Developing a Scene remains the hardest part of teaching someone to write, of someone trying to learn to write. I’ve read others who are just of the opinion that “this can’t be taught – you’re a writer or your not”. I resist that line of thought, simply out of fairness. Everyone with a heart to write should write.
I’m just having a hard time staying true to that, because I’m seeing evidence this may be true after all.
Help me to disprove that. I need someone who is a terrible writer – you just can’t put two words together – and follow my lessons and writings over the next year. I’m setting up 2020’s blog posts almost like a one year writing course, with tips and assignments. Just follow the course and tell me by December 1 if what I shared helped you to beat NaNoWriMo once and for all!
The basics of writing are simple, and I’ll come back to this over and over again. A novel is a story of at least 50,000 words based upon the actions of a protagonist when confronted by a scenario.
If this was a college course, I’d repeat this, stomping my foot to let you know it was a test question. There’s some key words in there we’re going to explore – actions, protagonist, confrontation, scenario.
And certainly, we’re going to explore levels of interaction. I’ll introduce you to nested choices and decision trees.
Today we’re interested in one thing.
How do I take a scene (Jennifer finds the note) and make that happen?
You’ll have to make a number of decisions right at the outset.
Who: Jennifer
What: Your action (finds the note)
Where: your decision
When: your decision.
Why? This is the inciting incident, the one action that drives the rest of the novel. To answer this question is to dictate what your novel is about.
How? Your decision.
These six questions must be answered for you to write the scene.
This is how you develop an idea, a scene. I’ve got a system I use to write novels, and I’ve taken my readers through it time and again.This is the one area I haven’t really dealt with.
This is what you face as you write a scene. The novel has chosen for you who and what. Developing the scene needs to address the final steps.
When I write a novel, I usually have an idea something about who the protagonist is. We’ll talk more about this later, and I’ll explain some archetypes I’m drawn to using over and over again.
We’ll explore step one tomorrow!
