Make A Scene (27 page)

In William Golding's revered novel
Lord of the Flies,
the entire student population of a boys' school is shipwrecked on an island, and the boys must fend for themselves without any adult rules. In the following scene, the boys have splintered off into two factions: Those who follow the rough, violence-prone Jack, who acts more like a little dictator, and those who follow the gentler, consensus-minded Ralph.

Before the following excerpt, which takes place about two-thirds of the way through the book, Jack and Ralph have been butting heads more and more. Jack is tired of doing things civilly—he wants to take control and his desire for dominance infects the entire group of boys. Jack has figured out how to kill for meat, and this alone wins more boys over to him, inflating his already out-of-control sense of power. Now that he knows he can kill food, he realizes that he has a kind of leverage over the group that Ralph does not. He starts the boys in nothing more than a boyish ritual to show off their dominance, but it quickly descends into a frenzy of violence.

Jack leapt up on the sand.

"Do our dance! Come on! Dance!"

He ran stumbling through the thick sand to the open space of rock beyond the fire. Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of firewood. A circling movement developed and a chant. While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.

"Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!"

Caught up in the energy of the dance, the boys react by killing their classmate, Simon:

The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit tore.

Ralph is the only one whose conscience is troubled the next day. His only true remaining friend, Piggy, tries to assuage him saying they were scared, but Ralph knows better.

"It was dark. There was that—that bloody dance. There was lightning and thunder and rain. We was scared!"

"I wasn't scared," said Ralph slowly, "I was — I don't know what I was."

Ralph is changed. He knows now that every boy has within him the potential to be both bad and good, and that the hallmark of maturity is learning to choose the right path.

When you write an action scene, consider how you can challenge your protagonist to discover something unexpected about himself that he wouldn't necessarily know through his intellect. All people have instincts, but not many get the opportunity to act on them, so think about how, through actions, you can let your protagonist access his instincts.

In terms of plot, it's also good to have your character engage in actions that he can't take back so that you create new consequences for him to deal with. If your character, who has a fear of looking foolish, engages in the action of riding a horse for the very first time without telling anyone he's a novice, that's not very dramatic and has little room for conflict. But if that same character rides a horse for the first time and takes it down a forbidden path where the horse breaks a leg and must be put down—that can't be taken back, and it comes with consequences.

ENDING AN ACTION SCENE

There are multiple ways to end an action scene, and we'll look at several strong ways to do so in a moment, but no matter which way you select, an action scene's end should convey the following:

•That your protagonist's life has been altered by the action

•That the actions have created consequences the protagonist will have to deal with in future scenes

Endings can fall into three essential categories: those that slow down the pace and offer room for reflection; those that jack up the tension and suspense and leave the scene on a high note of anxiety that forces the reader to press on; and those that come with big revelations that will change your protagonist or the plot (or both).

Slow-Down Endings

After all that action, you may choose to close your scene with a quieter, slower pace to gives the reader an opportunity to breathe. Use exposition or reflection to bring the pace down for a feeling of conclusion. Notice how Neal Stephenson does it at the end of the
Snow Crash
scene. The protagonist—"the Deliverator," whose name is Hiro—did not, in fact, make his delivery, and he must now flee from the scene of his car crash—in a residential neighbor-hood—for his life. Stephenson uses exposition to bring the pace down, but he leaves the reader with an image that foreshadows how things are likely to get worse for Hiro.

Dad is emerging from the back door pulling on a jacket. It is a nice family, a safe family in a house full of light, like the family he was part of until thirty seconds ago.

When you taper an action scene to a quiet close, you still want to leave the reader with the feeling that your protagonist will suffer consequences for the actions in the scene. Even though this is not a typical cliffhanger, because the danger Hiro is in isn't immediate, it leaves the feeling of trouble on the horizon. You can use a foreshadowing image like Stephenson did, or you can allow your protagonist to have a thought or feeling in a brief moment of narrative summary.

Cliffhanger or Suspense Endings

If you want to keep the action alive at the end of the scene so that the reader must keep reading on to the next scene, do not conclude the action of the scene, but bring it to a place where it can hang—that is to say, where the action hasn't concluded or run its course. At the end of the scene from
And Now You Can Go,
Ellis's attacker is gagged and held captive in the elevator by her two friends—one who is holding a gun—who are begging her to identify him so they can beat him up.

I hear a bang. At first I think the gun's been fired.

"Jesus," Sarah says. She's been standing next to me, and now she grabs my elbow and thrusts her chin in the direction of the glass door to the lobby. The door is locked after 11
P.M.
But the representative of the world is standing outside, in his green coat, knocking. He points to me. "Sorry about Melissa," he mouths. I try to wave him away. He presses his walnut-colored face to the glass and sees the ROTC boy and G.P. holding the man. He knocks on the glass door with a gloved hand. Then he takes off his glove and knocks harder, with his knuckles.

