Setting the Scene
I hope everyone's having great holidays!
I'm a little (OK, a lot) behind on comments, and even worse on reading fics that have been posted in the last two weeks, because I pretty much shut down to do little else but write and edit to get part 8 up by the deadline that I set myself. My beta has gotten back to me with corrections and edits, but I'm having a hard time getting started for a variety of reasons that sound frighteningly like being burned out.
As much as I'd love to write a couple of LM Extras while I'm on vacation (admittedly, a very rare occurrence), writing anything is a little hard to do when the dogs are running around with the squeak toys that they got for Christmas. That's not the annoying part. It's that, by virtue of them being medium-sized dogs with long tails, I end up chasing after them and picking up everything they knock off the coffee tables, shelves, and DVD stand.
But they're cute, so I'll forgive them.
In other news, I've received a surprising (and flattering) number of very nice and very sweet PMs about the writing in LM. Some of those PMs are questions about the technical stuff of writing. So in the future, I am going to put up more posts like this one, starting with how to set the scene.
As a disclaimer, I am not an expert on writing, some things may not make sense, and I might contradict myself. But since I firmly believe that no one thing works for everyone all of the time, please feel free to chime in with your own approaches and tips!
Setting the scene is just what it sounds like -- establishing the important details like where, what, who, when, why, and maybe also the how. Those are the five W's and the H that get pounded into students in most English classes. The downside is that most English classes don't explain how to use them effectively in setting scenes. If I were to use the five W's and H's rule to describe a scene, it would come out like this:
Merlin and Arthur were on the bridge at five o'clock waiting for the car to arrive.
The who are Merlin and Arthur, the where is some bridge, the when is at five o'clock, the what (as in what are they doing) is that they're waiting, the why is that a car is supposed to arrive.
In that description, there is no how. The how is the forgotten middle child who gets away with murder and wanders off somewhere else to go meandering in the swamp only to come home later with frogs and snakes shoved in his pockets. Without the how, there's a lot of information that goes missing -- you need the frogs and snakes to make it interesting.
And, to be brutally fair, that so-called scene-setting sentence is BORING. It doesn't hook me, I wouldn't want to keep reading, and I'm pretty sure some of you would stare at me as if I'd grown a second head before dragging me off to the hospital to find out what was wrong.
What I'm going to do now, since I know the scene involves a bridge at five PM and a car, I'm going to rip that sentence apart and ask the right questions to put it in a better context.
Let's start with, how did Merlin and Arthur get to this mysterious bridge?
It was a wild scramble through the city streets, narrow alleys, and public buildings. Merlin yanked Arthur's arm and pulled them both down the carved stone stairs instead of a more convenient overland route. They raced along the narrow walkway, ignoring the hoots and catcalls from the tourists on the River Seine's cruise boats, and took the next set of stairs two and three at a time. Arthur grabbed Merlin's wrist and they joined the gaggle of pedestrians crossing the street, both of them craning their necks and looking around while trying not to be too obvious about it. They kept walking, their thighs burning, using the crowd as cover, diverting only when they reached the Pont Neuf, hurrying until they were almost at the other end.
We automatically know the who -- Merlin and Arthur. The how gave me tension, and I kept building on it by showing the mad race, the frantic way that Merlin guides Arthur to escape along a completely unexpected route -- and threw in some atmosphere to situate them -- the River Seine, the tour boats. Once they're at the other end, Arthur takes charge again, taking advantage of the tourist cover. They're both anxious -- they keep looking over their shoulders, and they're walking as fast as they can without attracting more attention. And, finally, we have our answer for where: they're on the bridge.
What happened to make them run?
If not for Gwaine, they wouldn't have known that the meeting point had been a trap. If not for Gwaine, they'd be dead now. They wouldn't have escaped from the building before it blew up. If not for Gwaine, they wouldn't have known about the black suits who'd come out of the arse-end of nowhere to chase them through the streets of Paris.
Arthur's grasp around his cell phone was white-knuckled with rage.
We have another who in here -- the mysterious people in black suits, and Gwaine, who had warned them in time.
Now, we're not going to know why they are being chased beyond the fact that they'd been set up, but we have more why questions that we can ask instead: why are they at the bridge? Why did they stop there? Why aren't they still running? Why isn't the team backing them up?
Where how is the oft-forgotten middle child, why is the two-year-old who wants to know everything, and very rarely never gets its questions answered, so I'm going to try my best to answer them all.
"We can't stay here. We're exposed," Merlin gasped. He leaned against the carved moulding, trying not to slip off and collapse in a heap. His vision was closing in, and the only thing he could focus on at the moment was Arthur. The dizzying speeds of Paris traffic, combined with the honking horns of an impeding rush hour, was making it hard to concentrate.
