In reading Annie Dillard today, I realized that what makes her an excellent writer is that she’s outside of herself. She not only observes keenly, but she also appreciates greatly. She applies this observation to nature and then uses nature as a metaphor for the writing process. In my case, I’m perhaps (make that likely) too grounded in the self. You have to be able to get out of your own way when you’re writing, to do it unselfconsciously, to swim in it as if it were a river and the words are just carrying you along like the current. In fact, you aren’t swimming at all if you’re writing well. You’re being carried. Swimming implies a lack of freedom from the restrictions of self. You no longer battle until you’re weary-armed. You just are.
Journal of a Novel,
January 14, 1998
All that I’ve shared with you so far begs the real question: How do you write it? It being the book. “One word at a time” is the coy answer (like the incredibly helpful response I heard a writer give a student asking how to write good dialogue: “Open a vein.” Now that was really useful.). The answer I prefer to give is this: If you see your novel as a collection of causally related scenes, you just write the book one scene at a time.
You begin this process by deciding whether you need a scene at all, given where you might be in the novel. You might not need a scene. You might do well with simple dramatic narration for the place you are in the book.
Using this latter form of storytelling, you’re crafting a section of the novel in which a narrator relates actions rather than renders them. This can be done in summary fashion, in which case you have something we call summary narration. Or it can be done in lengthy fashion in which characters grow and develop, in which conflicts brew (both inner and outer), and in which other tools of the craft—such as figurative language—are employed. Consider this example from Jim Harrison’s novella “Revenge.”
You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or alive. The man didn’t know himself and the bird was tentative when he reached the ground and made a croaking sideward approach, askance and looking off down the chaparral in the arroyo as if expecting company from the coyotes. Carrion was shared not by the sharer’s design but by a pattern set before anyone knew there were patterns. The vulture had just eaten a rattler run over by a truck outside of Nacozari de Garcia, a little town well off the tourist run about a hundred miles from Nogales. The coyotes would follow the vulture’s descent out of curiosity whether or not they were hungry from the night’s hunt. As the morning thermals developed more vultures would arrive until the man’s dying would have an audience.
As the dawn deepened into midmorning and the heat dried and caked the blood on the man’s face, the blood lost most of its fresh coppery odor. The man was dying fitfully now, more from the heat and dehydration than from his injuries: an arm twisted askew, chest a massive blue bruise, one cheekbone crushed in with a hematoma rising like a purple sun, his testicles inflated from a groining. And a head wound that darkened the sand and pebbles and drew him down into his near fatal sleep of coma. Still, he kept breathing, and the hot air whistled past a broken tooth and when the whistle was especially loud the vultures were disturbed. A female coyote and her recently weaned pups stopped by but only for a moment: she snapped at the pups saying this pitiful beast is normally dangerous. She nodded in passing to a very large, old male coyote who watched with intense curiosity from the shadow of a boulder. He watched, then dozed, even in sleep owning an alertness unknown to us. His belly was full of javelina and watching this dying man was simply the most interesting thing to happen his way in a long time. It was all curiosity though: when the man died the coyote would simply walk away and leave it to the vultures. And it had been a long vigil for him, having been close by when the naked man had been thrown from the car the night before.
In the first comparative coolness of the evening a Mexican peasant (peóne in Mexican slang) and his daughter walked along the road making short forays into the brush for stray pieces of mesquite firewood. Rather, the man walked doggedly under his light load of wood and the daughter pranced, hopping from one foot to another, skipping, running then waiting for her father. She was his only child and he wouldn’t let her pick up firewood for fear she would be bitten by a scorpion, or a corallo, a coral snake which unlike the rattlesnake gave no warning though it was shy and retiring and meant no harm. It simply bit when cornered or provoked, then slid away and calmed its nerves under another log or stone. The daughter carried a bible. She helped in the kitchen of the Mennonite mission where her father had long been the custodian.
The daughter began to sing and that flushed the vultures still another hundred yards down the road. They were about to leave anyway for the safety of their mountain rookery before evening deepened. The coyote withdrew a little farther into the gathering shadows. He recognized the voices of the man and his daughter and knew from the seven years of his life that they weren’t dangerous to him. He had watched them on their way to the mission countless times but they had never seen him. The great birds flushing in the evening sun aroused the curiosity of the father and he quickened his pace. He had a hunter’s inquisitiveness, not unlike the coyote’s, and he remembered the time when he had found a large deer freshly fallen from an escarpment by following a descending gyre of vultures. He told his daughter to wait at a distance and he cautiously entered the dense chaparral along the road. He heard a rush of breath and a faint whistle and quickly opened a long pearl-handled knife. He crept noiselessly toward the whistling, smelling a trace of blood amidst the vulture dung. Then he saw the man and whistled himself, kneeling to feel the pulse. At odd times he had accompanied the missionary who was also a doctor on his treks into the mountains and he had learned the elements of first aid. Now he stood, whistled again in unison with the dying man, and looked at the sky. He was mostly Indian and his first thought was to simply walk away and avoid any contact with the Federales. But then the doctor was friends with the Federales and the man remembered the parable of the good Samaritan and looked back down at the body somewhat fatalistically, as if to say, I’ll help but I think it’s too late.
