Chap04

Plot controls the arc of events, including its rising and falling action. Plot’s building blocks are scenes, doorways into your story that allow readers to experience not only moments from your life but also your point of view. Just as you use structure and plot to build a form for your story, well-written scenes are mirrors that readers can pass through to forget their own lives as they immerse themselves in your story’s world.

But what, precisely, is a scene, and how do you build one? To begin to answer that question, let’s consider a relatively short scene from Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived.

We are going by car from Bulaq Dakhur to Heliopolis. I am in the back. The leather of the seat sticks to my bare legs. We travel along a road lined at either side with oleander and jacaranda trees, alternate splashes of white and blue. I chant, quietly: “Jacaranda, oleander…Jacaranda, oleander…” And as I do so there comes to me the revelation that in a few hours’ time we shall return by the same route and that I shall pass the same trees, in reverse order—oleander, jacaranda, oleander, jacaranda—and that, by the same token, I can look back upon myself now, of this moment. I shall be able to think about myself now, thinking this—but it will be then, not now. (1)

We’ve chosen this scene to begin our discussion of dramatic structure because in a brief space it contains all the elements of scene we’ll be covering in this chapter: the particularizing of a moment, immediacy (in this case, through the use of present tense), powerful language that helps conjure the scene for the reader, telling details that create a picture in the reader’s mind, and dialogue that invites the reader into the scene, along with an emblematic moment that both stands for and enhances the larger narrative. As you’ll see, a strong scene involves the reader’s senses and engages the reader’s mind and emotions.

This scene begins at a specific moment (“We are going in the car…”), with a telling detail (“The leather of the seat sticks to my bare legs”) and action (in this case, internal action, which we’ll discuss at the end of this chapter) that rises from that moment to an epiphany (“I shall be able to think about myself now, thinking this”) that provides closure to the scene while at the same time generating a connection between the writer and the reader.

Documenting a compact scene that really happened and at the same time contains all of these elements can seem a daunting prospect. And yet, everything you need to construct such a moment resides either in your memory or in your imagination and can be accessed via the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit. What’s important to bear in mind is what Annie Dillard reminds us in “To Fashion a Text”: “Don’t hope…to preserve your memories. If you prize your memories as they are, by all means avoid…writing a memoir…. The Work battens on your memories. And it replaces them” (70).

The dance between memory and creating scenes that come to life—the movement, that is, between the two yous—is the heart of a memoir that resonates with readers: they experience events that match your narrator’s memories. As we discussed in chapter 1, what you’re after is the essential truth of your story, even more than exactly “what happened,” which is nearly always impossible to reconstruct. In this chapter, we’ll show you how dramatic structure can help you mold scenes that come to vivid life.

As we discuss dramatic structure, keep in mind that each of these steps applies to your larger work as well. When an artist creates a large painting, she considers each section’s particular shapes and relationships. Like an artist, visualize your work as a canvas, with scenes making up chapters and chapters mimicking the larger plot. Scenes and chapters, in other words, are microcosms of the arc of the completed story.

The single most important thing you can do when crafting a memoir is to keep your reader’s attention. Dramatic structure is your means to this end. A scene’s structure begins with an immediate entrance into what’s happening on the page by providing a protagonist with whom the reader wishes to spend time and an image that immerses the reader at once into a moment from that narrator’s life. Scene structure sets what Lisa Dale Norton calls “shimmering images” into motion.

Consider Penelope Lively’s scene above. The protagonist is a child, someone who notices things like the sticky leather seat and the passing trees, and at the same time an adult who possesses the author’s resources of language and experience. Toggling between the child’s sense of the moment and her own adult capacity for transforming memory into language, Lively provides an immediate entrance into the scene and immerses the reader in the moment. To the reader, this action appears effortless. For you the writer, it’s a skill you’ll master through study and practice.

The tools of scene structure allow you, the writer, to share the experience of you, the subject, with readers via telling details and emblematic moments. Scenes—the building blocks of dramatic structure—particularize the general, offering moving pictures of time in motion, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Lively does in the scene above.

