My office temping jobs instilled in me a mania for keeping things organised - at least as far as work is concerned. I like my bookshelves to be neat, my filing cabinet to be segregated and to know where I'm up to with any specific task. I don't know why it's taken me so long to create the two things I've completed in the last week considering the spreadsheet madness that has taken over my life since I started my PhD but these are two things I'm now using in my writing life:
Scene Analysis Spreadsheet
I'm fairly sure that I saw this idea on someone else's blog (and would credit if I could remember, honestly). I've gone through the latest draft of the first novel I completed. This is the one I completed for NaNoWriMo 2009 and which has undergone major changes since then. Nevertheless, I looked at it and knew there was still something missing. So I created a spreadsheet with the following categories to break each scene down into the sum of its parts and see exactly where I was:
Chapter
Scene Number
Scene Description
Scene Type
Characters
Location
Day/Time
Protagonist's Goal
Protagonist's Motivation
Protagonist's Complication
Outcome/How Does Scene Affect Growth?
I'm using the exceptional book Make a Scene by Jordan E. Rosenfield to help me with the breakdowns and see whether each individual scene works. I've got thirty one chapters and eighty-five scenes to work with. The novel needs a lot of work but collapsing it into individual units to be assessed may make it seem less intimidating. I am, however, happy with the overall story and structure. That only took two years!
The Book of Ideas
Again, I know I borrowed this from someone else but I can't recall who. I've taken a huge notebook, about three hundred pages, and have listed all the current projects and ideas I have with notes detailing where I'm at with each of them. Each project has a whole page to itself, meaning I've got plenty of space to fill up with details later. It looks quite empty at the moment but I'm hoping that'll change. There are three things on each page - 'Subject', 'Format' and 'To Date'. What's intriguing - for me, anyway - is the breakdown I've currently got in different formats:
Prose (novel) - 11
Prose (short story) - 28
Script (play) - 2
Script (television drama) - 4
Script (radio drama) - 2
Script (film) - 1
Script (musical) - 1
Script (unsure) - 1
Unsure - 5
As you can tell, I have too many ideas! Documenting them like this will help me keep track of them and encourage me to work on the ideas I've already got instead of dreaming up new ones all the time. Well, that's the theory...
Showing posts with label scenes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scenes. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Settings of Your Scenes
I think the knowledge that your setting for any piece of fiction needs to be more than incidental is drummed into our heads enough.
Setting equals a realistic experience for the audience, drawing on the setting can lead to a richer experience... Yes, yes, yes, we know all that. The trouble for me at least is remembering that setting doesn't have to be an overarching thing. It can - and should - be utilised on a scene by scene basis. Make sure you have a reason for setting your scene in a given location. Does the location add to it, complicate it, or is it merely decoration?
My current project takes place in a small Lancashire town. That's the main setting. Within it there are a couple of core places where the bulk of events take place: a storage facility on an industrial estate, a bar and a cottage. These are - I hope!- sufficiently well-described and utilised and I know precisely why I set certain scenes in those locations.
But on several occasions I take my characters out of their element. Two such instances are a park scene and an unfamiliar pub scene. I picked the park because, dare I say it, I thought it sounded pretty for the kind of deep and meaningful my characters were due to have. That's all well and good but I used it only as a backdrop. In my first draft I expected the reader to fix on their idea of a park and that'd be it. Fair enough, most people have an image of a park in their heads. Yet there was more to do with the scene. By picking an aspect of the park and underlining it I tied the location to the thought-processes of the characters. Suddenly the setting was a participant in the scene.
As for the pub scene... well, that needs more work. It's an unfamiliar environment, something we writers should relish exploring. My protagonist has more of an opinion than she's expressing, I know that much. I just have to coax it out of her.
A couple of questions to ask if you think your setting is nothing but a backdrop:
1. Can you easily pick up the majority of the action and dialogue and shift it to another location? If you can then the setting probably doesn't influence the scene at all.
2. Does your chosen setting impact the characters at all? For maximum effect, does it take them out of their comfort zone and, if so, have you exploited that?
3. Are you relying too much on certain locations: could you mix it up a little?
Setting equals a realistic experience for the audience, drawing on the setting can lead to a richer experience... Yes, yes, yes, we know all that. The trouble for me at least is remembering that setting doesn't have to be an overarching thing. It can - and should - be utilised on a scene by scene basis. Make sure you have a reason for setting your scene in a given location. Does the location add to it, complicate it, or is it merely decoration?
My current project takes place in a small Lancashire town. That's the main setting. Within it there are a couple of core places where the bulk of events take place: a storage facility on an industrial estate, a bar and a cottage. These are - I hope!- sufficiently well-described and utilised and I know precisely why I set certain scenes in those locations.
But on several occasions I take my characters out of their element. Two such instances are a park scene and an unfamiliar pub scene. I picked the park because, dare I say it, I thought it sounded pretty for the kind of deep and meaningful my characters were due to have. That's all well and good but I used it only as a backdrop. In my first draft I expected the reader to fix on their idea of a park and that'd be it. Fair enough, most people have an image of a park in their heads. Yet there was more to do with the scene. By picking an aspect of the park and underlining it I tied the location to the thought-processes of the characters. Suddenly the setting was a participant in the scene.
As for the pub scene... well, that needs more work. It's an unfamiliar environment, something we writers should relish exploring. My protagonist has more of an opinion than she's expressing, I know that much. I just have to coax it out of her.
A couple of questions to ask if you think your setting is nothing but a backdrop:
1. Can you easily pick up the majority of the action and dialogue and shift it to another location? If you can then the setting probably doesn't influence the scene at all.
2. Does your chosen setting impact the characters at all? For maximum effect, does it take them out of their comfort zone and, if so, have you exploited that?
3. Are you relying too much on certain locations: could you mix it up a little?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)