He came out of the brush and sent his daughter running to the mission a half mile down the valley. He squatted in the roadway and rolled pebbles back and forth with the blade of his knife. The sight of someone so gravely injured had quickened his heartbeat but he coolly rehearsed his story of finding the body. In his youth, in addition to being a hunter, he had been a small-time bandit and he understood that when speaking to authorities it was best to keep things simple.1
This is dramatic narration. The omniscient narrator gives us the facts of what occurred. There is no dialogue. An entire short story could have come from the discovery of the dying man’s body instead of just the opening of the novella itself.
Contrast that with this next example, which is still dramatic narration but which is instead summary narration from A Passage to India.
So the cavalcade ended, partly pleasant, partly not; the Brahman cook was picked up, the train arrived, pushing its burning throat over the plain, and the twentieth century took over the sixteenth. Mrs. Moore entered her carriage, the three men went to theirs, adjusted the shutters, turned on the electric fan and tried to get some sleep. In the twilight, all resembled corpses, and the train itself seemed dead though it moved—a coffin from the scientific north which troubled the scenery four times a day. As it left the Marabars, their nasty little cosmos disappeared, and gave place to the Marabars seen from a distance; finite and rather romantic. The train halted once under a pump, to drench the stock of coal in its tender. Then it caught sight of the main line in the distance, took courage, and bumped forward, rounded the civil station, surmounted the level-crossing (the rails were scorching now), and clanked to a standstill. Chandrapore, Chandrapore! The expedition was over.
And as it ended, as they sat up in the gloom and prepared to enter ordinary life, suddenly the long drawn strangeness of the morning snapped. Mr. Haq, the Inspector of Police, flung open the door of their carriage and said in shrill tones: “Dr. Aziz, it is my highly painful duty to arrest you.”2
E. M. Forster ends his characters’ fateful visit to the Marabar caves. He moves them from the caves to the train and on the train to their destination. He does this quickly and economically, with no fully explored scene. The mood is somber—hardly anything else being possible when the cars of the train are compared to coffins!—and the story plunges into more complications with the arrest of the good Dr. Aziz at the end of the narrative section. This works very well for Forster’s purposes. There was need to get the characters from the caves to their homes, but there was no need to dwell on what happened on the way. Dramatic narration was called for. Summary narration did the trick.
More often, however, you’re going to want to create a scene in which the point-of-view character or the omniscient narrator renders actions as they occur, allowing the reader to be a witness to the activities of the characters, an eavesdropper on their conversations. A scene fully played out can be long or, as in the following example, it can be quite concise.
Melvin Johns hadn’t intended to make love. He had met Tracy at their usual place, the gate leading to the towpath, and they had walked together, her arm tucked under his, her thin body hugging against his until they came to their secret place, the patch of flattened grass behind the thick elderberries, the straight, dead stump of tree. And it had happened, as he knew it would. The brief, unsatisfactory spasm and what went before were no different than they had always been. The potent smell of loam and dead leaves, the soft earth under his feet, her eager body straining under his, the smell of her armpits, her fingers scratching at his scalp, the scrape of the bark of the tree against his cheek, the gleam of the canal seen through a thicket of leaves. All over. But afterwards the depression that always followed was worse than he had ever known. He wanted to sink into the earth and groan aloud. She whispered:
“Darling, we have to go to the police. We must tell them what we saw.”
“It wasn’t anything. Just a car parked outside the church.”
“Outside the vestry door. Outside where it happened. The same night. And we know the time, about seven o’clock. It could be the murderer’s car.”
“It isn’t likely he’d be driving a black Rover, and it isn’t as if we noticed the number, even.”
“But we have to tell. If they never find who did it, if he kills again, we’d never forgive ourselves.”
The note of unctuous self-righteousness nauseated him. How was it, he wondered, that he’d never noticed before that perpetual whine in her voice. He said hopelessly:
“You said your dad would kill us if he knew we’d been meeting. The lies, telling him you were at evening classes. You said he’d kill us.”
“But, darling, it’s different now. He’ll understand that. And we can get engaged. We’ll tell them all that we were engaged.”
Of course, he thought, suddenly enlightened. Dad, that respectable lay preacher, wouldn’t mind as long as there was no scandal. Dad would enjoy the publicity, the sense of importance. They would have to marry. Dad, Mum, Tracy herself, would ensure that. It was as if his life were suddenly revealed to him in a slow unwinding reel of hopelessness, picture succeeding picture down the inescapable years. Moving into her parents’ small house; where else could they afford to live? Waiting for a council flat. The first baby crying in the night. Her whining, accusing voice. The slow death, even of desire. A man was dead, an ex-Minister, a man he had never known, never seen, whose life and his had never until this moment touched. Someone, his murderer or an innocent motorist, had parked his Rover outside the church. The police would catch the killer, if there was a killer, and he would go to prison for life and in ten years he would be let out, free again. But he was only twenty-one and his life sentence would end only with his death. And what had he done to deserve his punishment? Such a little sin compared with murder. He almost groaned aloud with the injustice of it.
“All right,” he said with dull resignation. “We’ll go to the Harrow Road police station. We’ll tell them about the car.”3
Here in two brief pages, P. D. James plays out an entire scene in A Taste for Death. She places us firmly inside her point-of-view character’s head, and the scene contains not only the conflict he faces but also the resolution to the conflict. Interestingly, this is the only time these two characters appear in the novel, serving the function of passing along valuable information to the police. But rather than just having one of the investigators report that an unnamed couple saw a car parked in front of the church on the night of the murder, the author instead allows us to see these characters in situ. As a result, she adds to the verisimilitude of the work.