No matter where it begins or ends, no matter how long it takes, no matter what happens over its course, every scene—and your larger work, because every scene is a miniplot—should contain each of the following steps in this order:

Before we show you each of these steps in more detail, here’s a brief illustration from a film with which you’re likely familiar. After the war is over in Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara realizes that she won’t be able to hang on to Tara unless she has some money (catalyst). Deciding that the best possible source of money will be Rhett Butler but at the same time certain that he mustn’t see how destitute she’s become (conflict), Scarlett storms from room to room in her patched dress, searching the few things left for something to help her out of her dilemma (rising action). Then she spots her mother’s green velvet curtains, gets that familiar twinkle in her eye, and begins to yank them down (climax). This scene’s denouement actually begins the next scene, as we see Scarlett strutting along a city boardwalk in a lovely green velvet dress.

Catalyst, conflict, rising action, climax, denouement: these are the tools you can use to create living, lively scenes. We call the movement among these elements the story arc. Successful story arcs plant expectations in the reader and then satisfy them, creating one of the core pleasures of narrative.

Just as the occasion of the telling, which we discussed in depth in chapter 1, launches the beginning of a memoir, every scene begins with a defining moment, a catalyst that instigates everything that comes after. The scene that opens this chapter, for example, begins with the young Penelope Lively sitting on that hot, sticky leather seat in the back of the car. The scene above is ignited by Scarlett’s need for money to save Tara.

As evidenced by these examples, a scene’s catalyst does not need (or even want) to be particularly dramatic in and of itself. In fact, many scenes—the strongest scenes—begin in the mundane and regular. As we noted in a different context in chapter 2, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion returns again and again to just such a scene—the moment before dinner when her husband, John, asks for another glass of Scotch, a snapshot in time that then suddenly escalates into (and beyond) the moment he dies.

What’s key to building a scene is that within each moment is desire. Who wants what? Even in Didion’s routine moment just before John dies there is desire, her desire for everything to remain the same: his desire for a second glass of Scotch and her desire for him not to die. Notice that in this case these desires can’t be articulated in that prior moment. It is often the case, in memoir (and in life), that we “don’t know what [we] got (till it’s gone).”

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Think for a moment of the spotlit moments you recorded in chapter 1. The fact that these memories remain with you suggests that they are catalysts, fragments from which individual scenes might unspool. Even if you can’t recall what happened after the key image, writing it down will often unstop the memories you think you’ve lost.

So, without thinking about it, pick one of those moments now. Consider what has brought you, its protagonist, to this moment. Is there someone else in the picture? Who wants what? Make some notes as answers come to you. By the end of this chapter you’ll have used this spotlit moment to create a complete scene. Working on one scene at a time can keep you from being overwhelmed by the idea of writing your whole story.

At the same time, be aware, as Patricia Hampl points out in I Could Tell You Stories, that your initial creation of this scene may contain some elements that don’t belong there. This isn’t a problem; always bear in mind that your first attempt at recording a spotlit moment is a draft—a starting point for digging deeper. As soon as we begin to write about the past our memories toss in all sorts of subliminal detritus. One of the great joys of writing memoir is that we’ll get to sort this detritus into a larger truth, discarding what isn’t essential and expanding upon what is. It’s important at this generative stage not to censor or edit but simply to let the story emerge.

Desire is the great motivator, driving practically every moment of our lives, and motivation forces us to act and make choices. Even something as basic as being hungry involves desire, and memoir can be driven by such basic needs as well as more complex ones.

Conflict stands at cross-purposes to desire and thus drives scene. That’s why we asked you above, Who wants what? Where desire is a catalyst, conflict is created when someone or something stands in your—or your character’s—way. So, even while Joan Didion wishes for everything to remain the same, John’s sudden death changes everything.

While the word itself conjures slings and arrows, conflict does not necessarily require the tools of battle to be compelling to the reader. Conflict can be internal or external, as we’ll discuss later in this chapter. At its simplest, internal conflict involves a battle with oneself. As a human being you know that drill all too well. As a writer you can mine that internal struggle to create compelling scenes. Didion’s conflict in The Year of Magical Thinking is both internal and external—her internal desire for continuity upended by an external reality, John’s sudden death.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Consider the spotlit moment you noted above. There you are at an earlier moment in your life, captured in a still photograph in your mind’s eye. Now, using what you wanted in that moment, put that photograph in motion. You want——. But——stands in your way.

