Notes from Bickham Scene Construction

The Time Period Dramatic Novels

It will help you to select such a late starting point and early ending point for your story if you will remember the following facts about readers:

1. They are fascinated and threatened by significant change;
2. They want the story to start with such a change;
3. They want to have a story question to worry about;
4. They want the story question answered in the story ending;
5. They will quickly lose patience with everything but material that relates to the story question.

1. Consider your story materials as presently imagined. Look for and identify, in terms of days, weeks or months, that briefer period of time when “the big stuff happens.” Plan to eliminate virtually everything else.
2. Think hard about your most major character and what makes him tick – what his self-concept is, and what kind of life he has built to protect and enhance it. (Make sure that this character is the type who will struggle if threatened. Wimps won’t form a story goal or strive toward it.)
3. Identify or create a dramatic situation or event which will present your character (and your reader) with the significant, threatening moment of change.
4. Plan your plot so that your novel will open with this event.
5. Decide what intention or goal your most significant character will select to try to fix things after the threatening opening change. Note what story question this goal will put in the reader’s mind.
6. Devise the start of a plan formulated by your most significant character as he sets out to make things right again.
7. Figure out how much later – and where and how – the story question finally will be answered. You should strive to know this resolution before you start writing. Granted, the precise time and even the place and details of the outcome may be changed by how your story works out in the first draft. But – even recognizing that your plan for the resolution may change later – you should have more than a vague idea when you begin. (To use a somewhat farfetched example, a ship captain might begin a voyage planning to unload his cargo in faraway England; war or weather en route might finally dictate that he would unload in France; but if he had set sail with no idea of his cargo and no idea of an intended destination or route, he might have wound up in Africa … or the North Sea … or sailing aimlessly and endlessly until he ran out of fuel – or sank. A novelist, like a ship captain, should have a good idea of where he plans to end up.)
8. Plan to make the start and end as close together in time as you can, and still have room for a minimum of 50,000 words of dramatic development.

Stimulus Response

• Stimulus must be external – that is, action or dialogue, something that could be witnessed if the transaction were on a stage.
• Response must also be external in the same way.
• For every stimulus, you must show a response.
• For every desired response, you must provide a stimulus.
• Response usually must follow stimulus at once.
• When response to stimulus is not logical on the surface, you must ordinarily explain it.

To put all this another way, you can mess up stimulus-response transactions three ways:

1. You can show a stimulus and then show no external response (or perhaps one that doesn’t fit or doesn’t make sense);
2. You can show a character response when no stimulus (or no credible one) for it has been shown; or
3. You can put so much story time between stimulus and response that the logical relationship between the two events is no longer evident.

• For every stimulus, do you show a response?
• For every response, have you provided an immediate, external stimulus?
• In complicated transactions, have you provided the reader with an explanatory internalization?
• Are the parts presented in the correct, textbook order, except when you want to connote confusion?

One final clarification. Throughout the part of this chapter dealing with stimulus and response, words like “external” and “physical” have been used with regularity. This was not an accident. Stimulus must be something on the stage in the story “now,” something (as mentioned earlier) that could be seen or heard or otherwise perceived with the senses of the audience if you were to put the transaction on a theater stage. Responses, too, must be external – physical.

Scene Patterns

What is the pattern of a scene? Fundamentally, it is:

• Statement of goal.
• Introduction and development of conflict.
• Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster.

. The goal of each scene must clearly relate to the story question in some way.

1. The conflict must be about the goal.
2. The conflict must be with another person or persons, not internally, within oneself.
3. Once a viewpoint has been established and that viewpoint character’s problem and goal have been stated, it’s wise to remain with that same, single viewpoint through the disaster.
4. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started.
5. Readers will put up with a lot if your scenes will only keep making things worse!
6. You can seldom, if ever plan, write, or revise a scene in isolation of your other plans for your story, because the end of each scene dictates a lot about what can happen later.

1. Once a viewpoint has been established and that viewpoint character’s problem and goal have been stated, it’s wise to remain with that same, single viewpoint through the disaster.

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Another reason for giving the starting scene goal to the viewpoint character is the fact that you can better keep track of the goal – and how things are going – if you can slip into the viewpoint character’s head every once in a while, as the scene goes along, to remind the reader what the scene goal is, and provide the reader with some indication of how the lead character thinks things are going at this point.

1. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central Figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started.
2. Readers will put up with a lot if your scenes will only keep making things worse!

The process of apparent “backward progress” in working fiction can be seen as an elimination of options that is closing the walls in on your main character, and bringing him closer all the time to the inevitable final showdown. In planning your scenes, and writing them, this general pattern of tightening – of seeming to move backward, further from possible attainment of the story goal – should always be in your mind. Devise and write your scenes so that each makes things worse, never better. Seldom risk a scene ending with a disaster that only reaffirms the status quo. Don’t fall into the trap of writing scenes which end saying, in effect, “Well, it was 33 percent bad before, and this is terrible because it’s still 33 percent bad after this scene.” Things must grow more and more gloomy, and the way you plan your scenes, remembering the big plot picture, can assure that this continual further darkening does take place.

Scene tips

Finally, here are some other observations that should help you plan, write and revise scenes.

1. Make sure that the stated scene goal is clearly relevant to the story question. Don’t just assume that the relevance is obvious. Spell it out.
2. Show clearly that the viewpoint character considers the oncoming scene as vitally important. Have him say so, or think so, or both! Never allow a lead character to enter a scene with a lackadaisical attitude.
3. Make sure you have provided enough background for the opposition character – or have him state enough motivation at the outset – to justify his opposition to the lead character in the scene. Don’t just have someone be antagonistic on general principles!
4. Make sure your opposing character clearly states his opposition early in the scene, and never lets up.
5. Mentally devise a moving game plan for both the lead character and the antagonist so that even if you don’t tell the reader what either is thinking, you know what both are thinking. This awareness of your character’s thoughts, as the conflict moves along, will help you to imagine and bring out more angles – more feints and parries – in the conflict as it develops.
6. In searching for your scene-ending disaster, don’t always grab the first idea that comes to your mind. Your reader will be guessing along with you, and you don’t want him to outguess you and anticipate the disaster before you give it to him. Chances are that if you make a list of six or eight possible disasters that would work, one of them well down the list from your first idea will be fresher, brighter, worse for the lead character – and not predictable by the reader. You always want the reader kept guessing!
7. Don’t be afraid to have your antagonist try to get the lead character “off the point” of argument as one of his opposing tactics. Just make sure that your lead character keeps reiterating his scene goal – and fighting to keep the argument on the central subject.
8. Don’t hesitate to use dialogue at cross-purposes once in a while as a scene-building device. Such dialogue can be defined as story conversation in which the conflict is not overt, but where the antagonist either doesn’t understand what’s really at issue, or is purposely nonresponsive to what the lead character keeps trying to talk about. Dialogue at cross-purposes, or nonresponsive behavior by an antagonist, will be experienced by both the lead character and the reader as conflictual. After all, in such a situation the lead character feels thwarted in some way, and so struggles harder. If the opposing character does not start responding quite directly, the viewpoint character will fight harder.

(Again, the excerpt in Appendix 3 illustrates the point.)

One caveat, however: The use of this dialogue device cannot substitute for genuine conflict over the length of many chapters. It is for occasional use only, when information must be transmitted to the reader through a story conversation, and the author wants to avoid the dullness of one character simply lecturing the other about facts the reader needs to be told.

1. Remember, in building conflict in the scene and in devising your disaster, that people are not always entirely rational, especially in stress situations. If your antagonist loses his temper and says or does something that would be crazy in other circumstances, maybe it’s okay. Think about his character as you’ve built it, and if his craziness seems “in character,” given this stressful conflict segment, then consider allowing him to blow up or make some stupid mistake. Your story people – even in the toughest scenes – are not wholly logical robots.
2. Plan and write the scene for all you can get out of it. Revise if its impact suddenly seems too great for what your plot calls for next, and cut it only if you reread it later and sense that it may get dull in spots – or if the overall pacing of your novel requires that this particular segment be boiled to hurry general story progress along.
3. Always be alert for ways to raise the stakes in a scene, as long as you don’t turn it into Armageddon.
4. Never let your characters relax or feel comfortable in a scene.