There are also times, however, when a fully rendered scene isn’t necessary. These times generally arise with omniscient narration since the narrator can bounce around, in and out of people’s heads, in and out of settings, in and out of time periods if she feels like it. That’s what John Irving does in the following selection from Cider House Rules.
He was nothing (Homer Wells) if not of use. His sense of usefulness appears to predate Dr. Larch’s instructions. His first foster parents returned him to St. Cloud’s; they thought there was something wrong with him—he never cried. The foster parents complained that they would wake to the same silence that had prompted them to adopt a child in the first place. They’d wake up alarmed that the baby hadn’t woken them, they’d rush into the baby’s room, expecting to find him dead, but Homer Wells would be toothlessly biting his lip, perhaps grimacing, but not protesting that he was unfed and unattended. Homer’s foster parents always suspected that he’d been awake, quietly suffering, for hours. They thought this wasn’t normal.
Dr. Larch explained to them that the babies of St. Cloud’s were used to lying in their beds unattended. Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, dearly devoted though they were, could not be rushing to each and every baby the second it cried; crying was not of much use at St. Cloud’s (though in his heart of hearts Dr. Larch knew very well that Homer’s capacity for withholding tears was unusual even for an orphan).
It was Dr. Larch’s experience that foster parents who could so easily be deterred from wanting a baby were not the best parents for an orphan. Homer’s first foster parents were so quick to assume they’d been given a wrong one—retarded, a lemon, brain-damaged—that Dr. Larch didn’t extend himself to assure them that Homer was a very fit baby, bound to have a courageous long haul in the life ahead.
His second foster family responded differently to Homer’s lack of sound—his stiff-upper-lip and bite-the-bullet-while-just-lying-there placidity. His second foster family beat the baby so regularly that they managed to get some appropriately babylike noise out of him. Homer’s crying saved him.
If he’d proven himself to be stalwart at resisting tears, now when he saw that tears and howls and shrieks seemed to be what his foster family most desired of him, he tried to be of use and gave, with his whole heart, the lustiest wails he could deliver. He had been such a creature of contentment, Dr. Larch was surprised to learn that the new baby from St. Cloud’s was disturbing the peace in the fortunately small and nearby town of Three Mile Falls. It’s fortunate that Three Mile Falls was small, because the stories of Homer’s cries were the center of the area’s gossip for several weeks; and it’s fortunate that Three Mile Falls was nearby, because the stories found their way to St. Cloud’s and to Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, who had cornered the gossip market in all those river, wood, and paper towns. When they heard the tales of how their Homer Wells was keeping Three Mile Falls awake until the small hours, and how he would wake up the town before it was light, the nurses’ good memories did not forsake them; they went straight to St. Larch.
“That’s not my Homer!” Nurse Angela cried.
“He’s not a natural at crying, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said—taking every opportunity she had to pronounce that name so dear to her heart: Wilbur! It always made Nurse Angela cross with her (whenever Nurse Edna indulged her desire to call Dr. Larch a Wilbur to his face).
“Doctor Larch,” Nurse Angela said, with pointed and excessive formality, “if Homer Wells is waking up Three Mile Falls, that family you let have him must be burning that boy with their cigarettes.”
They weren’t that kind of family. That was a favorite fantasy of Nurse Angela’s—she hated smoking; just the look of a cigarette dangling from anyone’s mouth made her remember a French-speaking Indian who’d come to see her father about digging a well and had stuck his cigarette in one of her cats’ faces, burning its nose!—the cat, an especially friendly spayed female, had jumped up in the Indian’s lap. That cat had been named Bandit—she’d had the classic masked face of a raccoon. Nurse Angela had restrained herself from naming any of the orphans after Bandit—she thought of Bandit as a girl’s name.
But the family from Three Mile Falls were not sadists of a very known kind. An older man and his younger wife lived with his grown-up children of a previous marriage; the young wife wanted a child of her own, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Everyone in the family thought it would be nice for the young wife to have her own baby. What no one mentioned was that one of the grown-up children from the previous marriage had had a baby, illegitimately, and she hadn’t cared for it very well, and the baby had cried and cried and cried. Everyone complained about the baby crying, night and day, and one morning the grown-up daughter had simply taken her baby and gone. She left only this note behind:
I’M SICK OF HEARING FROM ALL OF YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH MY BABY CRIES. I GUESS IF I GO YOU WON’T MISS THE CRYING OR ME EITHER.
But they did miss the crying—everyone missed that wonderful, bawling baby and the dear, dim-witted daughter who had taken it away.
“Be sure nice to have a baby crying around here again,” someone in the family had remarked, and so they went and got themselves a baby from St. Cloud’s.
They were the wrong family to be given a baby who wouldn’t cry. Homer’s silence was such a disappointment to them that they took it as a kind of affront and challenged each other to discover who among them could make the baby cry first; after first they progressed to loudest, after loudest came longest.
