Scenes, the primary building blocks of creative nonfiction, are little stories, episodes, anecdotes, or other opportunities for the creative nonfiction writer to be artful and use all the literary techniques available to fiction writers and dramatists. These techniques include dialogue, description, action, and suspense.
At their core, creative nonfiction stories are simply series of scenes, generally arranged according to some overall frame that makes them add up to a larger story.
Lauren Slater’s “Three Spheres,” for example, begins when Slater, a psychologist, is assigned a new patient, a very troubled woman with a history of self-mutilation and suicide attempts. Slater resists—clearly she does not want to care for this patient (we learn why later)—but her boss is insistent, and she has no choice but to relent.
Slater phones her new patient soon thereafter and immediately discovers in a brief conversation that the woman is severely traumatized. Slater calls 911 and quickly dispatches an ambulance so that paramedics can rescue the woman and take her to a nearby emergency room for treatment. Two days later Slater receives another phone call, from a nurse at the psychiatric hospital to which the patient has been admitted, summoning her to a team meeting to discuss the patient’s treatment. Again Slater resists but eventually realizes that she must capitulate. Slater and the nurse agree on a time for the meeting and hang up.
Early in this essay, three episodes occur: three little stories or scenes in which something happens to further the action of the overall story. From beginning to end, in Slater’s five-thousand-word essay, there are approximately a dozen scenes, all of which either advance the chronology of the story a little further or flash back to the past, offering insight and illumination. Why is Slater so resistant to caring for this patient? We find out through the scenes Slater provides, which chronicle the pain and tragedy of her own past.
How does a writer know that he or she is writing in scenes? Lee Gutkind has devised the yellow test, a simple exercise that helps writers recognize the definite narrative elements in their work. “Take a highlighter and yellow in the scenes,” he says. “If half your essay, more or less, is not glaring and blaring back at you in yellow, that’s a red flag, a warning that your essay may not be infused with enough narrative to compel a reader onward.” The yellow test is a way of establishing that the writer is telling a story, showing rather than telling in as cinematic and intriguing a way as possible.
How to recognize a scene? “There is a difference between being scenic and descriptive and writing a real scene or story,” says Gutkind. “It is not just pretty blue sky and scattered conversation, dialogue and description. A scene has a beginning and an end. Something has to happen.”
What happens need not be monumental. Two people have a conversation and then say good-bye; a man walks down a street and sees something; a psychiatrist talks to her patient on the phone and then calls an ambulance. Each of these scenes can be used as a building block in a larger story.