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@the-fledgling-artist @edmund-lloyd-fletcher

I got the following email from Daniel David Wallace’s newsletter this morning (minus most of the sales pitch buy one of his courses):

The other day, I helped a talented writer improve a scene in her novel.

…

The scene we were discussing was a simple one: the main character’s friend, a fellow journalist, was calling a hospital to get information about a recent admission.

The dialogue was clear and the two characters were distinct and well-established, and the scene ended in a frustrating set back for the “good guys.” However, it still didn’t feel quite right. Even though it was a small moment in the novel, it felt a little TOO low stakes, a little too perfunctory.

…

So the question was — how to improve this scene? As written, it verged on being a purely generic type of scene from that style of novel (the journalist calls a source and asks questions) — just as generic fantasy stories have scenes where an old man explains ancient legends, and generic literary novels need to have scenes where the protagonist walks around a city thinking about the past.

As the group talked, the solution, we discovered, was not to change anything about the actual events of the scene. I don’t think we adjusted a single line of dialogue. And yet, by the end of the session, the scene had been transformed.

The key was to get into the character’s head, and then to get what he was thinking / feeling on to the page. Step by step, line by line, as he tried to extract some information from the person on the other of the phone, this journalist had to be anticipating things, feeling things, deciding things.

He would react with happiness or frustration to even small developments, and he would be picturing one future reality (while the scene seemed to be going well for him), and then, as things went wrong, another (“I’ve screwed this up.”)

This is a small part of what it means to think of your plot “character-first.” It’s not necessarily about turning every scene into a screaming fistfight, although there’s nothing with those, either. Rather it’s about making every development feel REAL — to the main character.

We can all remember moments, in our real lives, where something small happened to us, something outwardly minor and trivial, and yet it left us annoyed, enraged. Similarly, there are moments of happiness that descend in response to a tiny piece of good news.

The more you can give your novel’s characters this same vitality, the more compelling your readers will find them.

And one way to do that is to start inserting, into their scenes, quick lines that convey their intentions, hopes, expectations, reactions, re-evaluations, and plan-making.

Here’s an example for you.

Imagine you are writing a story about a teenager who takes fencing classes in school. She arrives in the gym one afternoon ready to practice with her friend. But he is cold, doesn’t look her in the eye, and when they spar, he is both aggressive with his attacks and clumsy in defence. He leaves early and she has no idea why.

How could you break up the action of the scene with her internal commentary, her thoughts and feelings (or her actions that reveal her thoughts to the reader), to turn this rather perfunctory scene into a vivid one? -Wallace

I don’t agree with everything Wallace teaches (though everyone should grab his “Write Better Sentences” booklet I reference in my forum signature), but this was worth sharing. -Taylor