Let your reader's journey shape your story
Feel your way into the best telling of your story for your reader
As a writer, are you a planner? Then you might well have a story plotted out. Are you a ‘pantser’? Then you probably have a sense of where your story’s heading, but whether you’re a planner or a ‘panster’, let me ask you this: How do you actually shape a scene?
Would it help to know that there are four simple elements that can help you master this process?
When I’m working on a scene in a character’s story line, or writing about a situation in which two or more characters interact, I find these four simple elements invaluable. Want to know what they are? Well, let me tell you. And let me invite you to play with them. Play with speed of telling, with emotion, with suspense, and/or with surprise. None of these are genre specific. They work across any genre, fiction and nonfiction. All four are related to how you want to shape the reader’s story line. All of them are key to giving your reader a great experience.
There are four simple elements that can help you master the skill of writing a scene
and optimally shape the reader’s journey
If you want to take your reader on a rollercoaster ride of a journey, speed up the narrative for starters. If you want to take them through the scene at a leisurely pace, slow down the pace, point out features in the setting, delve deep into the psychology of the characters. With emotion, think both about what you want your reader to feel and about what is going on emotionally for your characters in your story. Rack up the tension for your reader by building up the suspense. Give them a hint of what’s coming up, but make them wait for it. Get them to bite their nails in anticipation. Shift the energy by using surprise. Make them jump out of their seat!
But first, what’s your starting point? Maybe you have an image in your mind. Maybe you can imagine your character at a particular point in time, in a particular setting, in a particular state, and you start from there. Maybe you are clear on your story structure and you are shaping a particular scene. Either way, you still have the challenge of setting the tone for the piece you’re writing. And that depends on how you want to shape the reader’s journey.
A slow development will hold the reader back. Show them round. Focus on the emotional quality of the scene. Take the opening of Camus’ The Guest (In Justin O’Brien’s translation):
The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse of the high, deserted plateau. From time to time the horse stumbled. Without hearing anything yet, he could see the breath issuing from the horses nostrils. One of the men, at least, knew the region. They were following the trail although it had disappeared days ago under a layer of dirty white snow. The schoolmaster calculated that it would take them half an hour to get onto the hill. It was cold; he went back into the school to get a sweater.
There’s quite a bit of tension there: the ‘abrupt rise’ which is coming up for the travellers, their ‘toiling … slow progress’, the ‘snow’, the ‘stones’, the ‘high, deserted plateau’. The terrain is rough; the climate harsh; the weather cold. You can visualise each element that adds to the tension for the reader and in each character’s story line by using a backward barb, one of the six basic visually intuitive symbols I use to scribe story structure and how it flows. It looks like this: ↽ . In Story and Structure, I map how story structures can expand and contract. It’s really useful to know that a ↽ step can expand to a ↽ ⇀ ↽ sequence (as happens in the schoolmaster’s story line when he feels cold, so he goes back to school and we assume gets the sweater. Meetings, by the way, including his meeting with the sweater which he will have to find before he can put it on, are scribed with a ↽ step). You can speed up your telling by condensing, as Camus did in his telling. You can slow it down by expanding, for example, by describing the interaction of the schoolmaster with the sweater. You don’t need to plan this. Simply embody it. Feel the flow of energy. Let it guide you.
It’s the same with emotions: positive ones make the reader feel more expansive: ⇀ . Negative ones make them feel more like they want to contract: ↽ . Different things will trigger different readers, but if you know your audience, you’ll know what appeals to them, and you’ll be able to shape their emotional journey effectively. In Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations, Mr. and Mrs. Dearly have just found out that their dogs, Pongo and Missis ‘were shortly to become parents. Puppies were due in a month’.
“Let us all go for a walk, to celebrate,” said Mr. Dearly, after hearing the good news. Nanny Cook said the dinner was well ahead, and Nanny Butler said she could do with a bit of exercise, so off they all set along the Outer Circle.
The Dearlys led the way, Mrs. Dearly very pretty in the green going-away suit from her trousseau, and Mr. Dearly in his old tweed jacket, which was known as his dog-walker. (Mr. Dearly wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had the kind of face you don’t get tired of.) Then came the Pongos, looking noble; they could both have become champions if Mr. Dearly had not felt that dog shows would bore them—and him. They had splendid heads, fine shoulders, strong legs, and straight tails. The spots on their bodies were jet-black and mostly the size of a two-shilling piece; they had smaller spots on their heads, legs, and tails. Their noses and eye-rims were black. Missis had a most winning expression. Pongo, though a dog born to command, had a twinkle in his eye. They walked side by side with great dignity, only putting the Dearlys on the leash to lead them over crossings. Nanny Cook (plump) in her white overall, and Nanny Butler (plumper) in a well-cut tail coat and trousers, plus dainty apron, completed the procession.
It was a beautiful September evening, windless, very peaceful. The park and the old, cream-painted houses facing it basked in the golden light of sunset. There were many sounds but no noises. The cries of playing children and the whir of London’s traffic seemed quieter than usual, as if softened by the evening’s gentleness. Birds were singing their last song of the day, and farther along the Circle, at the house where a great composer lived, someone was playing the piano.
“I shall always remember this happy walk,” said Mr. Dearly.
The idyllic quality of the passage brings calm, but it also helps to build tension and add suspense. After all, can anything this good realistically last forever?
Suspense is all about knowing where you’re going but not revealing that fact. Even better if you keep something about the journey secret. Imagine travelling down a corridor blindfolded. The corridor can’t go on forever, but what you’ll find at the end …
Surprise! ⇌ The huh?! moment. Those huh?! moments work best when they resolve (eventually - you can keep the reader guessing) into an aha! moment (symbolised by a parallel ⇌ event). You’ll find more about this in Story and Structure – particularly in the chapter on the Trickster Variation structure, the main feature of which being that one character surprises another.
Intuitively speaking, suspense works well with a slow build up; surprise often follows a passage in which the speed of the telling accelerates. Can you break those pairings and still make your scene work? How would you spin a story about the woman or violin in this picture? Could you spin the same story different ways?
Give it a try – map the moments of tension with ↽ steps. Every meeting is a potential for a moment of tension. Map the moments of release with ⇀ steps. For moments of surprise, use ⇌ steps and remember … for every ‘Huh?!’ ⇌ step there needs to be a balancing ‘Aha!’ ⇌ step. Let me know how you get on!
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