Make A Scene (23 page)

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned; it is no match for my aunt, her rightness and her despair, her despairing of me and her despairing of herself. Whenever I take leave of my aunt after one of her serious talks, I have to find a girl.

Fifty minutes of waiting for Kate on the ocean wave and I am beside myself. What has happened to her? She has spoken to my aunt and kicked me out. There is nothing to do but call Sharon at the office. The little pagoda of aluminum and glass, standing in the neutral ground of Elysian Fields at the very heart of the uproar of a public zone, is trim and pretty on the outside but evil-smelling within. Turning slowly around, I take note of the rhymes in pencil and the sad cartoons of solitary lovers; the wire thrills and stops and thrills and in the interval there comes into my ear my own breath as if my very self stood beside me and would not speak. The phone does not answer. Has she quit?

Notice how this scene achieves the points laid out above. First, Binx grapples with his difficult feelings: He's torn between his desire for Kate, his aunt's disapproval, and his own tendency to use women as a distraction from his feelings. Second, he comes to a decision here, too, to call Sharon—he trusts her opinion and wants to run his feelings by someone who will not shame or scold him. Finally, his reactions, while they are emotional, are appropriate—here he finally has fallen in love with someone, with a history of suicidal tendencies, no less—and she hasn't shown up to meet him as she said she would. His fear and anxiety are getting the best of him.

When you slow things down to reveal thoughts and feelings in this kind of a narrative way, you want to be sure that your protagonist works out issues specific to plot events, and that he comes to a point of change or choice as a result. While people contemplate all kinds of things in real life, from the good to the downright dull, in fiction, musings about how great life is tend to get boring, fast. Save contemplation for where it is most needed—on that which is difficult.

DRAMATIC TENSION

In chapter seven we talked about giving your protagonist at least one new plot situation or piece of information to deal with in each scene, and a catalyst or antagonist to interact with. However, a contemplative scene is the one scene type where you're not obligated to do either of those things. What you
must
do, however, is find a way to keep dramatic tension alive without much action and with limited interaction with other characters. How do you do this?

• Include internal conflict.
The reason for a contemplative scene is to allow the characters and the reader to digest and make sense of complex decisions and actions that have taken place in the plot. So, whether your character is forced to have time to himself—through jail, kidnapping, or just waking up alone one morning—or feels the need to take that time to understand what has happened to him, the main criteria is that in the scene he actively struggles to come to terms with something, like Binx Bolling did. You want to show that there is struggle and fear and worry in your protagonist's mind. He should be thinking about his options and wondering what will happen. He should not know until the scene's end what he wants or needs to do next.

• Include unspecified danger.
An absence of action or other characters does not necessarily mean that a scene will feel relaxed. People can contemplate in dangerous situations too, so you can keep the tension alive by creating a sense of danger on the horizon or anxiety in the moment. Maybe your protagonist has been kidnapped, but the captors have left him alone for a few hours. Maybe a man's beloved wife has gone missing and you show him walking through his house, fingering her possessions, wondering what has happened to her and if she is okay.

• Create an eerie or tense atmosphere.
Use the setting to your advantage. We'll discuss this more in the next section, but consider how weather, physical geography, and objects can serve to create an uncomfortable and tense environment for your character to contemplate in. For example, if you want to create a tense contemplative scene, and you are considering whether to set it in the protagonist's sunny, cheerful backyard, or on the side of a road after his car has broken down, consider that the lonely road in the broken down car has far more potential for tension—that is, creating a sense of potential conflict or crisis for the protagonist.

For example, in Camille DeAngelis's novel
Mary Modern,
a blend of the literary and the fantastic, Lucy Morrigan, who is infertile and the daughter of a genetic scientist, is preparing to clone a child through the use of her grandmother's DNA and her own womb. As she searches for a clipping of her grandmother's hair, she ventures into the attic, where she finds the scrap of cloth that bears drops of her grandmother's blood. Through careful description, DeAngelis sets an eerie mood for the act that Lucy is contemplating:

Most attics are unpleasant places: cobwebs swaying in the breath of stale wind stirred up by the opening of the door, or perhaps a draft through a hole in the roof or a broken windowpane: the smells of mildew and dust and mothballs; the fear that any given thing you touch will fall to pieces in your hands. Even the natural oil on a clean fingertip leaves a stain on old wood. Why come here, why putter through all these material reminders of lives long since lived?

These careful details bring about a feeling of decay and decrepitude. As Lucy contemplates the illegal act of cloning her own kin, these setting and object details create a feeling of tension and foreboding, which causes the reader to worry about the consequences of Lucy's actions.

In a contemplative scene your setting details should act as mirrors for the emotional content of your character's contemplation. A despairing person might best contemplate suicide in a lonely setting—a deserted room, an empty hotel. A person contemplating a rash and violent act, in contrast, could be reflected in a loud, overwhelming setting, such as a carnival, or you might find objects in the setting that speak to a feeling of anger—a lit match or a line of marching red ants.

