I try so hard to do this, and it never works. My brain doesn't naturally turn pictures into words. So I have to look for other methods (tricks), like thinking of the setting as a living thing.
It's the same with me. I can picture the setting and the events perfectly but I can't turn it into words very well. I start putting in way too much detail and end up describing the wrong things. I've found a minamilistic approach works out better for me in the end. I am still having a lot of trouble mastering this, but it seems like the right direction and hopefully leaves more for my readers to imagine.
This is one of the many circumstances where "write what you know," comes in handy. If I had to write a story that took place in a jungle, there's a good chance it would turn out awkward.
That's a huge problem for me as well. I'd like more sensory detail, but I also want a publishable word count.
I feel you should write to your strengths, at least in your first draft. If you feel dialogue is your strength, and writing it gets your story out on 'paper' or the electronic equivalent, then just go for it. THEN when you're all finished, put the thing aside for a good long while. I feel this is a step many writers struggle with. If you don't give yourself a long-enough break from the original writing, you end up tinkering and not actually seeing the big picture. You remain overly fond of your writing, and won't see its flaws ...yet. When you do come back to it with fresh eyes, you will see that a lot of your dialogue is unnecessary. (Endless pages of 'banter,' etc, or too much restatement of what has already been said.) You can then ruthlessly pare speech down to the crucial lines that move the story forward. Then you add in—as you suggested in a later post—enough details to make the scene come alive in place and time. You can do this very economically, often by breaking up your dialogue with action beats that contain a bit of character reaction to the location they're in. People who struggle to write dialogue will need to do the opposite. Maybe pare down repetitive or overly detailed descriptions of scenes, and focus hard on what the characters are actually saying and how their voices 'sound.' The trick is keeping your story moving forward without stalling, no matter what pace you've set or whatever your strengths are. It's hard to do that in a first draft.
I don't 'see the scene' my mind doesn't project an internal picture. All I care about, this stands for reading, writing, or even watching, is how something makes me feel. For me everything i write starts with one thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." I then take the following mad rant and edit out as much of the crazy and inane as i can. The product is as you see.
Not to argue, but I don't think the two are necessarily linked. I think some of the best detail can be sparsely written. A perfect example is screenplays. Tons can be packed into one or two lines. I prefer lean writing anyway. Elmore Leonard is a fave of mine.
Kind of a fine balance. I dislike overly detailed scene descriptions as I find them distracting. I like to throw in just enough description to engage the reader, let them imagine the rest. Unless there is a reason to do so, it is a very unusual scene. "Giant waves slowly rolling by like grey elephants," during a storm at sea, which got a lot of detail about the sounds, sight, feel of a sea-anchored sailing ship in a Force 7 gale. Or as the group passed through the Zhangye Danxia... Google it up to see the pictures, see why that scene was worth a detailed description. "like the gods had draped a multi-colored tapestry over the mountains, reds, greens, blues, yellow, vermillion..."." Otherwise. let the reader imagine it.
I think my many years doing screenplays is what developed this trait for me. It was SOP during those years, to actually induce, cultivate, that skill. Then as I switched over to 'novels' a few years ago I think I just brought that tendency along for the ride. In fact, I can't do it any other way. lol
Totally agree. Straightforward, clear, concise is best IMO. I wonder sometimes if the way writing is taught academically affects people's fiction style. Also, all those flowery descriptions you illustrated in your post remind me of a lit major swinging for the fence.
@Catrin Lewis, those are actually very good things you are doing. And my editor backs that up... where I had good, narrative, nicely adjectivized scene descriptions, she made me turn them into dialogue, seen through the POVs eyes (and ears/nose and throat, felt by his fingers). And yes, each POV will notice different things. You sound like you are doing all the right things!
As I've begun to write my novel, I find that narrative can be very self-indulgent, to go on and on. So I started this thread to find out how people write the narrative, the description, the scene, the behind-the-scene and all the stuff that a writer decides to put into the work because I want it to be good observation, but not pedantic or gratuitous.
