Stories with SPINE

What's a scene? How do authors make it stand on its own?

 At its most basic, a scene is action that takes place at one time, in one place, and moves the story along convincingly to the next plot element. It is, in effect, a single small story in a connected row of small stories, each revealing an action, something about the characters (their wants, their fears, their plans), and one or more goals or obstacles that push the characters through to the next scene, and ultimately to The End.

As a complete story in itself, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Any story, whether long or short, literary or genre, staged or sung or read aloud, has a plot. The plot, or the dramatic action, is composed not only of actual actions, but also of internal changes that reveal or advance the motives for those actions. Motives occur inside characters; actions take place outside them, in specific locations/settings. 

Repeat: a scene is a single small story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in which something changes either internally or externally (or both).

Picture the story as an animal: the bones are the frame, the nerves are the psychological/emotional connectors, the setting is the fur, hide, or feathers on the outside. 

We're talking today about the spine: the set of bones (vertebrae) that link to each other, holding up the animal and protecting its central nerve corridor. A story with SPINE has strong, well-connected vertebrae: scenes that securely wrap around the story's emotional core and carry it from plot point to plot point, all the way from inciting incident to action climax or even epilogue (the tail).

Laboratoires Servier, CC BY-SA 3.0

What are the nerves of a story, you ask? They're characters we care about, with goals we want to see them achieve (or, in rare cases, to see them get thwarted from achieving), that we're willing to follow through scene after scene in hopes the outcome will validate our decision to spend this time, these irreplaceable minutes of our lives, reading this one particular story over all the other ones out there.

But if a story's an animal, what kind is it?  A hamster if it’s a flash fiction (short spine), a brontosaurus for a very long novel (and many, many vertebrae) and every other length in between. Maybe it's a series: a whole family of ostriches racing forward, running over any plot obstacle that would get in the way of the characters achieving their goals.

What the shortest and longest have in common is spine, a series of vertebrae, or scenes, through which the nerves flow as one continuous unit. 

A vertebrae in your physical spine has a beginning (flanges), a middle (the smooth ring of thick bone), and an end (different flanges that interlock with the beginning of the next vertebrae). In your story, the plot’s vertebrae are individual scenes in that longer story, protecting the through-lines or 'nerves' while presenting the necessary actions and motivations to readers in a logical and entertaining order.

What is a scene? At its most basic, a scene is action that takes place at one time, in one place, and moves the story along convincingly to the next plot element. It is, in effect, a single small story in a stream of small stories, each revealing an action, something about the characters (their wants, their fears, their plans), and one or more goals or obstacles that push the characters through to the next scene.

As a complete story in itself, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The beginning flange is a reason for the characters to all be at that place at that time. The action in a previous scene (or in off-page back story) brought these characters to this place at this time; the action in this scene will bring the same characters, or other ones, to a new place and/or time where a new scene will start.

In a beginning, some small action or line of dialogue raises a question in the reader’s mind, gives the characters a reason to interact with each other, and sets the scene rolling. The action might be as small as Character A ringing a doorbell. As over-used as this example is (much like answering the telephone or waking from sleep), it instantly raises the question of what Character A is doing at the door.

The middle of the scene advances and protects the psychological/emotional core of the story.

Like working against gravity thickens a human spine’s bony ring, what strengthens the middle of a scene is conflict. Each character wants something, even if it is only to be left alone by another character. The conflict between what Character A wants and what Character B wants makes the scene denser, more complex, like the lattice in bone becomes denser under pressure from gravity.

Assume Character A wants answers to a question. Character B doesn’t want to give them. B evades or lies. A pushes harder, verbally or physically, or changes tactics. B repeats or changes their earlier response. Sometimes one of them appears to be gaining, only to have a reversal occur that puts the other ahead. Every shift of the power dynamic is strengthening the matrix of bone around the story's nerve-core, carrying it safely to the next scene.

Andrewmeyerson, CC BY-SA 4.0 

The beauty and challenge of the middle, whether of a scene or of the whole story, is not to make it too easy, either for the characters or the reader. Too easy means not dense, not good bone. Keep the reader guessing a bit. Entice them to use all they have learned about the characters up to this point, to try to figure out who will win this small struggle. The more the reader invests in an outcome, the stronger the middle is.

 The end, the final flange, is both the link to the next scene and the payoff for the character’s – and the reader’s – efforts. Did A get his answer? Did the reader guess right, or wrong?And what happens next because of that outcome?

Perhaps neither A nor B achieves their goal in this scene. That type of ending is the most frustrating for readers but can also make the most compelling reading. Use it too often, or too obviously, and the reader’s frustration will outweigh their engagement with the larger story. However it ends, there must be flanges to hook onto the next scene: new questions arising from the answers received, new places to go, new ideas to be incorporated or old ones eliminated.

At its simplest, a scene is action that takes place at one time, in one place, and moves the story along convincingly. At its most complex, a scene also sets a mood, reveals hidden aspects of character, delves deeper into the larger story’s central question, and has enough dramatic tension to draw the reader’s eyes forward almost without their conscious awareness.

If you can build a single solid scene with a beginning, middle and end, you can write any length of story. Make each scene, each small story, as strong as it can possibly be, linking it to the one before and leading to the one following, and there is no limit to what you can achieve: flash fiction with one strong vertebra, short stories with four to ten vertebrae, novellas and novels with as many scenes as you need. They’re all built on the length and strength of the spine.

The A-B-C of Active vs. Passive Writing

 Writers hear a lot about Show versus Tell, mainly how the former is the key to success. Then they read some award-winning story and see paragraph after page of Tell. Why can’t they get away with all that telling?

Often it comes down to the passive language and phrases they’re using.

ACTIVE writing pulls the reader in, engaging them deeper with the characters and events during every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph. PASSIVE writing tells the reader the story from an emotional distance. Guess which kind keeps more readers hooked on your writing?

A is for Action

At their simplest, verbs move a character (and the reader) from one place or state of being to another.

Passive verbs take a character from one place to the other but barely carry their own weight, let alone shift the mood or enhance character development. ‘Walked’ may be the English language’s most overused, and therefore sleep-inducing, verb. Writers rely on various means to awaken ‘walked’ from its torpor: piling on modifiers like quickly, slowly, reluctantly, relentlessly, or using dialogue or inner monologue to tell the reader the character is in a hurry.

In active writing, instead of the simple act of walking, a character might saunter, stride, run, speed, hurry, scurry, flee. Each choice gives a different flavour to the sentence, the scene, and the character. A scurrying character seems mouselike, a striding one confident, a fleeing one frightened. Active verbs pull double duty, moving the character and also shifting the mood, foreshadowing a plot development, or exposing a character’s trait, all without ‘telling’ the reader anything. A character who runs or hurries when the scene doesn’t obviously call for it may be awakening a question (what do they know that the reader doesn’t yet?) or revealing their inner drive, worry, or impatience.

So how does this work in writing? Take a simple daily situation in the life of a child.

Inner monologue: Remembering [passive] his mother telling [passive]  him to be on time for school, Angus put [passive] his schoolbag on his shoulder and walked [passive] quickly [modifier] out of the house.

Dialogue: “Hurry up, Angus,” said [passive] his mother. “You’ll be late for school.” Angus picked up [passive] his schoolbag and walked [passive] out of the house.

Active writing: As Mom yelled [active] for the third time [implied lateness], Angus grabbed [active] his schoolbag and ran [active] out of the house.”

In that last example, how would you see Mom differently if she’d shrieked or bellowed or whispered instead of yelling? How would you see Angus differently if he scurried, slouched, stomped, or strode instead of ran?

When choosing verbs, think about how you want the reader to see that character moving in this moment of their fictional life. Choose the active verbs that bring the character to life in the reader’s mind.

 B is for Bringing the reader inside the character’s experience

To be or not to be, says Hamlet, beginning one of the most famous monologues of the English theatrical tradition with his musings on whether dying (the ‘sleep’) would be preferably to living in his state of torment. Like Hamlet, writers over-using ‘to be’ verbs are teetering toward putting readers to sleep rather than awakening them to the exciting adventure that will follow.

 ‘to be’ verbs: Is, am, are, was, were, being, been

How does it push readers out of the character’s experience?