Or it could just be from the blood loss.
Arthur glanced at him briefly, nodded in sharp agreement, and brought his phone to his ear.
"Pont Neuf. How far away are you?" Arthur paced in place, smoothed down his suit, and straightened his tie one-handed. Every time he passed Merlin, his eyes would trail down to Merlin's limp arm and watch the way the blood dripped onto concrete. Merlin didn't want to look. He thought that if he did, he'd pass out.
And he might have, because the next thing Merlin knew, Arthur was supporting his weight and trying to subtly staunch the bullet wound.
"Come on, Merlin," Arthur said, his voice a frantic hush against Merlin's ear. "Just hold on a little longer. Perce is almost here."
"All right," Merlin mumbled. He couldn't hear his own voice. He felt as if he was about to be sick.
"They're fucking stuck in traffic," Arthur continued, a sharp, hysterical laugh blowing against Merlin's neck. "But they'll be here. They have to be."
The car that skid to a stop a few feet away to a chorus of protesting horn honks behind was not one of theirs. The front passenger door opened, and a black suit stepped out, a gun close to the body, shielded from sight. He reached for and opened the rear doors.
"Gentlemen. Let's not make this more difficult than it already is."
They're at the bridge because it's a convenient pick-up spot -- presumably because Arthur knows that Merlin can't keep going. He's too badly injured. The team is trying to get to them, but they were separated. I sneaked a when in there, too -- the impeding rush hour.
By this point, I'll freely admit that I have not only lost track of every W and H question I was supposed to answer -- and usually, when that happens, that means I've set up the scene to my satisfaction, complete with a cliffhanger (sorry) to drag the reader in. There are more questions, of course, like, Who are these black suits? Why do they want with Arthur and Merlin? Where are they taking them? What are they going to do to them? When and How is Excalibur going to find them again?
Setting the scene -- any scene -- is, to me, asking a bunch of questions until you get the answer, but the more you answer, the more questions pop up. That's how an author keeps my attention -- by keeping the ball rolling, by answering the questions before I come up with them, or even dangling the answer in front of me in a tease to get me through to the end.
So there you go. That's how I do it -- for the most part. Like I said, not everyone works the same way and this technique might not work for you.
I'm a little (OK, a lot) behind on comments, and even worse on reading fics that have been posted in the last two weeks, because I pretty much shut down to do little else but write and edit to get part 8 up by the deadline that I set myself. My beta has gotten back to me with corrections and edits, but I'm having a hard time getting started for a variety of reasons that sound frighteningly like being burned out.
As much as I'd love to write a couple of LM Extras while I'm on vacation (admittedly, a very rare occurrence), writing anything is a little hard to do when the dogs are running around with the squeak toys that they got for Christmas. That's not the annoying part. It's that, by virtue of them being medium-sized dogs with long tails, I end up chasing after them and picking up everything they knock off the coffee tables, shelves, and DVD stand.
But they're cute, so I'll forgive them.
In other news, I've received a surprising (and flattering) number of very nice and very sweet PMs about the writing in LM. Some of those PMs are questions about the technical stuff of writing. So in the future, I am going to put up more posts like this one, starting with how to set the scene.
As a disclaimer, I am not an expert on writing, some things may not make sense, and I might contradict myself. But since I firmly believe that no one thing works for everyone all of the time, please feel free to chime in with your own approaches and tips!
Setting the scene is just what it sounds like -- establishing the important details like where, what, who, when, why, and maybe also the how. Those are the five W's and the H that get pounded into students in most English classes. The downside is that most English classes don't explain how to use them effectively in setting scenes. If I were to use the five W's and H's rule to describe a scene, it would come out like this:
Merlin and Arthur were on the bridge at five o'clock waiting for the car to arrive.
The who are Merlin and Arthur, the where is some bridge, the when is at five o'clock, the what (as in what are they doing) is that they're waiting, the why is that a car is supposed to arrive.
In that description, there is no how. The how is the forgotten middle child who gets away with murder and wanders off somewhere else to go meandering in the swamp only to come home later with frogs and snakes shoved in his pockets. Without the how, there's a lot of information that goes missing -- you need the frogs and snakes to make it interesting.
And, to be brutally fair, that so-called scene-setting sentence is BORING. It doesn't hook me, I wouldn't want to keep reading, and I'm pretty sure some of you would stare at me as if I'd grown a second head before dragging me off to the hospital to find out what was wrong.
