of the inside world.

Now stop and think. Did those things I listed have anything to do with the coloration, the level of detail, the arrangement of the objects? In a superficial way, yes, but not really. These are all the tools of the “essence” of the paintings, they are not the essence themselves.

Now think for a moment. If I called the essence of these pictures their “dispositions”, wouldn’t you understand what I meant?

If disposition is hard for you to grasp, imagine a scene from your novel as a master painting. You have one snapshot of time. Imagine it however you want. Now, stare at the painting and ask yourself what the soul of it is.

If none of this made sense, go ahead and berate me. 😛

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