They first made him cry by not feeding him, but they made him cry loudest by hurting him; this usually meant pinching him or punching him, but there was ample evidence that the baby had been bitten, too. They made him cry longest by frightening him; they discovered that startling babies was the best way to frighten them. They must have been very accomplished at achieving the loudest and longest in order to have made Homer Wells’s crying a legend in Three Mile Falls. It was especially hard to hear anything in Three Mile Falls—not to mention how hard it was to make a legend out of anything there.4
Covering Homer Wells’s adoption history in a few pages, Irving uses both summary narration and partial scenes to lay out his information for the reader. Note that the partial scene contains dialogue, and once it has been touched upon, the summary narration takes over once again. So what we have is narration, a pause for dialogue within an unspecified scene, then a return to narration. You should also note that this is an omniscient narrator: John Irving utilizing a storyteller’s voice.
Thus, you have three different types of narration to consider when you’re constructing your novel: dramatic narration (summary narration or otherwise), the full scene, or the partial scene interrupting dramatic narration.
If your choice is the scene, you have further considerations, things to ponder before or during your creation of the scene. You’ll need to make sure you’re constructing your scene in such a way that, whatever behavior it depicts on the part of the characters, that behavior either advances the plot or illustrates something about the character engaged in it. Scenes are for drama, so make sure the events you render are dramatically depicted. Make sure the scene creates dramatic questions in the mind of the reader. Be careful that the scene adds something necessary to the story’s development: information, revelation, discovery, sudden change. If the scene you’re creating doesn’t do any of this, then what you have is something that doesn’t need to go into a scene in the first place. Instead, it can be handled as part of dramatic narration (again, summary or otherwise) and indirect dialogue within that dramatic narration.
But if you’re doing a scene, then shape what you’re doing to make it a scene. That means there must be conflict, even if the conflict is not the same as the Big Conflict of the main story. There may be a conflict from a subplot that you can exploit during your scene. Well and good. Do it. And make that conflict rise, as all good conflict should. Don’t jump into it with people yelling, screaming, shooting, and having swords drawn.
Think of a scene as you would a complete story, and shape it like a story. It should begin at a low point. During the course of the scene, the tension should rise as the conflict brews. At the height of the conflict you should have the climax and what follows should be a form of resolution which propels the entire novel forward.
Here’s an example from my novel Payment in Blood.
BARBARA HAVERS closed her notebook. It was a studied movement, one that bought her time while she thought. Across from her, Lynley felt in the breast pocket of his jacket. Although colour still splodged his face where Lady Helen had struck him, his hands were quite steady. He brought out his cigarette case and lighter, used them both and handed them over. Barbara did likewise although after inhaling once, she grimaced and crushed out the cigarette.
Not a woman who ever spent a great deal of time analysing her emotions, Barbara did so now, realising with some confusion that she had wanted to intervene in what had just occurred. All Lynley’s questions had, of course, been fairly standard police procedure, but the manner in which he had asked them and the nasty insinuations carried in his tone had made Barbara want to throw herself into the fray as Lady Helen’s champion. She couldn’t understand why. So she thought about it in the aftermath of Lady Helen’s departure, and she found her answer in the myriad ways that the young woman had shown kindness to her in the months since Barbara had been assigned to work with Lynley.
“I think, Inspector,” Barbara ran her thumb back and forth on a crease in the cover of her notebook, “that you were more than a bit out of line just now.”
“This isn’t the time for a row about procedure,” Lynley replied. His voice was dispassionate enough, but Barbara could hear its taut control.
“It has nothing to do with procedure, does it? It has to do with decency. You treated Helen like a scrubber, Inspector, and if you’re about to answer that she acted like a scrubber, I might suggest you take a good look at one or two items in your own chequered past and ask yourself how well they’d appear in a scrutiny the likes of which you just forced her to endure.”
Lynley drew on his cigarette, but, as if he found the taste unpleasant, he stubbed it out in the ashtray. As he did so, a jerk of his hand spilled ashes across the cuff of his shirt. Both of them stared at the resulting contrast of black grime against white.
“Helen had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Lynley replied. “There was no way to get round it, Havers. I can’t give her special treatment because she’s my friend.”
“Is that right?” Barbara asked. “Well, I’ll be fascinated to see how that line plays out when we have the two old boys together for a confidential little chat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lords Asherton and Stinhurst sitting down for a chew. I can hardly wait for the chance to see you treat Stuart Rintoul with the same iron glove that you used on Helen Clyde. Peer to peer, chap to chap, Etonian to Etonian. Isn’t that how it plays? But as you’ve said, none of that will get in the way of Lord Stinhurst’s unfortunate placement of himself at the wrong place at the wrong time.” She knew him well enough to see his quick rise to anger.
“And what is it exactly that you would have me do, Sergeant? Ignore the facts?” Coolly, Lynley began to tick them off. “Joy Sinclair’s hall door is locked. The master keys are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable. Davies-Jones’ prints are on the key to the only other door that gives access to the room. We have a period of time that is unaccounted for because Helen was asleep. All that, and we haven’t even begun to consider where Davies-Jones was until one in the morning when he showed up at Helen’s door, or why Helen, of all people, was put into this room in the first place. Convenient, isn’t it, when you consider that we have a man coincidentally coming here in the middle of the night to seduce Helen while his cousin is being murdered in the very next room?”
“And that’s the rub, isn’t it?” Barbara pointed out. “Seduction, not murder.”
Lynley picked up the cigarette case and lighter, slipped them back in his pocket, and got to his feet. He didn’t respond. But Barbara did not require him to do so. A response was pointless when she knew very well that his stiff-upper-lip breeding had a propensity towards deserting him in moments of personal crisis. And the truth of the matter was that the instant she had seen Lady Helen in the library, had seen Lynley’s face when Lady Helen crossed the room to him with that ridiculous greatcoat hanging forlornly to her heels, Barbara had known that, for Lynley, the situation had the potential of developing into a personal crisis of some considerable proportions.
Inspector Macaskin appeared at the bedroom door. Fury played on his features. His face was flushed, his eyes snapped, his skin looked tight. “Not one script in the house, Inspector,” he announced. “It appears our good Lord Stinhurst has burnt every last one.”
“Well, la-de-da-da,” Barbara murmured to the ceiling.5
In this scene, the lowest point of the drama is at the beginning when Barbara Havers closes the book. The tension increases during her conversation with Lynley over the manner in which he dealt with Helen Clyde during his questioning of her regarding the night of the murder. The scene reaches its climax on the word seduction. The resolution occurs when Macaskin appears on the scene to relay the information that part of the evidence has been deliberately destroyed. Obviously, that new fact must propel the story forward. The police can hardly ignore the situation when a suspect burns up evidence.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here about the shape of scene, however. Don’t think that every scene must be formed identically, because that isn’t what I mean to imply. Indeed, sometimes a scene might start with the climax, back off from it and explain how we got to that point, and then continue. But even if it does that, it will still contain rising conflict and resolution as well, just in a different order. And the order in which these elements appear is determined by your choice of scenic construction.
More choices? Indeed. That’s the thing about craft. The more tools you have, the more choices available. The more choices available, the better the writing can be.
There are as many ways to construct scenes as there are people with imaginations. If the basic rule of writing is “Whatever works,” then the more the merrier as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to give you just a few examples of ways to consider structuring your scenes.
I call the first one the motion picture technique. If you think about the most common way a scene is set in a film, the camera begins with an establishing shot. Then it dollies in to the character or characters. Then the dialogue begins. Or, put in abbreviated form: Set the scene, move to a narration of action, hit the dialogue. Here’s what that looks like in writing, from my novel For the Sake of Elena.
Cambridge police headquarters faced Parker’s Piece, a vast green crisscrossed by intersecting paths. Joggers ran here, their breaths gusting out in fibrous clouds, while on the grass two dalmatians—tongues flapping happily—chased after an orange Frisbee thrown by a whip-thin bearded man whose bald head shone in the morning sun. All of them seemed to be rejoicing in the disappearance of the fog. Even pedestrians rushing by on the pavement held up their faces to let the sunlight strike them for the first time in days. Although the temperature was no higher than it had been on the previous morning, and a brisk wind made the chill cut close, the fact that the sky was blue and the day was bright served to make the cold stimulating instead of insufferable.
Lynley paused outside the dun brick-and-concrete structure that housed the main offices of the local police. A glass-enclosed notice board stood in front of the doors, on which were fastened posters about child safety in cars, drinking and driving, and an organisation called Crimestoppers. Over this last had been taped a hand-out giving the superficial details of Elena Weaver’s death and asking for information from anyone who might have seen her yesterday morning or Sunday night. It was a hastily composed document with a grainy, photocopied picture of the dead girl upon it. And it had not been generated by the police. DeaStu and a telephone number were printed prominently at the bottom of the page. Lynley sighed when he saw this. The deaf students were launching their own investigation. That wouldn’t make his job any less complicated.
A blast of warm air hit him when he opened the doors and entered the lobby where a young man garbed in black leather was arguing with a uniformed receptionist about a traffic ticket. On one of the chairs, his companion waited, a girl in moccasins and what appeared to be an Indian bedspread. She kept murmuring, “Come on, Ron. Cripes. Come on,” with her feet drumming impatiently on the black tile floor.
The constable working reception cast a thankful look in Lynley’s direction, perhaps appreciative of the diversion. He broke into the young man’s “You listen here, mate. I bloody don’t intend to—” with “Sit down, lad. You’re getting in a twist over nothing,” after which he nodded to Lynley, saying, “CID? Scotland Yard?”
“It’s that obvious, then?”
“Colour of the skin. Police pallor, we call it. But I’ll have a glance at your ID all the same.”6
We start out with the “camera” at a distance, and through the lens we see the Cambridge police station. Then Lynley arrives and observes the place. When he goes inside, the action and dialogue begin. Thus, with each “camera movement,” the reader gets closer to the character involved in the drama.
Sometimes, however, I like to start off with more of a bang. When that’s the case, I use what I call sound versus sight. Doing this, I begin immediately with dialogue. Then I back off to set the scene. Then I return to dialogue and move the scene forward. Here’s what that looks like, from the opening of chapter six in In the Presence of the Enemy.
“So what have we got on for tomorrow?” Dennis Luxford pointed a finger at Sarah Happleshort, his news editor. She tongued her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and picked up her notes.
Round the table in Luxford’s office, the rest of the news meeting waited for the conclusion to their daily conference. This was the gathering to determine the contents of tomorrow’s Source, to decide how stories would be spun, and to hear Luxford’s decision on what would run on the front page. Sports had been arguing for heightened coverage of the selection of the England cricket team, a suggestion that had been greeted with hoots of derision despite the recent death of England’s best batsman. In comparison to the rent boy rumba, the asphyxiation of an eminent cricketer was minuscule potatoes no matter who had been arrested and charged with orchestrating said asphyxiation. Besides, that was old news and it didn’t carry the amusement value of the Tories’ attempts at damage control faced with Sinclair Larnsey, the rent boy he was caught with, and the steamy-windowed Citroën—“The slime-ball doesn’t even buy British,” Sarah Happleshort said, her dudgeon high—in which the pair were purportedly “discussing the dangers of solicitation” when abruptly interrupted by the local police.