"Should I get rid of that guy?" Danny says, nodding toward the door. I hear a grunt. The ROTC boy has punched the man from the park in the stomach.

"Should I get rid of him?" Danny says again, thumbing toward the representative.

"Fucking freak," the ROTC boy says, looking at the door.

Now, even though they do punch the guy once—you might argue that's the action—it's only a test punch. The real pummeling they want to give the guy rests on whatever Ellis says. If she says it's him, the reader is pretty sure they'll beat him within an inch of his life, or worse—they do have a gun after all. But Ellis tells them to let him go, unwilling to perpetrate more violence, and the scene ends before the reader knows what happens:

No one knows what to do next. The elevator has stopped on the sixth floor. The only thing moving is the man's gagged mouth. "Please," I say. "It's not him. Let him go."

The cliffhanger or suspense ending requires only that you delay the conclusion of the action. It's that simple. It works best when you leave the scene literally in the middle of an action; or, if you use some narrative summary, that it reinforces a feeling of tension or drama about to unfold. This moment also shows the reader how Ellis has gone from a person who wanted revenge, who liked the idea of letting this man get his comeuppance, to someone who feels she does not want to be responsible for perpetuating more violence.

Revelation Endings

When you want to convey that your protagonist is changed at the end of an action scene, a revelation ending is a powerful way to do so, and in the process, to set the stage for the next scene. In a revelation ending, you wait until the very final moments of the scene to reveal—to the reader and protagonist both—what the consequences of the action are. In the
Lord of the Flies
scene, the reader finally understands what happened in the wild dance where the boys were shouting "Kill the beast" at the end of the scene. The beast was, in fact, their classmate Simon:

The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water

lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself

a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body

moved out toward the open sea.

Harking back to Ralph's earlier comment, in which he says that he wasn't scared, the reader sees that Ralph knew that he'd participated in something awful. What is revealed is that Ralph is the only character with a conscience.

Since action scenes don't leave much room for emotions, you can drop a powerful emotional note through a revelation in that final paragraph or page that will leave the reader reeling, or convey what will be at stake for the protagonist in the next scene. A revelation can come in a moment of reflection, an exchange of dialogue, a description of the carnage after a riot, etc. A revelation can take almost any form—but if you choose to use it, it should carry emotional significance for your protagonist.

ACTION SCENE MUSE POINTS
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•The protagonist's focus is on reaction—instinct before intellect.

•Action involves physical movement that conveys a sense of time.

•Action scenes have less need for reflective or emotional content.

•The protagonist and his plot should be changed by the action.

•The actions should have consequences for future scenes.

Beneath any narrative runs a deep seam of history, facts, and reasons that inform your characters' lives, motivations, the plot, and much more. This rich seam is referred to as backstory, and is so named because it takes place behind or before the front of your plot, whose sequence of events is of the most interest to the reader. The front plot, or frontstory, begins the moment of your significant situation. If your protagonist finds his wife murdered on a Wednesday afternoon, 2001, then anything that came before that moment is backstory.

Backstory is most effective when used in the form of a flashback scene, because then it can be made vivid and allow the reader to participate in it; otherwise, it might drag the prose down to a crawl. A flashback scene still contains all the elements of a scene—setting, action, characters, plot information, dramatic tension—and differs from other kinds of scenes in only one major way: It takes place in the past.

Flashback scenes should:

• Focus on action, information, and character interactions

• Be lean on setting and sensory details, which slow down the pace

• Illustrate or explain a plot or character element in the frontstory

• Enrich the reader's understanding of the protagonist

Note that just because you
can
write flashback scenes does not mean that you should crowd your present-time narrative with them. Flashbacks, even done in the form of a scene, still draw the reader away from the frontstory and run the risk of distracting her. Use flashbacks judiciously, even sparingly. If you use them early in your narrative, be sure to keep them short and quickly paced. And, as in the upcoming example from Neil Gaiman, use them more to drop clues or plot information that will come to bear on the frontstory. You may want to drop one into a contemplative scene that has very little other action, or use one to heighten the tension in a suspense scene. I find that they can get in the way of a dramatic scene—which is all about character interactions in the present—so keep that in mind when writing flashbacks.

TRANSITIONING INTO THE PAST

A flashback is just another kind of scene, but it's important to consider how you transition into and out of one, seamlessly taking the reader from the present narrative into the past. Detours into the past must be constructed carefully if they are to hold the reader's attention and avoid becoming narratively dense. Here are some quick and easy tricks for transitioning: