The Fire in Fiction (9 page)

Have you ever skimmed through some scenes in the middle of a novel? Worse, have you ever looked at middle scenes in your own manuscript and wondered if they work?

Middles are tough. Too many middles in manuscripts and published novels are routine, lackluster, just there, nothing special. What goes wrong? Is it poor focus? Is it a blank spot in an outline? Were these ho-hum scenes written on rainy afternoons following disturbing parent-teacher conferences when inspiration was lacking?

I suspect many sagging middle scenes slump the way they do not because of bad planning or bad luck but because their purpose hasn't yet emerged. Authors, as they plow through the middle portion of their manuscripts, tend to write what they think ought to come next; furthermore, they write it in the first way it occurs to them to do so. In successive drafts such scenes tend to stay in place, little altered. Unsure what to do, an author may leave a scene in place because ... well, just because.

The push to rack up pages, to meet self-imposed or actual deadlines, makes it easy to avoid tearing apart a scene to find its weakly beating heart and surgically open it. Taking a fresh approach means throwing away time and redoing a lot of work. Who wants to do that? It's understandable that authors leave the troubled middles alone, but the result is too often scenes that are ineffective.

What can you do to fire up your middles? To answer that question, it's first helpful to realize that every scene set down by an author usually has a reason to be. The author may not grasp the reason yet, but the impulse to portray this particular moment, this particular meeting, this particular action, springs from the deep well of dreams from which stories are drawn.

This scene has a point. The task is to draw that purpose out. How? Changing the words on the page won't work. We authors are wedded to our words. Our instinct is to preserve them. So, it's the whole scene that needs to be explored again. Scene revision is, to me, less a matter of expression and more a way of seeing.

To re-envision a scene, look away from the page and look toward what is really happening. What change takes place? When does that change occur (at what precise second in the scene)? In that moment, how is the point-of-view character changed? The point of those questions is to find the scenes'
turning points
(note the plural).

Having identified the turning points, you will find focusing the scene becomes easier. Everything else on the page either contributes to, or leads readers away from, those changes. All the extra stuff—the nifty scene setting, clever character bits, artful lead-ins and lead-outs—are now expendable, or perhaps they are tools to help selectively enact the scene's main purpose.

Practice re-envisioning scenes in this way; after a while you will find yourself not only dissatisfied with flabby middle scenes as you write them, you'll also have at hand the tools to shape them effectively from the outset—possibly even a few handy tricks and master techniques to use in orchestrating scenes of multiple impact on many characters.

All of this revision does not mean that some scenes shouldn't be cut. Sad to say, some scenes don't deserve to live. The purpose of this chapter, though, is not to set rules for scene triage, but rather to illuminate why middle scenes rock when they do. Once you have that understanding, it's my hope that revision will get easier and, for the majority of your scenes, may prove unnecessary.

Let's look at some of the factors that contribute to scenes that can't be cut.

OUTER AND INNER TURNING POINTS

A moment ago I mentioned a scene's turning
points.
I used the plural because every change (which, after all, is the reason to include a scene in the first place) has two dimensions: 1) The way in which things change that everyone can understand; 2) the way in which the scene's point-of-view character also changes as a result. To put it plainly, scenes work best when they have both
outer
and
inner
turning points.

Marisha Pessl's sparkling debut novel,
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(2006), was widely noted for a clever stylistic trick. The novel's young narrator, Blue van Meer, is the daughter of a colorful but drifting college professor. During their early wanderings, Blue's father advises her with regard to her writing, "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids." The text of Pessl's novel thus formally cites hundreds of other works and includes many carefully numbered Visual Aids (illustrations).

Pressl's bold stylistic approach, though, is not enough to carry readers through more than five hundred pages. Story is needed too; this Pressl provides in a mystery surrounding the death of a charismatic film teacher, Hannah Schneider, at the prep school where Blue spends her senior year. From the outset we know that Blue found Hannah hanged by an orange electrical extension cord from a tree. Was it suicide or was she murdered? Pressl flashes back to recount Blue's peripatetic childhood, her involvement at the St. Gallway School with a clique called the Bluebloods, and the tangled webs that, ultimately, will reveal the truth.

There's a lot of ground to cover. Along the way, Pessl faces the chore of bringing Blue to St. Gallway and getting her involved with the Bluebloods. She also needs to imbue this group of friends with the exclusivity and special-ness that makes them alluring, as well as making Hannah Schneider seem a teacher of charisma and openness, not to mention invoking the progressive atmosphere of St. Gallway.

In most manuscripts, tasks like these defeat their authors. Arriving somewhere, introducing people, and creating atmosphere are almost always low-tension traps. Scene after scene of slogging middle are taken up with getting the players and pieces in place so that some
thing neato can happen later on. Pessl knows this. So she constructs these set-up scenes in ways that make them matter.

Consider the chapter titled "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (a reference to Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel of the same name, 1782). After chickening out on several invitations from members of the Bluebloods, Blue decides finally to accept an invitation to meet them at room 208 of Barrow Hall one afternoon ... only to find herself in a meeting of a Dungeons & Dragons club. Blue is crestfallen:

In the aftermath of being brazenly hoodwinked or swindled, it's difficult to accept, particularly if one has always prided oneself on being an intuitive and scorch-ingly observant person. Standing on the Hanover steps, waiting for Dad, I reread Jade Whitestone's letter fifteen times, convinced I'd missed something—the correct day, time or location to meet, or perhaps
she'd
made a mistake; perhaps she'd written the letter while watching
On the Waterfront
and had been distracted by the pathos of Brando picking up Eva Marie Saint's tiny white glove and slipping it onto his own meaty hand, but soon, of course, I realized her letter was teaming with sarcasm (particularly in the final sentence), which I hadn't originally picked up on.

It had all been a hoax.

This is the scene's turning point: the moment when the protagonist's fortunes take a turn. In this case it's a low moment. Blue is deflated. Set up for new friends, she's been let down by a trick. That realization is the demarcation point, the precise moment when things change. That would be good enough to give the scene shape, but Pessl knows that turning points have both outer and inner components. In the next paragraph she creates the scene's
inner turning point:

Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the "Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising" in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians

and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. ("Fourteen-year-old lovers last longer," he'd noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents' cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires.

Strickly speaking, it might not have been necessary to explore how cruddy Blue feels. But look again. Pessl draws a contrast between Blue's humiliation and the ease of the other students, whose parents, unlike Blue's father, have arrived to collect them. Blue longs to be like them but isn't. This sudden ache is the inner change, the surfacing recognition that she needs friends. What about outward consequences? Pessl adds that too: Immediately after this, Hannah Schneider comes along to chat with Blue and summon her to lunch on the following Sunday. Blue's life takes a fateful turn.

This scene does a lot of work: It humbles precocious Blue, it makes her aware of her loneliness, and it introduces the agent of change. For a set-up scene, that's pretty dynamic. In many manuscripts this scene would be weak, a candidate for cutting. Pessl uses a nicely defined turning point and a well delineated
inner
turning point to make the scene necessary.

Khaled Hosseini's debut novel,
The Kite Runner
(2003), had a long run on best-seller lists; his second novel,
A Thousand Splendid Suns
(2007), has also gripped readers. It's the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and their friendship and mutual suffering through several decades. The story spans the Soviet occupation years, the Taliban era, and beyond. In addition to portraying the condition of Afghan women, Hosseini also wants to convey some of the magnificence of Afghanistan's history.

Uh-oh. Portraying the
majestic sweep of history
is, for many writers, a recipe for lengthy self-indulgence and low tension. Hosseini, however, is too skilled for that. In the novel's second section he switches point of view from unhappily married Mariam to young Laila,
daughter of a neighboring couple. Laila has a best friend, Tariq, for whom in adolescence she develops more powerful feelings. Hosseini needs to portray the evolution of this friendship to something deeper. He wants to simultaneously include Afghan history.

In chapter twenty-one of
A Thousand Splendid Suns,
Hosseini sends Laila, Tariq, and Laila's father, Babi, on an excursion to see Shahr-e-Zohak, the Red City, and the enormous twin Buddhas at Bamiyan (later dynamited by the Taliban) carved into a cliffside. On their way from Kabul, Hosseini signals the era by having Tariq shout taunts at passing Soviet tanks. Later, they see remnants of many invasions. Their driver remarks: