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Scene Quiz: From a Harvard Bar to Your Scenes

Yesterday, we talked about what you’d find if you dissected a good scene. Today, we’ll apply this information by studying a scene from the classic movie, Good Will Hunting. (Warning: Adult language) Then, you can apply it to your own scenes.

Watch this four minute scene and identify the following:

1. What happens in the beginning phase?
2. What happens in the middle phase?
3. What is the turning point or focal point of the story?
4. How does the scene end? In a disaster (tragedy), in success, or somewhere in between? At the end, what has changed for each character?
5. What is the setting for this scene? Why is this an appropriate scene for the action that happens?
6. What is the underlying emotions of this scene, the pulse, as Sandra Scofield calls it?
7. List at least 3 reasons why this is a necessary scene for this story.
8. What else do you notice about scenes by studying this film clip?

Repeat this analysis for each of the scenes in your novel.
If you want confirmation of your answers, or want to discuss the analysis, please leave a comment.

Anatomy of a Scene

If you dissect a scene, what do you find? Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer lays out a simple, yet insightful discussion of this concept and it’s usefulness to a novelist.

Here are the basics of a scene:

1. Event and Emotion: Something happens and it makes the reader feel something. We’ll say it again: novels are made up of external events, not interior thoughts and feelings. Yes, novels are distinguished by their ability to take a reader inside a character’s head and show us their thoughts and feelings. Yet, paradoxically, the scene is the solid framework of events to which the character reacts.




2. Function: Hey, why did you write this scene and include it in your novel exactly here? For example:
   • Character: character entrance, develop character’s qualities, build relationship, complicate relationship, argument, making up, romance, etc.
   • Plot: conflict, twist, surprise
   • Technical stuff: foreshadowing

   The question is always, do you need this scene, or could you skip it or just summarize it?

3. Structure: There should be a beginning, middle (including a turning point, or as Scofield describes it, a focal point), and end.
4. Pulse: This is the emotional content of the scene, the underlying emotions, whether expressed explicitly or implied.

I could spend pages explaining each of these, but a demo will work better. Tomorrow, we’ll look at a film clip and see if you can identify each of these in the clip.

Meanwhile, read Scofield. Her explanations are so good, you should get it directly from the master.

I dislike busy weeks, I really do, and the last couple have been among the busiest in quite some time. The good news is that I have dedicated myself to finishing a first draft of my novel before the year ends.

Can I do it? Yes.

Will I do it? That remains to be seen.

I've reached the climax of the story and I can see the end in sight, the problem is simply finding time to write these days. Overall I think it's a pretty solid first draft thus far. It's basically a fantasy story about some kids who end up in another world (which has been done a billion times) but I think how they get there, and what happens when they do are both different and interesting. While it's fantasy, at the same time it's a story about terrible father figures, family, fate, and faith (which is a bit strange seeing as I am by no means whatsoever a religious man) so it works on a few different levels.

Or maybe it doesn't, I don't know. Maybe it's total crap.

Anyway, crap or no crap I'm going to finish the thing before January 1st rolls around.

The sketch above is a very rough sort of outline of a possible book cover. (Really just an excuse to draw some of the characters.)

Early today we posted an article about health care reform by Lawrence J. Schneiderman, M.D, a Professor Emeritus at UCSD Medical School and Visiting Scholar in the Program in Medicine and Human Values at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. His new book, Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles, looks at end of life decisions from both the medical and philosophical perspectives and advises on how to best make tough decisions. In the excerpt below Schneiderman emphasizes the importance of communicating your end-of-life preferences.

One of my patients, Earl Adams (not his real name), an African-American in his late seventies, was afflicted with severe Parkinsonism. Not only could he no longer play the organ for Sunday church services, he could barely move and relied on his devoted wife for even the most basic needs. She got him out of bed in the morning, helped him to the toilet, bathed him, fed him, kept him upright during the day, and returned him to bed at night. So successful was she at these tasks that whenever she brought him to see me he was always clean-shaven and meticulously dressed, complete with jacket and tie. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The adverb is an endangered species in Modern English. One should neither wring one’s hands nor weep on hearing this news. In the course of the last thousand years, English has shed most of its ancient endings, so that one more loss does not matter. Some closely related Germanic languages have advanced even further. For example, in German, schnell is both “quick” and “quickly,” and gut means “good” and well,” even though wohl, a cognate of Engl. well, exists. Everybody, at least in American English, says: “Do it real quick.” Outside that phrase, which has become an idiom, adverbs are fine: he is really quick and does everything quickly. During his visit to Minneapolis after the collapse of the bridge, President Bush said: “We want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible.” This is not a Bushism: few people would have used quickly here despite the fact that my computer highlighted the word and suggested the form with -ly. (more…)

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