Sarah used a pencil to point to items on her list. “Larnsey’s met with his constituency committee. No precise word yet, but we’ve got a reliable source telling us he’s going to be asked to stand down. East Norfolk is willing to put up with the occasional dalliance, it seems. All pardonable in the light of let’s-practise Christian-forgiveness and let-him-without-sin-proceed-with-the-stone-toss. But they appear to draw the line at human weaknesses involving married men, teenaged boys, closed automobiles and an exchange of body fluids and cash. The crucial question among the committee appears to be whether they want to force a by-election while the PM’s popularity is on the wane. If they don’t, they look like they don’t care about the Recommitment to Basic British Values. If they do, they’re going to lose the seat to Labour and they know it.”
“Politics as usual,” the sports editor complained.
Rodney Aronson added, “The story’s getting tired.”7
Using sound versus sight, I jump in with Dennis Luxford speaking. The reader doesn’t know where he is until the next paragraph in which I explain where he is and what’s going on. Only after I’ve explained that do I have the character to whom he’s speaking answer him. That’s how sound versus sight works.
Similarly, a technique that I call present-past-present begins a scene and then appears to back off from it. Unlike the previous example, however, when you use this construction, you start the scene in real time, stop the scene, and go back to previous action to bring the reader up to date, then return to present time. Here’s an example from a novel I wrote called A Suitable Vengeance.
The day’s fair weather had begun to change by the time Lynley touched the plane down onto the tarmac at Land’s End. Heavy grey clouds were scuttling in from the southwest and what had been a mild breeze back in London was here gathering force as a rain-laden wind. This transformation in the weather was, Lynley thought bleakly, a particularly apt metaphor for the alteration that his mood and his circumstances had undergone. For he had begun the morning with a spirit uplifted by hope, but within mere hours of his having decided that the future held the promise of peace in every corner of his life, that hope had been swiftly overshadowed by a sick apprehension which he believed he had put behind him.
Unlike the anxiety of the past few days, this current uneasiness had nothing to do with his brother. Instead, from his meetings with Peter throughout the night had grown a sense of both renewal and rebirth. And although, during his lengthy visit to New Scotland Yard, the family’s solicitor had depicted Peter’s danger with transparent simplicity unless the death of Mick Cambrey could be unassailably pinned upon Justin Brooke, Lynley and his brother had moved from a discussion of the legal ramifications of his position to a fragile communion in which each of them took the first tentative steps towards understanding the other’s past behaviour, a necessary prelude to forgiving past sins. From the hours Lynley had spent talking to his brother had come the realisation that understanding and forgiveness go hand-in-hand. To call upon one is to experience the other. And if understanding and forgiveness were to be seen as virtues—strengths of character, not illustrations of personal weakness—surely it was time he accepted the fact that they could bring harmony to the single relationship in his life where harmony was most needed. He wasn’t certain what he would say to her, but he knew he was ready to speak to his mother.
This intention—a resolution which lightened his steps and lifted his shoulders—began to disintegrate upon his arrival in Chelsea. Lynley dashed up the front steps, rapped on the door, and came face to face with his most irrational fear.
St. James answered the door. He was pleasant enough with his offer of a coffee before they left, and confident enough with his presentation of his theory about Justin Brooke’s culpability in Sasha Nifford’s death. Under any other circumstances the information about Brooke would have filled Lynley with the surge of excitement that always came with the knowledge that he was heading towards the conclusion of a case. Under these circumstances, however, he barely heard St. James’ words, let alone understood how far they went to explain everything that had happened in Cornwall and London over the past five days. Instead, he noted that his friend’s face was etiolated as if from an illness; he saw the deepening of the lines on his brow; he heard the tension beneath St. James’ exposition of motive, means, and opportunity; and he felt a chill through his skin and settle in every vital organ of his body. His confidence and his will—both flagships of the day—lost a quick battle with his growing dismay.
He knew there could be only one source of the change that had come over St. James, and she walked down the stairs not three minutes after his arrival, adjusting the leather strap of a shoulder bag. When she reached the hallway and Lynley saw her face, he read the truth and was sick at heart. He wanted to give sway to the anger and jealousy that he felt in that instant. But instead, generations of good breeding rose to commandeer his behaviour. The demand for an explanation became meaningless social chitchat designed to get them through the moment without so much as a hair of feeling out of place.
“Working hard on your photos, darling?” he asked her and added, because even good breeding had its limits, “You look as if you haven’t had a moment’s rest. Were you up all night? Are you finished with them?”
Deborah didn’t look at St. James, who went into the study where he began rooting in his desk. “Nearly.” She came to Lynley’s side, slipped her arms round him, lifted her mouth to kiss him, and said in a whisper against his lips, “Good morning, darling Tommy. I missed you last night.”
He kissed her, feeling the immediacy of her response to him and wondering if everything else he had seen was merely the product of pathetic insecurity. He told himself that this was the case. Nonetheless he still said, “If you’ve more work to do, you don’t need to go with us.”
“I want to go. The photographs can wait.” And, with a smile, she kissed him again.
All the time with Deborah in his arms, Lynley was acutely aware of St. James. During the journey to Cornwall, he was aware of them both. He studied every nuance in their behavior towards him, in their behavior towards each other. He examined each word, each gesture, and remark under the unforgiving microscope of his own suspicion. If Deborah said St. James’ name, it became in his mind a veiled avowal of her love. If St. James looked in Deborah’s direction, it was an open declaration of commitment and desire. By the time Lynley taxied the plane to a halt on the Land’s End airstrip, he felt tension coiling like a spring in the back of his neck. The resulting pain was only a secondary consideration, however. It was nothing compared to his self-disgust.
His roiling emotions had prevented him from engaging in anything other than the most superficial of conversations during the drive to Surrey and the flight that followed it. And since not one of them was gifted with Lady Helen’s capacity for smoothing over difficult moments with amusing chatter, their talk had ground itself down to nothing in very short order so that when they finally arrived in Cornwall, the atmosphere among them was thick with unspoken words. Lynley knew he was not the only one to sigh with relief when they stepped out of the plane and saw Jasper waiting with the car next to the tarmac.8
Notice how we begin in real time: Lynley is just touching the plane down at Land’s End in Cornwall. But his mood is bleak and this requires explanation. So I back away from present time at Land’s End airfield and bring the reader up to date, going back to the previous night and his conversations with his brother and running through the morning’s events and what they’ve done to his peace of mind. When that ground is covered, I hop back to the present. You can see, I hope, that using this structure allowed me to summarize the events of the previous night instead of playing them out. The key, however, is that the action of the previous night contained within the section of the past must be action that moves the present story forward.
Sometimes, it’s simplest to begin a scene just by giving the time of day or by telling how much time has passed since the last time we were with the point of view character. For example, in A Taste for Death, P. D. James begins a chapter by writing, “Ten minutes after Kate got back to her office, Massingham came in.” Bang. We know where we are and who’s there. The scene just goes from there.
Other times, we want our footwork to be fancier. In For the Sake of Elena, for example, I end a chapter with an artist moving away from her plein air drawing to evaluate it, only to step on an arm. The exact words are: “The object wasn’t a branch, but a human arm.” The next chapter immediately begins.
Mercifully, the arm was attached to a body. In his twenty-nine years with the Cambridge Constabulary, Superintendent Daniel Sheehan had never had a dismemberment occur upon his patch, and he didn’t want that dubious investigatory distinction now.
Upon receiving the telephone call from the station house at twenty past seven, he’d come barrelling down from Arbury with lights flashing and siren sounding, grateful for an excuse to leave the breakfast table where the tenth straight day of grapefruit wedges, one boiled egg, and one thin slice of unbuttered toast provoked him into snarling at his teenaged son and daughter about their clothing and their hair, as if they were not both wearing school uniforms, as if their heads were not well-groomed and tidy. Stephen glanced at his mother, Linda did the same. And the three of them tucked into their own breakfasts with the martyred air of a family too long exposed to the unexpected mood-swings of the chronic dieter.
Traffic had been locked at the Newnham Road roundabout, and only by driving half on the pavement was Sheehan able to reach the bridge of Fen Causeway at something other than the hedgehog speed at which the rest of the cars were moving. He could envision the clogged mess which every southern artery into the city had probably become by now, and when he braked his car behind the constabulary’s scenes-of-crime van and heaved himself into the damp, cold air, he told the constable stationed on the bridge to radio the dispatcher for more men to help move traffic along. He hated rubberneckers and thrill seekers equally. Accidents and murders brought out the worst in people.9
What I’ve used here is a narrative explanation of events. I’m essentially explaining how we got to this particular point in the drama. I’m creating a lead into Sheehan’s appearance on the scene of the crime because I think it’s more interesting to consider the investigators as people who have lives outside the crime novel I’m writing, who’ve had those lives before the novel was written, and who will continue to have those lives when the novel ends. Hence, the image of Sheehan at the breakfast table with his family, driving them all to distraction because he’s on a diet.
Plunging immediately into the action is another way to begin a scene, which is what the next example does from For the Sake of Elena. In this scene, we are with Melinda Powell, doing what she’s doing as she does it. Notice that this doesn’t use any of the other scene constructions. When the character is introduced, the action starts. We stay with that character as the action continues. Where there is setting, it’s described so as to make it part of the action.
Melinda Powell was about to wheel her bicycle from Queens’ Lane into Old Court when a panda car pulled up less than half a block away. A uniformed policeman got out of it, as did the President of Queens’ College along with the senior tutor. The three of them stood talking in the cold, arms folded across their chests, breath clouding the air, faces grave and grim. The policeman nodded at something the President was saying to the senior tutor, and as they moved apart from one another, preparatory to the policeman’s taking his leave, a noisy Mini rumbled into the lane from Silver Street and parked behind them.
Two people emerged, a tall, blond man wearing a cashmere overcoat and a squat, square woman swathed in scarves and wool. They joined the others, the blond man producing some sort of identification and the President of the College following up by offering his hand. There was a great deal of earnest conversation, a gesture from the President towards the side entrance to the college, and what appeared to be some sort of direction given by the blond to the uniformed policeman. He nodded and came trotting back to where Melinda stood with her mittened hands curved round the handlebars of her bike, feeling the cold from the metal seeping through the knit wool like strips of damp. He said, “Sorry, miss,” as he scooted past her and stepped through the gateway into the college.
