Making A Scene

Recently I had a friend reach out to me. He mentioned that he had a lot of stories inside him that he wanted to get out, but he just didn’t know how to go about it. It’s a complicated process—getting these living things that are bounding around in your head to live their lives on the page.
Having written for the majority of my life almost continuously with minor breaks here and there, and genre flipping and market jumping because my curiosity got the better of me, I learned an important lesson: Write scenes and experimentation only helps you grow.
There is a lot of work that goes into a story, or can go into a story far in advance of actually writing it. For nonfiction writers, this is basically the whole book, everything needs to be boiled down and condensed to understand the material and relate it to your audience in an easy to digest nugget, think about all the Idiot’s Guide books on all manners of topics.
Historical fiction and period pieces also require a Herculean amount of research just to make sure all those nifty details that you are including in the work are correct. For example, outside of alternative historical fiction, President Lincoln wouldn’t be listening to the radio because he ended up six feet under in 1865 and the radio wasn’t invented until much later, though the mathematical proof of wave propagation came about with Maxwell in 1864.
Even things that we might take for granted—wifi for the younger generation—We have to clarify and understand when they came about less we really want to mess things up. And even then we have to understand how they might affect our characters. If you’re writing a piece and they are just getting a radio, to continue the example, they would be amazed by it. I raise this point to get to another, namely, that looking into journal and newspaper articles and how people actually reacted to the invention of the radio can breathe a deep flushing life to your characters instead of them acting as though you might have grown up with the radio and never known a time without it.
I’m glad he reached out to me. I have a lot of knowledge to share on the craft of writing.
I remember when I was younger and took up photography. I used an analog system for the longest. I felt that it allowed me to create the truest image possible because I used real halide. But, and here is the true draw back for many, shooting film is expensive.
Writing a book and doing it off-cuff because you think that’s how it works is a total joke. When people start to write books, the failed abortions that are stuffed in the back of a draw or tossed into the trash are rightly so, shit.
Doesn’t mean the idea was totally bad, just the execution. You’re too green, which brings me back to my original topic, write scenes. Learn what actually works and how you can bend the rules. But learn those rules before you do.
No one likes a pretentious writer claiming that you the reader didn’t understand what they were saying because it happens to be too high of a bar for you to get. This is total bullshit. You understood the story. The story was crap, the idea was okay, but it ended up bogged down and lost any edge it might have had long ago. Write scenes. Write smarter, not harder… That’s your editor’s job. Write scenes and see what you have. Who knows you might just stumble upon a really kick ass idea and already have the basics out of the way. And don’t think of scenes as chapters. Scenes can be anything from chapter long actions to a four line packet of dialog that tells the reader a lot about the characters.
But keep on writing. Write scenes, write trash, write anything you can think of, but get it out.