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When do you accept the invitation to step into the water, to begin the process of swimming that will take you into the unknown territory of a new story? The invitation can come at any time or place. You might be standing in the shower rinsing your hair or getting into bed or folding laundry after dinner and, as you reach into the laundry basket for another napkin to fold, the invitation strikes

I'm posting some of my older comics here as I catalog and tag them in prep for a print book compilation. You can also find my comics for writers on Tumblr and Pinterest.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, you’ll be starting at midnight tonight or first thing in the morning. You’ll be opening your story with a great scene, right?



Here are resources for those first lines, opening chapters of your novel.

1. 10 Opening Line Strategies, illustrated with the top 100 opening lines of novels.
2. 4 Goals of Opening Chapters
3. 5 Ways Openings Go Wrong
4. Backstory’s Emotional Weight, or Where Do I Put the Emotional Backstory if It Doesn’t Belong in the First Chapter–Which it Doesn’t
5. 4 Ways to Deal with Narrative Summary, Or How to Deal with Another Common Opening Chapter Mistake
6. Still trying to decide on the POV for your novel? 5 Questions About First Person POV
7. Round-up of Links for Opening Chapters
8. Prophetic Openings: Foreshadowing the Story’s Ending in it’s Beginning
9. Improve Your Weak Opening. No, you’re not revising yet, but read this one to see what to avoid.

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.

“Ayn Rand man, I would like to apologize for a few things. To begin with, I am sorry that I did not state in simpler words, when you asked why Ayn Rand was shelved in the fiction section instead of the philosophy section, that the Fountainhead is a novel.” from best of craigslist, via library_mofo.

One of the largest challenges with serving “the public” is that you’re answerable to the public for your decisions. So when a conservative think tank issues a report that says your libraries are full of extremist literature and you reply that you’re trying to achieve a balanced collection, how do you think people are going to respond? This news story reminds me of this post to the library_mofo group on LiveJournal (sorry, if you’re not a member of the group you won’t be able to read it, but membership is free) where a newly minted MLIS grad starts a job in a Catholic school library and has to figure out what to do with the well-meaning but seemingly inappropriate donations (hate speech, graphic anti-abortion flyers) she receives from library patrons. If you’re seeing that the connection is having a good collection development policy and effective communication with the media and your library administration, you’re most of the way there. In the work I do over at MetaFilter, our last resort to people unhappy with policies is to tell them “well perhaps this isn’t the right community for you, you are welcome to leave at any time” but this is a much stickier issue in a public library, even though we do see libraries doing this from time to time. [thanks eoin]