Melinda followed him. She’d been gone most of the morning, struggling with an essay she was rewriting for the fourth time in an effort to make her points clear prior to showing it to her supervisor, who would, with his usual bent for academic sadism, no doubt tear it to shreds. It was nearly noon. And although it was typical to see the occasional member of college strolling through Old Court at this time of day, when Melinda emerged from the turreted passage that led to Queens’ Lane, she found numerous small clumps of students having hushed conversations on the path between the two rectangles of lawn while a larger group gathered at the staircase door to the left of the north turret.
It was through this door that the policeman disappeared after he stopped for a moment to answer a question. Melinda faltered when she saw this. Her bicycle felt heavy, as if a rusting chain made it difficult to push, and she lifted her eyes to the top floor of the building where she tried to see through the windows of that misshapen room tucked under the eaves.
“What’s going on?” she asked a boy who was passing. He wore a sky blue anorak and matching knit cap with the words Ski Bulgaria blazed onto it in red.
“Some runner,” he said. “Got bagged this morning.”
“Who?”
“Another bird from Hare and Hounds, they said.”
Melinda felt dizzy. She heard him ask, “You all right?” but she didn’t respond. Instead, with every sense numbed, she pushed her bicycle towards the door of Rosalyn Simpson’s staircase.10
You’ll probably also recognize that the scene you’ve just read is constructed so that it begins in media res just as some novels begin: in the middle of the action. But you can also begin a scene within the head of a character. That’s what’s going on in this next scene from Payment in Blood. We have a brief bow to setting in the first paragraph, but you should notice that we’re immediately with Barbara Havers, unlike the camera construction of the motion picture technique where we got a description of the setting before we knew that Lynley was going to be the character involved in the scene.
BARBARA HAVERS paused on the wide drive before going back into the house. Snow had fallen again during the night, but it was a light fall, insufficient to close roads but enough to make walking on the estate grounds wet, cold, and unpleasant. Nonetheless, after a foully sleepless night, she had risen shortly after dawn and had set out through the snow, determined to rid herself of the turmoil of mixed loyalties that were plaguing her.
Logic told Barbara that her primary responsibility was to New Scotland Yard. Adherence right now to procedures, to judges’ rules, to Force regulations would add to the likelihood of her receiving a promotion the next time an inspector’s position came open. After all, she had taken the examination only last month—she could swear for certain that she’d passed it this time—and the last four courses at the training centre had earned her the highest possible marks. So the time was right for advancement, or as nearly right as it was ever going to be, if she only played this entire affair wisely.
Thomas Lynley was what made everything so difficult. Barbara had spent practically every working hour over the last fifteen months in Lynley’s presence, so she was not at all oblivious of the qualities that had made him a superb member of the Force, a man who had risen from constable to sergeant to detective inspector in his first five years. He was quick-witted and intuitive, gifted with both compassion and humour, a man liked by his colleagues and well trusted by Superintendent Webberly. Barbara knew how lucky she was to be working with Lynley, knew how deserving he was of her absolute faith. He put up with her moods, stoically listened to her ravings even when her most virulent attacks were directed against him, still encouraged her to think freely, to offer her own opinions, to disagree openly. He was unlike any other officer she had ever known, and she owed him personal debts that went far beyond her having been returned to CID from her demotion to uniformed patrol fifteen months back.
So now she had to decide where her true loyalties lay, to Lynley or to advancement in her career. For in her forced hike through the woods this morning, she had inadvertently come upon a piece of information that bore the unmistakable stamp of being part of the puzzle. And she had to decide what to do with it. More, no matter what she decided, she had to understand exactly what it meant.
The air was stinging in its icy purity. Barbara felt its sharp stab in her nose and throat, in her ears and against her eyes. Yet she breathed it in deeply five or six times, squinting against the brilliant purity of sunlit snow, before she trudged across the drive, stamped her feet roughly against the stone steps, and walked into the great hall of Westerbrae.
It was nearly eight. There was movement in the house, footsteps in the upper corridor and the sound of keys turning in locks upstairs. A smell of bacon and the rich perfume of coffee gave normality to the morning—as if the events of the past thirty-two hours had only been part of an extended nightmare—and the low murmur of pleasant voices came from the drawing room. Barbara walked in to find Lady Helen and St. James sitting in a soft pool of sunlight at the east end of the room, sharing coffee and conversation. They were alone. As Barbara watched them together, St. James shook his head, reached out and rested his hand for a moment upon Lady Helen’s shoulder. It was a gesture of infinite gentleness, of understanding, the wordless binding of a friendship that made the two of them together stronger and more viable than either one could ever be alone.
Seeing them, Barbara was struck by the thought of how easy it was to make a decision when she considered it in the light of friendship. Indeed, between Lynley and her career there was no choice at all. She had no real career without him. She crossed the room to join them.11
So we have in this scene the bow to setting, a sojourn in Barbara’s mind, and then the action starts.
What’s important to remember here is that there are scores of ways to begin scenes. The only limit is that of your imagination. If there’s any rule at all, it’s that whatever works, works. Beyond that, it’s all about rising conflict (either outer or inner), climax, and resolution.