One of the most flattening, energy-lowering uses of the to-be verb occurs in emotional ‘tells’ like I am furious, she’s sad, they were happy.’ In every one of these cases, the reader is told how the character feels but not invited to feel it along with them.

Any time the author isn’t actively inviting the reader to feel, see, hear, taste, or sense with the character, the reader feels subtly more distant, less immersed, in the character’s experience.

Sometimes that is deliberate; in literary fiction, authors frequently uses those low-engagement ‘tells’ to create some distance. They want the reader to think about what the character is feeling at this moment, to analyze the feeling in context of the other story parts, to discover perhaps that the character is deluding themselves. The author uses the technique to help the reader become more knowledgeable than the character they’re following, which colours their interpretation of everything the character sees, says, and feels going forward.

More of the time, ‘to be’ verbs are simply the fastest route to where the author wants the sentence, or the scene, to go. 

That’s fine for a first draft, but in edits, almost every ‘tell’ can be swapped for an active phrase that invites the reader further into the character’s experience. Simple ‘shows’ to replace the ‘tells’ above might be I clenched my fists [anger], her head drooped [sad], they whooped and cheered [happy].  I’m sure you can think of many more active phrases to replace ‘tells’ once you train yourself to notice them.

The other common way ‘to be’ verbs appear is with an action. For these examples, let’s go with our old neutral verb, ‘to walk’.

She is walking away from the candy store.

We are walking to the library.

He was walking out the door.

They were walking up the hill.

They have been walking toward us.

In writing or rewriting, swap a more active verb to draw the reader into the setting, the mood, the character’s state of mind or emotion. A good choice of active verb raises curiosity in the reader’s mind about what comes next in the story.

I rush toward the bus stop. (Oh, no! Will I/they miss the bus?)

She flees from the candy store. (Oh, no! Did she steal something?)

We stroll to the library. (How peaceful that sounds! Will we/they always be this content or is disaster right around the corner?)

He stomped out the door (and slammed it behind him?)

They raced up the hill (for fun, or were they rushing to help someone?)

They paced toward us (coming to lecture us, to arrest us, or measuring the distance for a duel?)

Those ever-awakening questions in the reader’s mind keep their eyes (or, increasingly, their ears) engaged with the next sentence, paragraph, scene, seeking answers large and small, all the way to the end of the story.

 

C: Colouring

Like dropping food colouring into cake batter turns the resulting cupcakes pink or blue, a verb colours the sentence it is building. It imparts mood, tone, atmosphere that reveals more of the character’s inner thoughts and feelings. A passive or under-active verb flattens the energy in the sentence while an active verb propels the reader through it with the energy you, the author, have deliberately chosen.

Carla said, “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

This gets the job done but doesn’t increase tension or curiosity. The reader already read whatever dialogue Carla’s responding to.

Aside: Author forums are filled with conflicting opinions on ‘said’. Some say it’s the only appropriate dialogue tag for all situations. Others opine that an occasional ‘replied’ is okay. And some people embrace the grade school vocabulary lesson to use a different dialogue tag every time: said, replied, spoke, laughed, chattered, babbled, and so on.

The truth is that no one way is always the right answer. What does your character, your story, need to awaken the reader’s next question? End Aside.

If Carla cooed, “I said, I wish you hadn’t said that,” what’s your impression as a reader? Is she talking to a child who has blurted out something inappropriate for the company? Is she putting on a little-girl voice in flirtation, or to register a protest while hoping to avoid an angry backlash? What does her ‘cooing’ voice tell readers about her relationship to, and feelings about, the character who spoke just before her?

Now what if Carla flung the answer over her shoulder. “I said, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

First, the choice of ‘flung’ implies a physical action. Pairing it with ‘over her shoulder’ lets the reader intuit that Carla is walking—possibly even striding—away from the other character. It implies a conflict, either between Carla and the other or inside Carla herself.

Second, flung lends tone to the words she speaks, at least in the reader’s mind. Each reader might ‘hear’ her words slightly differently, as

“I said, I wish you hadn’t said that.” (don’t you EVER listen to me when I’m talking?)