Maybe you’re sitting on a swing and want to keep swinging higher and higher, but it’s getting dark, and you have to be home before dark. Conflict.

Maybe you’ve been forbidden to see the person who has just called you, but you want to see them. Conflict.

Maybe you’re scowling at someone outside the frame. Why? Conflict.

Maybe there’s a war on, and you must get out of the place you are in. Conflict.

Record any sensory images of that conflict: qualities of light, expression, gesture.

Nearly every moment of our lives exists in counterpoint to something or someone standing in its way. Consider, for example, the beginning of Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life, which we cited in chapter 3. While young Toby and his mother may desire stability, their peripatetic life stands in sharp contrast to this desire. Conflict is the gunpowder of dramatic structure, propelling the catalyst.

The moment a catalyst is fired by conflict, the action begins to rise. We like to think of rising action as a deepening of oppositions, as the protagonist and the situation move farther and farther into the conflict.

This is an excellent moment to bring up the issue of time. We humans tend to think in chronological terms—this happened, then that happened. But when it comes to rising action, moments from the past or the future can deepen the opposition in surprising ways. Using such moments in your narrative can up the ante for both your narrator and your dramatic structure. Linearity is not necessary in rising action; psychological conflict often proceeds in a montage of moments. Such juxtaposition can enhance the conflict.

We use the term chronos (the Greek word for “time,” as in “chronology”) to refer to clock time, while kairos (the Greek term for “holy” or “sacred time”) defines the sense of time in which a moment can expand and seem like hours or contract and feel as if no time has passed at all. Think about crucial instances in your life during which time seemed to expand or contract along with your sensory apprehension of what was happening. Intriguingly, especially for our purposes in writing memoir, memory distorts (or enhances) our sense of kairos even further.

While we may recall time sequentially, within our minds all our moments—past, present, and future—exist in a present all their own. Even as you’re reading this sentence (present), you may be thinking about what you had for lunch (past) or what you’ll have for dinner (future). Applying this capacity of the mind to a scene’s rising action can increase the tension, as Sven Birkerts notes: “Not only is the sequential approach a chore for the writer, but it’s often a deadly bore for the reader. The point is story, not chronology, and in memoir the story all but requires the dramatic ordering that hindsight affords. The question is not what happened when, but what, for the writer, was the path of realization” (61, emphasis added). This is yet another instance where the remembering you has a distinct advantage—all that time before and since has affected both the scene and your memory of it.

Joan Didion uses chronos and kairos to marvelous effect in The Year of Magical Thinking, returning again and again to the moment before John’s death and then examining it from myriad angles with the urgent hope of changing it. In a scene halfway through the book, for example, Didion has just reread one of John’s books, Harp, in which he imagines a character’s death (“’a moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark?’” [155]). Didion wonders if John experienced his own death that way. She then thinks through the seemingly random event that is a heart attack, “a sudden spasm” as plaque clogs the artery, and, deprived of blood and oxygen, the heart starves. “But how did he experience it? The ‘moment of terror,’ the ‘eternal dark’?” she wonders (156).

We use this example for rising action intentionally. The catalyst—Didion’s rereading of John’s book—is fired by her continued attempts throughout the book to come to terms with his death. Thus the conflict in this scene arises from Didion’s application (present) of John’s own words (past) to his death (a different moment in the past). But, this being Didion, she then deepens the opposition by pulling back, pulling herself out of the narrative and instead using more abstract language to describe what happens during a heart attack, causing the action to rise and the reader to become more deeply invested in the scene.

The effect of this contemplation is a stunning example of one of the most important lessons we are taught when we begin studying writing. “Be specific,” we are told (and teach): the more specific the language, the more individual the moment, and the more universal the connection. While to the layperson Didion’s use of less accessible medical terminology in her quiet recitation of facts may seem at first a more difficult approach, in the end Didion achieves a far deeper connection with the reader, rendering the terror of an individual heart attack all the more horrific through the specificity of the language. Didion then brings it home in the two sentences that follow, the first in a paragraph of its own: “But how did he experience it? The ‘moment of terror,’ the ‘eternal dark’?” These two sentences of conjecture exist outside of time— or put another way, in kairos time, rather than in chronos, chronological time.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading: Consider the catalyst you recorded earlier in this chapter. What did the you in that moment want, and what stood in your way? What happens when you put that moment into motion? Does dialogue spring forth, an exchange where you express your desire and someone else says no? Or are you sitting in your childhood room, imagining what might happen if you attempt to fulfill your desire? Or does this scene occur after your desire was thwarted? In the latter two instances, your scene will immediately move into a moment outside the story’s chronological time frame to deepen the opposition—in the first case into an imagined future, in the latter into the past. We’ll consider the use of flashbacks, and “flashforwards,” in chapter 5.

Rising action is integral to the movement of a scene, ratcheting up the tension and therefore the consequences. If at any moment a reader’s attention lags, the action is no longer rising. Especially in memoir, the “but it really happened” issue comes into play. When we write memoir, we shape what really happened into scenes with deepening oppositions, scenes that move toward something the reader cannot yet discern but desires to discover because of the way we’ve built the scenes. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, desire is movement. We don’t alter the truth; we render it vivid in order to engage the reader and to describe as fully as we can the essence of our experience.

If you think of time in your writing as part of “the mind of your story,” emulating how all time exists concurrently in your mind, you can use the manipulation of past, present, and future to move around in time and enhance the rising action of your scenes.

While not one of the steps in dramatic structure, reversals nonetheless play an important role in maintaining engagement with your reader. Reversals are just what the word implies: a flipping over of what’s expected, sending the narrative off in a different direction. A clear reversal occurs in the 2010 remake of True Grit, when the heroine vanquishes her antagonist, driving him off a cliff. She feels exultant briefly until the reversal, when she steps back and suddenly falls into a snake pit.

In The Year of Magical Thinking (and in all her work), Joan Didion refuses to settle for the usual. In this instance, “the usual” might be that when a husband dies, a widow will mourn, and then she will move on. All of this is in fact typically the case, but by adding her refusal to accept the fact of John’s death to the mix, Didion can apply everything from attempts to rewrite the past to research into a variety of topics in her effort to change the course of what’s already happened. Here, for example, she “reads an explanation, by Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, of what he called ‘re-grief therapy,’ a technique…for the treatment of ‘established pathological mourners’” (55). After quoting from Dr. Volkan’s findings at some length, Didion reacts thusly:

But where exactly did Dr. Volkan and his team…derive their unique understanding of “the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive,” their special ability to “explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died”? Were you watching Tenko with me and “the lost one” in Brentwood Park, did you go to dinner with us at Morton’s? Were you with me and “the one who died” at Punchbowl in Honolulu four months before it happened? Did you gather up plumeria blossoms with us…? (56)

Didion continues this litany of moments with John for another half page before she stops herself and “realize[s] that I am directing irrational anger toward the entirely unknown Dr. Volkan in Charlottesville” (57). Her realization that she is projecting her anger about John’s death onto the unknown Dr. Volkan provides a stunning reversal, an acknowledgment that, as Dr. Volkan suggests, she is “’not only upset mentally but…unbalanced physically’” (ibid.). Didion’s refusal to accept anything given at face value has led her to this moment and is a driving force in the rising action not only of her scenes but also of the entire narrative. In this way she witnesses her own experience, one of the great values of writing a memoir. This self-reflexive epiphany derives as well from the interaction of Didion’s two yous. In this example, then, the reversal involves a change of mind.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading and writing: Not all scenes have reversals, but we’ve found that when writers employ them, readers are “hooked” all the more. In a sense, the workings of plot and scene weave the reader into the action. Consider the scene you’ve been working on through the exercises in this chapter. Does something unexpected happen that surprises either the experiencing you or the remembering you? Bear in mind, too, that seemingly unrelated external occurrences can affect a narrator: something as simple as a bluebird’s trill might cause someone to realize that life is worth living after all, or a neighbor’s dog’s incessant barking might drive her in the opposite direction.

The experiencing narrator can effect a reversal as well: the you in the past might be purposefully acting on his desire when he suddenly remembers (and remembering is an internal action) something that causes him to reassess his actions or the behavior of those around him.

Take a few moments here to record a few possible reversals for the scene you’re working on. Remember, this is only a draft, a time to explore possibilities. You’ll have as much time as you need to revisit it again and again.

A scene’s climax is its turning point. Yes, in a good scene there have already been reversals that cause rising action to fall until it rises again toward the next crisis. But the climax is the high point, the explosion—whether internal or external—upon which the entire scene pivots.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Reading and writing: The scene you’ve been working on in this chapter has been moving toward its own turning point. The drama in a scene’s epiphany does not have to be concussive. In fact, the quietest shifts can have far more emotional impact than the loudest explosions. People lean in closer to hear whispers, and readers who must imagine themselves into a scene are more intimately connected to it than those who have been forced in.

This is not to say that your scene won’t have a literal explosion at its climax. But as the one who first experienced it and who now is reenvisioning it, you are the one who knows—and records—when the desire and opposition set in motion by your catalyst crescendo to their breaking point.

One of the beauties of the two yous is that there is more than one possible epiphany to your scene. You might apply knowledge you’ve gained only years after the fact (a letter you don’t know about until someone else’s death, for example). Even if an external event sends the scene in its moment in a new direction (that trilling bluebird, say), that event might send the experiencing you back to the first time you experienced it and how it made you feel. Recall the young Annie Dillard we referenced in chapter 3, recording her child-self acknowledged by the passing woman who notes Annie’s exuberance.

Rather than demand only one climax for your scene during this first draft, we suggest that you instead list as many possibilities as you can, considering how the scene’s present, past, and future might affect it. Don’t worry about structure, spelling, or grammar—don’t even try for complete sentences at this point unless they come naturally. Just note as many possible climaxes as you can.

As noted above, The Year of Magical Thinking uses primarily internal action and nonlinear structure to interweave its scenes. Such a structure can reach a climactic point just as dramatically (if not more so) as a linear one. In the scene that follows, Didion begins, “Grief turns out be a place none of us know until we reach it” (188). She then continues her musing, noting that, while we all know we will at some point lose someone close to us, we cannot imagine much beyond our initial shock: “We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind” (ibid.).

Notice how Didion builds from her catalyst here. Using repetitive structure and opposition, the catalyst of her first sentence (“Grief turns out be a place none of us know until we reach it”) crescendos toward a place she did not anticipate. She suspects that the days after John’s death will be the most difficult and that “hypothetical healing” will begin after the funeral pushes her beyond her endurance: “We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others” (188–89).

In the two sentences above, Didion reverses direction and pushes the scene’s tension to its breaking point, its climax. The scene has been built based on what we imagine, what we anticipate. It pivots on what “we have no way of knowing.” The tension in this scene occurs because both what we imagine and what we have no way of knowing exist in the future—an unknown territory. The unknown, especially concerning the losses each of us will experience during our lives, is perhaps our greatest fear. Fear creates tension all by itself, but it is Didion’s insistent charting and traversing of this unknown territory that give The Year of Magical Thinking such power and resonance for the reader.

After a scene’s climax, the writer offers (and the reader requires) at least a sentence acknowledging what has happened—what has changed, shifted, or even stayed the same. Scenes that end before their denouements feel truncated, because readers expect to feel some kind of closure, however inconclusive, before moving on to what’s next.

After the climactic shift in the scene above, Didion moves to a future beyond what the narrator has been imagining into the terrible silence of “unending absence.” A lesser writer than Didion might have ended at the climactic moment of realization that “the funeral itself is anodyne.” But Didion pushes beyond this moment into an uncharted country, from “the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is” to “the experience of meaninglessness itself” (189).

Despite the territory (grief), Didion makes magic here. She insists on looking at her subject squarely, with her journalistic eye. She provides the reader with both expectation and reality, as experienced by her, and so, in her grief, offers an inadvertent guide to grieving, one that does not shy away from the horror or difficulty or impossibility but instead faces it and tries and fails, again and again, to move on.

A scene’s denouement leads the protagonist past its climax into the next episode while at the same time leaving enough uncertain that the reader wants to keep reading. In other words, a successful finish to a scene is a balancing act between resolution and uncertainty—a way of offering readers something to hang onto while at the same time urging them toward whatever’s next.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Your own scene’s denouement will arise out of the architecture you’ve built of rising, falling, and climactic action. Take a moment now to record the moment after each of the epiphanies you imagined for your scene in the previous section. The experiencing you might move forward—or step back. The remembering you might comment, imagine, or conjecture. The important thing is to provide the reader with some sense that the narrator acknowledges what has happened in the scene while at the same time his or her larger narrative arc continues to move forward.

Catalyst. Conflict. Rising action. Climax. Denouement. When you revisit your scenes, consider each of these steps carefully, and, as in Didion’s memoir, your scenes will not only resonate with readers but offer connections to their own lives as well.

Beyond scene structure, writers strive to bring individual moments to life. Doing this with our only tool, words, can sometimes seem an impossible task, and yet, again and again, writers rise to the occasion, particularizing instances so that readers can not only see them but also hear, taste, touch, and even smell them.

In An American Childhood, the young Annie Dillard wants to interrupt her parents because she has made what to her is an important discovery. All winter she’s been experimenting with a microscope she was given for Christmas. The beginning of this scene is constructed as leisurely narrative, with Dillard being given the microscope, then several paragraphs as she experiments with it, preparing slides of everything from an onion’s skin to a section of cork. She even takes scrapings from her own cheek to see the blood and looks at her urine, only to find that the drop has dried into crystals. Dillard shows readers these details, inviting them into the scene. Then she moves into the moment of discovery: “Finally, late that spring, I saw an amoeba…. In the basement at my microscope table I spread a scummy drop of Frick Park puddle water on a slide, peeked in, and lo, there was the famous amoeba. He was as blobby and grainy as his picture; I would have known him anywhere” (148).

At this point, Annie runs upstairs to share her discovery with her parents, only to find that they are relaxing and talking over their after-dinner coffee. Her mother informs her that although she’s pleased at what her daughter has discovered, she and Annie’s father wish to continue what they are doing. Surprisingly, young Annie is not disappointed or angry at this rejection. Instead, Dillard is thrilled by the realization that, by claiming their time, her parents are giving her permission to have her own life as well.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Go back now to your scene’s catalyst—the shimmering image with which you began. What did you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel when you first reimagined that moment? Take time to list words and sensory details that you can later use to re-create that image for readers. It’s unlikely you’ll use them all, so don’t worry about that at this point. Even if you don’t use them, the excavation you do will reveal itself in a more layered narrative, as we mentioned in the discussion of scaffolding in chapter 3. Simply list things like “blue sky,” “smell of coffee,” “the feel of the old wood banister” that you can later flesh out, as Dillard has.

Throughout this scene, Dillard moves between external and internal action—but her epiphany occurs internally. Notice how Dillard uses details to particularize the scene—the “blobby and grainy” amoeba, for example. Telling details like this immerse readers in the scene so that they experience its rising action and climax as if they were living it along with the narrator.

A scene’s oppositions can increase by either external or internal action. Up until this point, we’ve been focusing largely on internal action, as it can be more difficult to chart. But well-written external action can be just as, if not more, riveting. In this scene from Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Toby, as most American teenaged boys do, has been experimenting with getting drunk. He and his friends are sitting at the edge of a gully when Toby hops up on a branch that extends over the gully to where it turns to cement. His friends holler at him to stop, but Toby knows he can handle it, and to demonstrate, he bounces on the branch and flaps his arms. Then he puts his hands in his pockets and strolls still farther out, until the branch breaks:

I didn’t feel myself land, but I heard the wind leave me in a rush. I was rolling sideways down the hillside with my hands still in my pockets, rolling around and around like a log, faster and faster, picking up speed on the steep cement. The cement ended in a drop where the earth below had washed away. I flew off the edge and went spinning through the air and landed hard and rolled downhill through the ferns, bouncing over rocks and deadfall, the ferns rustling around me, and then I hit something hard and stopped cold.

I was on my back. I could not move, I could not breathe. I was too empty to take the first breath, and my body would not respond to the bulletins I sent. Blackness came up from the bottom of my eyes. I was drowning, and then I drowned. (189–90)

Notice the verbs that Wolff uses in this passage, how they not only help you visualize the scene but also deepen the oppositions: “strolled,” “rolling,” “flew,” and “spinning” (among others) are all strong, active verbs. When you describe external action, the more work your verbs can do, the stronger and more vivid the scene will be to your reader.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: Even if the scene you’ve been working with in this chapter is not external, it nonetheless occurs in some physical space that requires external delineation, and even if it’s a quiet space, it nonetheless can be described by active verbs. Your childhood bedroom, for example, might “calm” or “frighten.” A coffee shop might “clatter” or “chatter.” Make a list of strong verbs that show the external action of your scene. As always, you’ll return to this later, so don’t worry about getting things perfect this first time out.

We opened this chapter citing Sven Birkerts’s use of the term emblematic scene. Now that you’ve learned how to build a scene, one step at a time, you’re ready to consider how your scenes can do even more heavy lifting.

Let’s return again to the scene with which we opened this chapter and which begins Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander, Jacaranda. In this scene the young Penelope is riding in the back of a car with sticky leather seats, reciting the names of the trees, over and over, when she has a sudden insight into the nature of time, apprehending not only that the order of the trees will reverse when she makes the return trip later that day but also that in future years she will be able to return to this moment at will, looking at it for further meaning.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISE

Writing: The examples we’ve provided of emblematic moments are complex ones, but such moments can be deceptively simple as well. We’ve noticed that what we call “first-date” stories—the details about ourselves we choose to share when we first meet someone—often contain such moments.

What are your first-date stories? Perhaps you always tell about the time you ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere, or, conversely, how you were the one who figured out how to get a stalled elevator full of people in motion again. Each of these stories reveals something you believe to be emblematic about you—whether or not they truly are. So begin this exercise by writing down your go-to first-date story. Try to write it as you tell it, keeping its dramatic structure to the form you’ve mastered over the years.

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick notes that memoir requires that the narrator have a stance that sustains his or her story. Once you’ve recorded your first-date story, put it away for a day or two. Then reread it with an eye toward the stance that you, its narrator, have taken regarding the you in the story. Do you use this story to illustrate what a contrary person you once were? Or to show that you’ve always been a take-charge sort?

Emblematic moments are keys into the two yous. Pay attention to them, and they’ll help you map potential paths for your story.

Throughout this memoir, Lively uses her memories of growing up in Egypt before and during the early years of World War II as stepping-off points for considering the writer she has become. Using the first moment in which she grasps chronos and kairos and their potential to enable her to reimagine her life, she spotlights how important they will be to her, to the way she writes, and to her search for meaning through her fiction.

In this chapter we’ve broken scene down to its essential components of catalyst, conflict, rising action, climax, and denouement. We’ve found that it helps some writers to think architecturally about the way scenes work to build the larger plot. The foundation is the occasion of the telling, and each scene takes the reader deeper into the narrative as the writer constructs the building’s frame. The building’s levels are made up of chapters, each of which is built, scene by scene.

FURTHER SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Pick a scene from a memoir and explore why it does or doesn’t work as a scene. Observe the balance of internal and external action. How does the scene engage the reader?

Writing: Create a dynamic scene in your memoir from anywhere in the story. By dynamic we mean a scene that has a dramatic arc, uses sensory details and a specific moment in time/space to reveal character or further the action, or creates a parallel image/event to reinforce a main theme or throughline. Be as specific as you can to show the action.

We’ve talked about how action moves in a scene, but bear in mind that rhythm, the momentum and movement of language and how they “pace” the action, is also important to rising action. Not all scenes or chapters are the same length, for example. We’ll explore how language creates rhythm more in the next chapter. For now, keep in mind that readers make meaning. The gaps between scenes, and between chapters, are opportunities for your reader to participate. Think of those gaps as the hallways of your building—spaces where your readers can pause to catch up on their impressions, arrive at conclusions, or compare what they’ve been reading to their own experiences.

You’ll find your own method in creating scenes, in balancing internal and external action, and in developing your story arc. Craft, what we call the Fiction Writer’s Toolkit, gives you the tools to do this. Craft, patience, and revision are your greatest assets in building your story. The spotlight exercises above can help you hone your narrative while at the same time allowing you the pleasure of exploring and enjoying the process.

In the next chapter we’ll show you how to dress up your scenes and story using vivid language, telling details, description, landscape, and subtext.