I have an MFA and have never heard of scene and sequel! In general, I hate rules and their related terminologies. I suppose they can be useful sometimes in a kind of "building blocks" way (and experimentation through exercises can be good for growth), but when people take them too literally or as universal truths or try to force their narratives to satisfy the rules, I start to get itchy. My advice is to take what's useful from your class and disregard the rest. And read read read read read! Then listen to your own voice.
Yes! I am about to do a rewrite of my SF Short Story Contest entry using the scene & sequel method, for precisely this reason. The story just isn't very good. There are some interesting moments and some intriguing ideas but they aren't assembled well. The story has serious structure problems. I'm hoping a dose of scene & sequel helps give the story some shape and a sense of pace.
This has been an interesting thread to follow -- thanks for all the responses. I still haven't done my assignment yet. What we're learning is that you can skip some steps in the process as needed (as long as they are implied) but you should never go out of order. Now, that is ridiculous. So, basically, thoughts must ALWAYS follow emotions, etc. Certainly I'm not grasping it 100% just yet, (as I gave up trying and am just simply trying to write freely right now) but what I can tell is that writing a whole novel this way would be a tedious process and you wouldn't end up with a great read (as Show mentioned). Jazzabel, thanks for your insight. I think these are good concepts to understand and use as needed but to use them like a writing bible -- not so great. In the long run I'm probably better for knowing them even if I don't consciously implement them. Georgia
Yay, another young adult writer! Seriously, though, that class is going to help you LOADS. The best way to figure it out is just to keep writing. 70,000 words is an accomplishment! I don't want to scare you off, but I wrote two full novels (both about 100,000 words) before I started to see significant growth in my work. So just keep at it! If you want some tips and pointers and stuff I learned specific to YA stuff, feel free to PM/email me, as that's most of what I write.
I can't tell you how glad I was to read this. While I have written a lot of other things, I am new to writing fiction novels. Before starting, I did a lot of research on the "proper" way to write a novel. I found a lot of information online that praises the 'Scene & Sequel' format. But every time I try to think about the structure of my story, I start to stress out. My hope was that I could just write it out the way it is in my head and then go back and edit it with this structure in mind. However, your concept of actor/goal/motivation/opposition is so much easier to understand! Thank you so much! I feel better now.
Even a book I read (about writing, bear with me, but it was a long time ago ) talked about scenes and sequels. I found it interesting but it's kind of impossible to think in these terms while writing. I think it's something for the revision stage, because during your creative flow you cannot expect to be bothered with stuff like that. The book I read was techniques of the selling writer (by dwight swain) and I very much enjoyed that book. it does break writing down to pieces, but it helps understand the "mechanics of writing", (although I dislike that term) how it's built and why. hopefully once you learned that you won't have to stop and think about it all the time.
I have what I think is a neat idea (though it's been done, I know) for a vignette / short story: Character A has a recurring dream / flashbacks to some event that seems innocuous. Meets Character B who is able to trigger a slight change in the dream / flashback. Over the next several (as in more than 3) times it recurs, Character A notices it's changing, and eventually something important is revealed to Character B through the final "true/real" version of Character A's (now realized) memory. The issue is how to change the recurring flashback subtly and slowly without having to go through it too many times for the reader to get way bored?
Rather vague... but there's always a slightly different way of saying the same thing. For example, "I always go to the pier." becomes "I always went to the pier." then "I rarely go to the pier." etc etc. Or "I could have gone."; "I would have gone."; "I should have gone." Anyway, something along that line. ??
Yeah, I tried to give a vague description because I haven't really formalized the narrative I want to tell, just the idea of a recurring dream that gets adjusted to reveal something important. The thing that would be repeating would probably be on the order of 2ish paragraphs, and I want the changes to be subtle differences each time.
This reminds me of that film, Groundhog Day. Maybe watching that movie would give you the clues you are seeking.
Also a TV show called "Daybreak"? These mechanics can work in movies and TV because the main character is reacting differently each time. However, to only change a few details in the dreams and repeat the paragraphs is going to make your readers skip to the action.
Thanks. As cold grave stated, I agree that this works well in TV/film. The particular thing I had thought of was an episode of Star Trek Next Gen. where they were caught in a temporal loop and they repeated things 3 or 4 times. It worked there because (a) each repeat was after a commercial break, and (b) because they could vary things like camera angle and other stuff (I remember watching the special features and the director was talking about that). But yeah, in narrative form ... not sure how to keep the interest.
Consentrating since i dont write in the computer having beside me on my desk it makes to hard to write a descend paragraph or two , but i found a solution so no problem
The hardest thing for any writer is to get the dialogue correct. But of course, everyone thinks their dialogue is just fine.
I have exactly the same problem as you, I have a huge issue with names. For me it is usually for two reasons, first, I derive a lot of inspiration from real life, especially with people, and often, my character (or a place) already has a name, which I can't use. Second reason is anxiety. I am perfectly comfortable with writing the story, but I'm plagued by the fear the name I chose is ridiculous or cliche or bad in some other way. And trust me, I have studied every single baby book and names site and mythology and despite no shortage of suggestions, I still have this problem in every single project I do. I believe this is an outer manifestation of insecurity, I bypassed the rest but it snuck through in the form of this fear. So at some point, when I decide I can no longer procrastinate, I just pick the name I like best and I keep writing. It's difficult but it hasn't kept me from writing some pretty decent stuff. I hope you can overcome it too.
I have no problem sitting down and writing a lot of content every day. The hard part is making every sentence good. I've noticed that in some of the works by great authors, every single sentence has a certain flair to it. No sentence is plain and every word seems to have been carefully chosen.
I think the biggest challenge for me is keeping my writing from being too technical. I do a lot of technical writing for my job, and I believe I'm pretty good at it. Writing fiction is a completely different skill. Sometimes I'll find myself approaching a novel in the same way I do a technical document, and it invariably fails.
I have trouble chaining events together to create a novel. Usually my writings will wind up being short stories after I'm fifteen pages in and realize I've already beat the dead horse of plot twists. Asides from that, it's finding time to actually write. My current schedule is 1 poem, 1 short story, and 3,000-5,000 words on a novel a day, I do the poems and short stories at school, and can sometimes find time in the evening to leisurely chock down 3,000 words. However, sometimes I only have a few hours in the evening, and have to assiduously type without even eating dinner.
There are a lot of things I find hard apparently. I'd forgotten most of them until I read through this thread! I can't come up with titles for my life. I am so lazy. I can only write when I'm at work. I never get anything done at home... Sometimes I have problems coming up with names (there's one character in my main project that I've renamed three times, only because I haven't come up with a new name for him yet). Awesome (and everyone else with name troubles), I might have a helpful suggestion for you. In my current project (a high fantasy novel), I picked naming schemes for each country. That gives me guidelines to follow in generating names when I need them. I also reuse names among minor characters because people generally do not have unique names in real life. For example, though, one country uses a lot of hard consonants. In the northern part, there's a lot of what I consider sharp consonants, like K and V (giving it an almost Russian feel). In the southern part, there's less emphasis on the sharp consonants but I do still lean heavily on consonants. I also determined that their language was very Japanese hundreds of years ago before it became assimilated into another language so older names are sets of consonant-vowel pairings. I'm not sure how helpful this has become now...
Sitting down and starting is the main one for me. Also i have a problem with narrative flow. Im always jumping large periods of time because i have no idea how to transition between scenes.
I have trouble describing buildings and landscapes. Also, I don't seem to be as capable now of writing action scenes as I used to be. Not sure why that is.
I have an incredibly hard time in turning my analytical mind/editor off. It's not so bad that I can't finish rough drafts, but it's enough to frustrate me and make constructing sentences feel more like a chore than anything fun.
I have a hard time thinking of stories that I feel aren't someone else's idea. I realize that every story has been told, but I remember something with the same general plot, and I feel like I'm just changing the setting sometimes. It gets frustrating trying to start from scratch.
Expressing character emotions/personality and also expressing what you want the story to convey, properly.
