By:
September C. Fawkes
Over
the last six months or so, I've learned a few new things about writing scenes.
Today, specifically I 'm going to share some techniques that can tweak your
scene here and there to make it more interesting and to keep it from going
stale. They are, expand, deepen, and create motion.
As
some of you know, I work for David Farland, so his writing tips and lessons
obviously have an impact on me, which is why I make sure to mention him right
there on the right-hand column of my blog. Well, one of his writing tips led me
to come up with the contents of today's post. This is just like a little
hypothesis of mine that has developed over the last few months.
In
one of his writing workshops, Dave talks about how in Hollywood, film makers
never want to use the same set twice, if they can help it. In one scene, the
protagonist will be in a hotel, in another on a boat, in another in an alley.
Even if the film takes place in the same castle the whole movie, they will try
to put each scene in a different part of the castle--one in the dungeons, one
in a tower, one in the entrance hall. We can do this with our scenes in novels
too. Instead of having three scenes in our protagonist's kitchen, maybe we want
to see if we can move one to a coffee shop and another to the zoo. By having
each scene take place in somewhere different, we not only keep the setting
interesting and fresh, we expand our setting. We are making our protagonist's world
feel bigger.
Obviously,
this isn't a rule that all stories should adhere to. Some scenes need to happen
in the same room. And using repeated settings can create internal resonance, a
"sense of history" (like I talked about in my last two posts), and
cultivate nostalgia. Almost all of Harry Potter takes place at Hogwarts, and
readers love returning to it. (With that said, keep in mind how many different
rooms and places Harry still goes to at Hogwarts. It's big and it's varied.)
But
Dave's advice on setting crossed paths with a few other things that were going
on with my own writing, and I soon realized that the advice doesn't just apply
to setting. I started seeing a lot of other ways to expand and deepen scenes.
So that's what I'm here to talk about today. Like I mentioned with Dave's
writing tip, the following are not rules that every scene in every story should
adhere to, these are just techniques to consider. They're great to turn to if
the details in your scene feel stagnant.
Expand
Micro-expand Settings
. . .
Read the full article HERE!
~*~
If you
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again:
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- September C. Fawkes: Expand, Deepen, and Create Motion--the Three Tweaks that Keep Details Interesting http://ow.ly/LUKPL
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