“I said, I wish you hadn’t said that.” (now my boss is going to question me about it and open a whole can of worms)

“I said, I wish you hadn’t said that.” (If Katie’s date had said it, people would think he’s the jerk instead of you.)

“I said, I wish you hadn’t said that.” (why did you blurt out the one thing I asked you to keep secret?)

Every one of those possible flung answers leads the reader deeper into Carla’s inner world.

Third, pairing ‘flung her answer over her shoulder’ with the words inside the dialogue tags awakens a question for the reader. Carla is obviously upset (annoyed, distraught, angry) by whatever dialogue preceded this line, so much so that she is already acting on her emotion. Readers are primed to wonder not only why she’s upset (if it’s not clear from the preceding paragraphs) but also what she’ll do next in response. 

Active writing implies another action is incoming. Something is happening. That feeling is to readers like catnip is to cats.

 

To recap: An active verb is

A: implied or described action in the character’s present moment.

B: Bringing the reader inside the character’s experience

C: Colouring all that comes after it with the mood the author has deliberately, specifically chosen

Three Torpedoes To Sink Your Story

...out from under readers

======

Lusitania 

by Norman Wilkinson, 1907

In May 1915, the passengers on the ocean liner Lusitania were not expecting to get torpedoed and sunk. They were just cruising across the Atlantic Ocean, en route to Europe for work or pleasure. But they were torpedoed, and it only took 18 minutes to sink the ship right out from under them. Same for those on the Athena in 1939: just taking the cruise and down went the ship.

Reading a novel is, for many readers, like taking a cruise: they want to get on board, relax, and enjoy the trip all the way to their destination. After decades as a writer, literary juror and editor, I’ve seen a lot of openings. The following common torpedoes have me disembarking before the ship is fully clear of the wharf.

First, a framework: in naval warfare, the first torpedo is generally a range finder, to give the gunner an estimate of distance and angle of fire. Sometimes it hits square on the fuel tanks and sinks the ship. More often, a second torpedo, better-aimed, follows the first. If that one doesn’t crack the ship wide open, it cripples it, leaving a stationary target for that third torpedo. The third one sinks it for sure.

In reading, that third kaboom is the moment your opening sinks. The potential reader, or agent, or editor sets it down, clicks <delete>, looks for a different cruise…. er, story. 

 

What are these torpedoes that sink your opening, and thus your novel, for readers both pro and amateur?

 

1.  The characters we meet are as anonymous as uniformed cabin stewards in a foredeck full of them.

a.       There are no nametags.

                                                               There are very few stories where it’s appropriate or useful to make a mystery of a character’s name. If they’re not the secret stalker/killer/malevolent entity whose identity will be revealed at the horrifying climax, then skip the awkward, faux-suspense tags of ‘the man’ or ‘she’ or ‘the woman with the brown hair’ and give the character’s name.

b.       There’s no memorable feature to help me identify a character when I next see them.

                                                               If you really, truly can’t give the name without ruining the plot (and even if you do), offer readers a memorable description. June should not be described as ‘brown-haired, medium height, in white dress uniform’ unless she’s also ‘lean as a greyhound, with a sharp nose and long canines that imply she’ll bite any hand that tries to feed her.’ Davro might make a fetish out of being invisible in uniform unless (the narrator tells us) ‘one noticed the marginal inward trend of their left knee, that caused a slight hitch any time they ascended the stairs.’

c.       They’re neither one gender nor both nor neither.

                                                              Like it or not, at the moment of introduction most readers still tick off gender on their mental character chart to help differentiate the players going forward. Unless it’s vital to the plot to keep this secret, use character pronouns as well as their names. “Guy’s a macho (or butch) gym-rat escorting Gerry-Lyn, whose piled-high hair rivals Dolly Parton’s.” (Trick question: is GL’s hair naturally big or a wig for their upcoming drag show?) Their getaway driver is Sam, the delinquent daughter of a media mogul.”

If a character’s name, appearance, and gender are left in limbo, the reader questions why they’re hiding it, looks for clues about that, and loses focus on the author’s careful setup of the inciting incident.

Is this one torpedo, or two, or three? 

That depends how tired and cranky the reader is feeling. For some it's just a few waves. For others, when they learn on page 25 that the character they’ve painfully pinned together from random phrases barely resembles the one the author placed on the ship, they’re not just confused but annoyed. Annoyed readers are more likely to sink this story and seek out a different cruise. 

 

2.    I don’t know where this character is.

a.       They’re bantering like a high-stakes ping-pong match but their snappy dialogue might as well be bobbing speech-balloons against an all-white background for all the locating information I have.

                                                              Readers who don’t know whether the character is standing on earth or floating in space soon feel queasy on a visceral level. Then you have work to convince them to stay on board. “This cruise is going to be fun, I promise. See that swimming pool? See that waiter with the tray of umbrella drinks?”

                                                             Avoid reader seasickness from the start by orienting them in the space. Show these characters walking past the pool during their ping-pong fast banter. Better yet, let readers experience the surroundings via the characters: blinking against the glare on the rippling water, speaking over the squeak of floating toys, chilling their fingers on that sweating umbrella drink, feeling the deck shiver underfoot as the engines thrust this cruise ship away from its moorings. Give those readers goosebumps from that chill sea breeze while the characters are talking.

b.       Can I see them and their surroundings?

                                                              Is it morning or night, darkness or full daylight? Candlelight casting wavering, mysterious shadows on their face?  You, the author, might already know there’s a single small light burning in the distance, and what shapes your character can make out by it, but if you don’t show the reader that single small light, they have to try to fit what the character says they’re seeing with whatever other cues are in the text to tell them where the light is coming from and how much of it there is. And then they might find out they’re wrong two pages later.

In summary:                Don’t leave your cruising readers lost in the bowels of the ship, where the light is the same everywhere, the walls are all blank white, the air is all the same temperature blowing from the same style of vent, and nothing shows them whether they’re going in the right direction to find their cabin or not. They'll sink this ship out of sheer frustration.

 

     3.       I have no idea why they're here, doing whatever it is they’re doing.

a.        Why are we here? Did the protagonist win the cruise? Are they taking it reluctantly with the in-laws to avoid marital strife? Undercover and following a suspect? The trick here is to give just enough information to avoid that first torpedo strike while not stalling the ship’s forward momentum. A stalled ship is a sitting target for the next torpedo.

b.       Some authors stop the ship to give us every possibly relevant fact about that character since birth to bring them to this moment. This alone sends some readers signalling the torpedoes. And yes, I know you can name exceptions but ask yourself: would that author get away with that opening if they didn’t already have a huge following? You, as an ordinary aspiring or midlist author, need to treat your readers as if every single one of them is booked into the VIP suite, because they are. Once they’ve sailed on your cruise and enjoyed it, they become your word-of-mouth advertisers to their local bookstore, library, book club, garden store, dog walkers, or social media accounts. Don’t sink their pleasure cruise out from under them by overloading the opening with any backstory that isn’t essential info in the next five pages.

c.       And why are we joining them at this particular moment? Can you wiggle a reason onto this opening page without the cruise sinking under the weight of backstory? It need only be a phrase, a sentence, where the character says to the passenger in the next chaise, or mentally reflects, or is told by the thug who’s just pinned their arms with a life-preserver ring: If only Cousin Benny had kept their fingers out of the till last Saturday…. That's my ex-husband and their new husband propping up the juice bar; they paid for my trip to deflect HER... Well, my cover story is a holiday but my target's that woman with the purse-poodle dyed to match her own hair...Let the readers know there are intriguing possibilities ahead!

To recap:

 

                Torpedoes sink your story when readers can't orient on

1.       characters who have names, genders, and memorable descriptions,

2.       a firm location, including lighting, sounds, smells, or other orienting information,

3.       a reason, however small, to be in this place doing this thing at this opening moment.

 

There is much more to a truly compelling opening than simply giving the reader this bare-bones information. But if you don't incorporate that information as the reader is ascending the gangplank, they may never set foot on the main deck. Then they'll never appreciate the luxury surroundings and many in-cruise activities you have in store. Give them these basics and they’ll set foot on Page 2 already getting their sea legs under them, umbrella drink in hand, ready to enjoy every moment of this cruise all the way to your chosen destination.