What I'm going to do now, since I know the scene involves a bridge at five PM and a car, I'm going to rip that sentence apart and ask the right questions to put it in a better context.
Let's start with, how did Merlin and Arthur get to this mysterious bridge?
It was a wild scramble through the city streets, narrow alleys, and public buildings. Merlin yanked Arthur's arm and pulled them both down the carved stone stairs instead of a more convenient overland route. They raced along the narrow walkway, ignoring the hoots and catcalls from the tourists on the River Seine's cruise boats, and took the next set of stairs two and three at a time. Arthur grabbed Merlin's wrist and they joined the gaggle of pedestrians crossing the street, both of them craning their necks and looking around while trying not to be too obvious about it. They kept walking, their thighs burning, using the crowd as cover, diverting only when they reached the Pont Neuf, hurrying until they were almost at the other end.
We automatically know the who -- Merlin and Arthur. The how gave me tension, and I kept building on it by showing the mad race, the frantic way that Merlin guides Arthur to escape along a completely unexpected route -- and threw in some atmosphere to situate them -- the River Seine, the tour boats. Once they're at the other end, Arthur takes charge again, taking advantage of the tourist cover. They're both anxious -- they keep looking over their shoulders, and they're walking as fast as they can without attracting more attention. And, finally, we have our answer for where: they're on the bridge.
What happened to make them run?
If not for Gwaine, they wouldn't have known that the meeting point had been a trap. If not for Gwaine, they'd be dead now. They wouldn't have escaped from the building before it blew up. If not for Gwaine, they wouldn't have known about the black suits who'd come out of the arse-end of nowhere to chase them through the streets of Paris.
Arthur's grasp around his cell phone was white-knuckled with rage.
We have another who in here -- the mysterious people in black suits, and Gwaine, who had warned them in time.
Now, we're not going to know why they are being chased beyond the fact that they'd been set up, but we have more why questions that we can ask instead: why are they at the bridge? Why did they stop there? Why aren't they still running? Why isn't the team backing them up?
Where how is the oft-forgotten middle child, why is the two-year-old who wants to know everything, and very rarely never gets its questions answered, so I'm going to try my best to answer them all.
"We can't stay here. We're exposed," Merlin gasped. He leaned against the carved moulding, trying not to slip off and collapse in a heap. His vision was closing in, and the only thing he could focus on at the moment was Arthur. The dizzying speeds of Paris traffic, combined with the honking horns of an impeding rush hour, was making it hard to concentrate.
Or it could just be from the blood loss.
Arthur glanced at him briefly, nodded in sharp agreement, and brought his phone to his ear.
"Pont Neuf. How far away are you?" Arthur paced in place, smoothed down his suit, and straightened his tie one-handed. Every time he passed Merlin, his eyes would trail down to Merlin's limp arm and watch the way the blood dripped onto concrete. Merlin didn't want to look. He thought that if he did, he'd pass out.
And he might have, because the next thing Merlin knew, Arthur was supporting his weight and trying to subtly staunch the bullet wound.
"Come on, Merlin," Arthur said, his voice a frantic hush against Merlin's ear. "Just hold on a little longer. Perce is almost here."
"All right," Merlin mumbled. He couldn't hear his own voice. He felt as if he was about to be sick.
"They're fucking stuck in traffic," Arthur continued, a sharp, hysterical laugh blowing against Merlin's neck. "But they'll be here. They have to be."
The car that skid to a stop a few feet away to a chorus of protesting horn honks behind was not one of theirs. The front passenger door opened, and a black suit stepped out, a gun close to the body, shielded from sight. He reached for and opened the rear doors.
"Gentlemen. Let's not make this more difficult than it already is."
They're at the bridge because it's a convenient pick-up spot -- presumably because Arthur knows that Merlin can't keep going. He's too badly injured. The team is trying to get to them, but they were separated. I sneaked a when in there, too -- the impeding rush hour.
By this point, I'll freely admit that I have not only lost track of every W and H question I was supposed to answer -- and usually, when that happens, that means I've set up the scene to my satisfaction, complete with a cliffhanger (sorry) to drag the reader in. There are more questions, of course, like, Who are these black suits? Why do they want with Arthur and Merlin? Where are they taking them? What are they going to do to them? When and How is Excalibur going to find them again?
Setting the scene -- any scene -- is, to me, asking a bunch of questions until you get the answer, but the more you answer, the more questions pop up. That's how an author keeps my attention -- by keeping the ball rolling, by answering the questions before I come up with them, or even dangling the answer in front of me in a tease to get me through to the end.
So there you go. That's how I do it -- for the most part. Like I said, not everyone works the same way and this technique might not work for you.