You want your reader to be impressed with your story and your characters, not with you. Best thing to do, however, is to not research, but to write. Your first draft is a draft. You will make mistakes, but if you get the story down then you can go back and pick and choose your descriptions. For a first draft, having a good narrative description may not be a good writing style, but it is a good writing tool for yourself. It puts you in the setting, and that allows you to see what your characters see. On your first revision, you may, and probably will, take it out, but for the first draft it acts as scaffolding while you build your story.
I am working on a story that has a lot of changes. I'm not sure that it should be called scene change, but here is what I have: Daniel was committed for the night so he wrestled the coffee maker out of his motorhome and settled in for a long night. A wave of doubt or depression came over him. Emma’s out with her mom while he was still recovering from a bullet wound, and Fletcher was building sand castles in a rain storm. Sean had changed from a man in charge, to a wounded animal. Desperate to get something going before control punches his ticket. Out of this desperation he hired a professional assassin to finally eliminate the one guy that caused most of his troubles, Daniel. Meeting with Rusty a modestly dressed, flaming hot red head, Sean said, “This is the mark.” Showing her the pictures of Daniel. “This is Daniel Paxton.” “How do you want it done?” “I think with all that’s happened we should make it look like an accident.” “Sean, I don’t do accidents. What I meant was, where do you want the hit to happen, and is it a slow death or fast? That’s your options.” I go back and forth from the antag (Sean) to the MC (Daniel) quite a few times, so I came up with the 'bold' lead in from Tom Clancy. What is the best way to mark the change.
You usually divide scenes with a # on a new line, centralised. Do this every time the POV changes. Otherwise, it's just confusing. You might get away with not using # if you were writing third person omniscient, but you're clearly not, so...
You can use whichever method you like so long as the breaks are properly delineated. There's plenty of books that use a straight double space with no other markers, though that does cause some formatting issues in e-books. I prefer the double space and the bold because I hate the funny little # or ~ markers. It should be noted that most agents and editors do require the # marker or some derivation, so if you're going that route you might as well include them now. How the book looks upon publication in print or e-book is another matter, but the # is fairly standard for submission format.
I've never seen that done, although so long as the scene change is clear, I don't see any issues. In the end, if you're going for traditional publishing, you will have to format your book according to the agent's submission rules. So if you're worried, perhaps look up a few agents you might be interested in for the future and see what their formatting rules are. As Homer said above, I think a single # on its own line is pretty standard in the industry. I don't remember where I learnt this though, but it's how I do my scene breaks
I was reading the Skipping Sections During Writing thread and had a question about a problem that I'm struggling with now. Ideally, I'd be able to sit down, have an idea for a scene, bang the whole thing out in a new chapter/scene/document or whatever, and then get on with my day. However... This often isn't the case, I frequently find myself needing to go to the toilet, have lunch, or deal with some random person from Porlock, and when I return the scene is just laying there, like a [REDACTED] with duct tape over its mouth and chips shoved up its nose for too long, lifeless... I can't be the only one to have lost the beat, any suggestions for getting it back?
I remember a post somewhere where someone said they retyped the previous paragraph or two to get back into it. Don't know it that would work, but maybe?
I almost always leave scenes hanging when I stop, specifically because it's easier for me to pick up where I left off rather than starting a totally new scene. I tend to re-read the last page or so before starting, but for the most part I've either already planned what is coming up next or I've been thinking about it while I was away, at least to some extent. Coming into a writing session totally blind is usually a non-starter for me.
I tend to rewrite the opening, even if it looks just fine. By “rewrite” I mean that I change the facts, not just the words. For example, if the important part is a conversation and not the setting, I may suddenly change the opening from entering a restaurant and sitting at a table, to climbing down a slope to trespass on a private beach. Or something. I write from that new opening for a while, and I’ll often find that I can not only graft into much of the previously existing scene, but the point where I stopped before now feels new enough to resume. (If the important part is the setting and not the conversation, I’d change the conversation. If it’s both, a character may be distracted by a pebble in his shoe. I just somehow have to change something.)
My general method is to give up on trying to remember / get back into what I was doing before, and treat it as something new. Sometimes that means veering the scene in a direction I hadn't planned on necessarily going in (even if only for a moment to reorient myself), sometimes it means wiping what I'd written before and redoing it. Change something. Basically, if it's hard to pick from where I left off, I apply the Fuck It Adjustment and don't pick it up from there at all.