TECHNIQUES TO SPEED THE STORY ALONG

Suppose the story seems to be going too slowly. Here, more specifically, are some of the things you can do to speed things up:

1. In those places where you find a developed sequel linking two scenes that follow one another in a fairly straightforward and logical way, consider yanking the sequel entirely and simply butting the two scenes back-to-front. If the goal and opening of conflict in the second of the two scenes seem to grow logically out of the previous disaster, your reader is not likely to be confused – and you may need speed here more than logical explanation to the nth degree.
2. Look for places where you might not be able to simply butt scenes end to end, but where a very simple transitional statement might get the job done. There’s nothing swifter-moving than the brief transitional statement such as “Three hours later …” or “In New York, at the Plaza …”. If you find such spots, and they are presently occupied by even a truncated or abbreviated sequel, jerk out the sequel material and substitute the simple, lightning-fast transition.
3. Study your sequels with an eye toward trimming out some of the present verbiage. Ask yourself questions like “Does all this emotion have to be described?” and “Does he really have to review all of these story events at this time?

(Sometimes, of course, you will ask yourself these questions and decide that yes, every word about the emotion is necessary here, or yes, because this plot has gotten so complex, the character must think about everything that’s happened to avoid losing the reader. If so, fine! I’m asking you to consider such trims or boils; I’m not ordering them.)

1. Look for places where you might have inadvertently skipped a chance to write in a big, exciting, extended scene. Analyze the dramatic potential of every confrontation between major characters, and ask yourself if you have possibly missed a chance to motivate them to struggle over some story issue at this point. Is it possible to invent some reason for one or both of the characters to enter this meeting with a stronger, more pressing immediate goal? Can you extend and intensify whatever argument already exists by raising the stakes or making the participants more desperate as a result of a preceding sequel? Have you (God forbid!) over-looked a chance to include some major confrontation that your plot has already set up as possible or even likely?

If you find such slips, by all means write the scene now and slip it into the story.

1. Examine all your present scenes and ask yourself if you can find ways to raise the stakes, increase the intensity of the conflict, add to the viewpoint character’s sense of desperation, or add some secondary issues, heretofore overlooked, that the adversaries could also fight about here.
2. Consider the nature of your scene-ending disasters. Have you inadvertently made any of them less disastrous and upsetting than they might still logically be?
3. Look at the timing behind the disasters you have chosen. Have you perhaps set up a disaster so that the hero has a week or ten days to react, when it might be possible to change the disaster only marginally and make it one which requires a sequel and new action right away?
4. Consider the thinking of both the hero and the villain-figure in every scene, and in general. How might you change their assumptions and plans in such a way as to tighten the time frame of the entire story, forcing scenes to come one after another much more swiftly?

Variations in Scene and Sequel

1. You can start your presentation somewhere other than at the classic (and logical) entering point, which is statement of goal.
2. You can end somewhere short of a fully pronounced disaster.
3. You can interrupt the scene virtually anywhere by having other action intervene.
4. You can interrupt the conflict component by having the viewpoint character’s internalization in response to a stimulus develop into “a sequel in the middle of things.”
5. You can present the goal-conflict-disaster segments out of their natural order.

1. You can skip one or more parts, or portray a segment in only a word or two.
2. You can amplify any given portion out of all proportion to the others.
3. You can mix up the normal presentation order of the component segments – i.e., emotion, thought, decision, action – if there is reason to do so.
4. You can interrupt a sequel with the unexpected onset of a new scene.

You can insert one or more remembered scenes within the thought component

Scene Errors

1. Too many people in the scene.
2. Circularity of argument.
3. Unwanted interruptions.
4. Getting off the track.
5. Inadvertent summary.
6. Loss of viewpoint.
7. Forgotten scene goal.
8. Unmotivated opposition.
9. Illogical disagreement.
10. Unfair odds.
11. Overblown internalizations.
12. Not enough at stake.
13. Inadvertent red herrings.
14. Phony, contrived disasters.