Make A Scene (21 page)

Dramatic scenes are also great precursors to epiphany scenes, for now your protagonist will need to assess what has just happened to her, or because of her.

MELODRAMA

Now let's take a look at where you don't want your dramatic scenes to go— into the territory of melodrama. Author Charles Baxter writes in his book of essays,
Burning Down the House,
that melodramatic writing enacts a kind of "emotional violence against the reader." He goes on to say, "One often feels bullied in its presence, pushed around."

The reason for this bullied feeling is that melodrama contains over-the-top or excessive emotional intensity, or it shifts too quickly to be plausible. You'll recognize melodrama when the emotional content of a scene is so hot it is almost embarrassing, or so hollowly sentimental that the reader feels his intelligence has been insulted. Melodrama lacks nuance. It slams a feeling or a weak character or a theme into the reader's face without doing any deep, foundational work. In essence, melodrama
tells
—loudly, with explosions and screaming ladies—it does not show.

Less Is More: The Art of Subtlety

Have you ever seen a real gross-out, gory horror movie like
A Nightmare on Elm Street
or one of the new slasher films that seem to come out every year? The drama is all very in-your-face, with pretty young victims screaming bloody murder as they're sawed in half (for no apparent reason), and the mangled villain jumping out of the shadows with tools of violence (with no apparent motive). There is nothing subtle about that kind of horror. Subtlety—or cool emotions—goes a long way toward building drama.

In Vendela Vida's novel
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name,
protagonist Clarissa has undertaken a search for her mother, Olivia, who left her fourteen years before. In a powerful moment, shown in the scene below, Clarissa finally makes contact with her mother. There's plenty of opportunity for melodrama—an abandoned daughter has a lot to be angry about. But with so much at stake for the protagonist, Vida takes the quieter path:

"I have something to tell you," I said.

"Yes I know," she said. "You're my daughter."

I nodded.

"I knew the second you walked in the door," she said. The corners of her mouth turned upward. I believed she might hug me.

"I knew this might happen one day ... I thought it was Richard who would track me down. ..."

She traced a flower, transforming the line into a stem. "I don't have anything to say to him, and I don't have anything to say to you. If I had, I could have written you a letter."

The characters don't cry and fight and yell at each other. There is a delicate pause after the sentence "I believed she might hug me" in which no hug follows, and the reader suddenly knows what's going to come. Olivia is not about to stand up and become a loving mother. Clarissa is devastated, and the reader feels this devastation for her without any need for Clarissa to get emotionally loud. Her pain is evident in the silence, in the lack of tenderness from her mother. The reader can feel her grief in the previous paragraph, and in her actions that follow, without any need for melodrama.

With subtlety, you let the reader figure certain things out for himself. You let the impact of information hit in its own time, without ramming it down the reader's throat. You deliver hints and images, rather than swooning ladies and strutting saviors.

The Traits of Melodrama

Believe it or not, you can still have wild situations with large and exciting actions and not go sliding off into melodrama. The most common traits of melodrama are:

• Sentimentality.
Think of the kinds of sentiments written in greeting cards for lovers. Think of cliche, trite, or corny dialogue. "'You are my everything,' he said passionately to her." "'The Earth wouldn't turn if I couldn't be with you,' she said to him."

• Hysterics.
Think crying, screaming, arguing that gets too loud, too emotional, or too angry. Allowing hysterics to go on for too long is a sure-fire way to lose your readers.

• Grand or unrealistic gestures.
These are often found at the end of sappy romance movies, in which the changed man arranges for something utterly implausible, like hiring a famous football team to serenade his love. Big gestures may work for Hollywood, but they rarely fly in writing.

• Affected speech.
Be careful that your characters don't sound like divas and English barons (unless they are), dropping phrases that real people wouldn't likely utter. Often what seems melodramatic in a character is just a bad affectation, or poorly crafted dialogue.

• Knee-jerk reactions.
When a character changes his mind or behavior too suddenly, flip-flopping from meek to brave, from kind to villainous, the scene can read as melodrama.

• Descriptor overload.
On the technical level, remember that an overuse of adverbs or adjectives can often lead to a feeling of melodrama. Often just cutting them away will solve the problem.

How to Cut Melodrama

The kindest thing you can do for your writing—and the reader—is to cut the heart right out of your melodramatic passages using these techniques:

• Check the emotional intensity.
Your first order of business is to go through your scenes looking specifically at the emotional content. Are people fist-fighting and launching soap-opera style accusations at each other? Are lovers a little too profuse in their expressions? Are your characters saying too much about their feelings rather than demonstrating them? Try to take the temperature of the emotional content of a scene. If it feels too hot, bring it down.

• Retool dialogue.
Go over your dialogue with the finest-tooth comb around, read it aloud—heck, read it to someone else—until it sounds like things people might actually say to each other (dialogue can still be stylized, but it should not make the reader want to gag or feel insulted).

• Smooth out character behavior.
Take the diva or the preening prince out of your characters. Get to know who they really are so that their behavior stems from true motivations, not affected or empty behavior.

• Ground gestures in reality.
Your characters can be bold and passionate, but think twice about having them do things that are too implausible or over the top if you want them to be believed.

• Equalize characters.
Try not to make one character so much larger than life that he seems out of proportion to the others. Villains often get very colorful in first drafts, since villainy is so much fun to write. But if your bad guy outshines your good guy in his speech and behavior, the scene will feel off kilter, and the reader will become confused about which character to pledge allegiance to.

DRAMATIC SCENE MUSE POINTS
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• Dramatic scenes should focus on characters' feelings.

• Drama should reach an emotional climax and drive the protagonist toward change.

•The focus should be on character relationships and interactions.

• Character reactions should be intense, but not melodramatic.

• Dramatic scenes make for good precursors to epiphany and contemplative scenes.

Contemplation—the act of careful consideration or examination of thoughts and feelings and smaller details—is the antithesis of action. When a character contemplates, time slows down, or even disappears, and the scene zooms in tightly and intimately onto the character's perceptions. Outside of traditional literary fiction, contemplative scenes tend to be used sparingly. However, as you'll see throughout this chapter, for some genres and styles contemplative scenes play a crucial role.

A well-crafted contemplative scene typically:

• Has a higher percentage of interior monologue (thought) than action or dialogue

• Moves at a slower pace to allow the reader to get a deeper, more intimate look into the protagonist's inner life

• Shows the protagonist interacting with himself and the setting more than with other characters

•Allows the protagonist time to digest actions, events, and epiphanies that have come before, and to decide how to act next

• Gives pause before or after an intense scene so that the character can reflect and the reader can catch her breath

A contemplative scene rarely acts as an opening scene. Such scenes also tend not to appear too soon in a narrative, as they work best following plot events and dramatic interactions that are worthy of being digested or reflected upon. Too many of these scenes in a row create a sense of drag, and so scenes that involve some action should be interspersed among contemplative scenes. Contemplative scenes contain more thoughts, considerations, and reflections on events than actions.