SETTING

Contemplation scenes rely heavily upon mood and ambiance. In some cases, setting might even be the reason your protagonist has so much time to think; for instance, a protagonist in prison, trapped in a cave, or making a long, slow journey will obviously have a little extra time on his hands to contemplate the state of his life. As your scene progresses, you have an opportunity to focus on the small details that often get passed over in dramatic or action-driven scenes. If your narrative is about a family tragedy, for instance, a contemplative scene should, through the specific setting details you choose, convey a sense of melancholy and sorrow through dark colors, low light, and any significant objects that can help to convey this mood.

More importantly though, since there is very little action in a contemplative scene, you can weave in setting details intermittently with interior monologue to give your protagonist something physical off of which to bounce his thoughts and feelings so that he isn't just sitting in a vacuum.

In this excerpt of a scene from the novel
Cold Mountain,
notice the careful attention Charles Frazier gives to setting details:

The women stood out in water to their calves, slapping the clothes against smooth stones and rinsing and wringing them, then draping them over nearby bushes to dry. Some talked and laughed, and others hummed snatches of song. They had their skirt tails caught up between their legs and tucked into their waistbands to keep them from the water. To Inman they looked like they were wearing the oriental pantaloons of the Zouave regiments, whose soldiers looked so strangely bright and festive scattered dead across a battlefield.

The use of details like "smooth stones" and the women's "skirt tails caught up between their legs" direct Inman's attention—they become focal points for his thoughts and distractions from his own discomfort—after all, the man has been walking for days. He's tired, dry, and dirty, with no other company than his own mind. His interaction with the setting (in this instance the women are essentially setting objects, since he only observes them, and does not interact with them) also reminds the reader of the central goal of the narrative—that he is walking back to one woman in spe-cific—the love he left behind for the war.

Focusing on specific setting details throughout a contemplative scene— and not just at the beginning, as we saw earlier in this chapter—not only creates a vivid atmosphere and mood, but also keeps the pace from slowing to an absolute drag. Contemplative scenes have far less action or character interaction to keep the reader engaged, remember. Here you can give the reader a chance to literally stop and smell the roses, or recoil at the stench of a battle scene, letting impression sink in and atmosphere build toward decisions that your protagonist will need to make.

ENDING A CONTEMPLATIVE SCENE

Since the pace of a contemplative scene is more like that of a gentle stream than of rushing rapids, when it comes time to end it, you will want to change the energy just slightly in preparation for the next scene.

After contemplation comes action. Once a character has had time to think and reflect, he will need to take some kind of action to get the plot moving forward again.

So, depending on the type of scene you intend to come next, here are some considerations for ending a contemplative scene on an up tempo, to build back toward action:

• End with an action cliffhanger.
After all that myopic thinking or paying careful attention to his surroundings, your protagonist may suddenly find himself backed into a corner, a gun at his neck, or a cliff at his back. Contemplative scenes often allow other characters to catch up to your protagonist—after all, he's just been sitting around thinking. A cliffhanger ending is great preparation for an action scene to follow.

• End with a moment of decision.
If your character has been grappling with a dilemma, the ending is a great place to show the reader that he has made a decision. You don't necessarily need to give away what the decision is, but you could, for instance, end a scene in which the protagonist has been debating whether to tell her husband she's been cheating, with her picking up the phone and dialing him; or a man might grab his gun, get in his car, or do something else decisive that lets the reader know something has been decided. The decision should, of course, relate to whatever issue the protagonist has been grappling with in that scene.

• End with a surprise.
Because contemplative scenes are so quiet and slow, the reader is not focused on the characters or events that are ostensibly taking place outside of the scene. This leaves room for all manner of surprises. While the character is sitting thinking, something outside of his control could happen, and the very end of a contemplative scene is a great place to drop such a surprise in.

• End with foreshadowing.
Since some contemplative scenes don't naturally lend themselves to action in the scene at hand, you can end the scene with a bit of foreshadowing that tells the reader there will be action, or dialogue, or some kind of pace-quickening, in the next scene.

Here's an example of the end of a contemplative scene from Jeffrey Eugen-ides' novel
The Virgin Suicides,
about a group of boys captivated by a family of sisters who all meet the same tragic fate as a result of their domineering parents. The contemplative scene ends with the boys reading from the diary of the youngest sister, Cecilia, which they have illicitly obtained:

Occasional references to this or that conspiracy crop up—the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial complex—but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think:
The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair
The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.

Cecilia was hospitalized for an attempted suicide before, so harking back to this drops a note of discord that tells us something is coming in the next scene. There is also an air of remembrance about the previous scene. As they recount the details of Cecilia's journey, they also remember her, setting up the readers for the next big action, when Cecilia succeeds at taking her own life:

Little is known of Cecilia's state of mind on the last day of her life. According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons.

The next scene opens with the harsh reality of Cecilia's fate, moving quickly from exposition into action as the boys revisit the last day of Cecilia's life.

No matter how you choose to end your contemplative scene, you want to keep in mind that you are setting up the next scene, and that action follows contemplation very nicely because it adds energy back to the equation of your narrative. You may choose to use your contemplative scene to lead your character toward change, toward action, toward drama or suspense to suit the demands of your plot. Rarely do you need two contemplative scenes back to back, however, as this may just slow your pace too much.