I started to write my first novel-length manuscript five years ago. After two years I had written it and dismissed it as a failure. Not that I hadn’t learnt a lot from it – I had. Not that there wasn’t any good writing in it – there was. I had planned the thing out in a flimsy, meaningless way that was a bit like throwing mud at a wall to see what might stick. In the end none of it did and the finished manuscript was series of meandering tangents which I (incorrectly) thought of as ‘scenes.’ These were compiled into a lump of drifting prose that alternately lost its way, then found its way and finally plateaued and hurtled towards – not a climax exactly – but a finish nonetheless.

Then, I got a better idea for a story and I planned this one out in a slightly more organised fashion, but there was still a lot of mud sliding off walls and a lot of ‘scenes’ that did not turn on plot or plots that turned on vaguely formed characters who blinked absently under a reader’s headlights. That story, too, was abandoned after a couple of years of daily, dogged work and tides of research. This failure hurts more than I will admit, but I can’t do anything but move forward. I turned to another Idea For A Story but with a greater determination to plan with care and strategy.

Before writing, I began with research and quickly discovered that research is not a finish line: it is a horizon. I also wrote up character templates for my minor and major characters. Using Scrivener, I began the dully repetitive and ridiculously satisfying act of creating folders titled chapter 1 (etc.) and files within folders titled scene 1 (etc.) until I had 16 chapters and 40 scenes. Each chapter will have 5000 words, each scene 2000 words so this will roughly equate to an 80000-word manuscript. I allow two or three scenes to each chapter and although I use 2000 words per scene as a rough guide, I won’t get too hung up on that when I write the first draft. I wrote the first chapter and a few notes for scenes as they occurred to me just to try this story on for size and get a sense of character, but really, writing has not yet begun in earnest. I want the plan to be solid. Absolutely solid because I’ve been down this story cul-de-sac before and I can’t meet a dead end again without smashing my face into the wall.

I used the corkboard feature of Scrivener to detail the ‘5 Commandments of Storytelling’ for each chapter: Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. Once I had this as an overarching framework (basically I know what happens at the beginning and end of each chapter and what goes on in between) I did exactly the same for every scene within the chapter. Some days this felt tedious. It felt like I was procrastinating, like my previous experiences in writing my blood into books that died at the end of a pen, has made me too afraid to write. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I am grieving for the writer I wanted to be, and aren’t yet and perhaps all this relentless planning is me wallowing in that sadness. Perhaps. But on other days it was thrilling to plan a book without writing it yet. I sped through the plot. It was easy to make changes to the structure – the plot was in fragments, in short sentences that can be moved and massaged without the whole thing falling down.

I found that this planning phase allowed for creative flow even though the focus is not on the actual writing itself. If an image or a scrap of dialogue, occurs to me I write it in note form in the proper place – on the very scene when I imagine this event happening. Awareness allows instinct to take its breath when it needs to. Planning in this way is not as formulaic and stifling as it might seem.

This brings me to the essence of the blog: the anatomy of the scene. I had the five commandments of each scene planned out but I knew there was something incomplete about my understanding of a scene. A single chapter might form one of the walls of your story but the scenes are the bricks the whole thing is made from. I took down a book from my shelf at random: Brooklyn, by Colm Tobin. I flicked to a page at random and have reproduced it below to dissect what is happening at the macro and micro level of this story.

The weather grew cold and sometimes in the morning it was icy when the wind blew. She had read her law book twice and taken notes on it and bought a second book that Mr Rosenblum had recommended and it lay on her bedside table close to the alarm clock, which rang each morning at seven fifty-five just as Sheila Heffernan was starting her shower in the bathroom across the landing. What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night. She wrote to her mother and Rose and to Jack and the boys about it. The air was like toast, she said, even on winter mornings, and you had no fear when getting out of bed that your feet were going to freeze on the floor. And if you woke in the night with the wind outside howling, you could turn over happily in your warm bed. Her mother wrote back wondering how Mrs Kehoe could afford to keep the heating on all night, and Eilis replied to say that it was not just Mrs Kehoe, who was not in any way extravagant, it was everyone in America, they all kept their heating on all night.

As she began to buy Christmas presents to send to her mother and Rose, and Jack, Pat and Martin, checking how early she would have to post them so that they would arrive on time, she pondered on what Christmas Day would be like at Mrs Kehoe’s kitchen table; she wondered if each of the lodgers would exchange presents. In late November she received a formal letter from Father Flood asking her if she would, as a special Christmas favour for him, work in the parish hall on Christmas Day serving dinners to people who did not have anywhere else to go. He knew, he said, that it would be a great sacrifice for her to make.

She wrote back immediately to let him know that, as long as she was not working, she would not be spending Christmas in the house, but working for Father Flood.

‘Well, I wish you would take a few of the others with you,’ Mrs Kehoe said, ‘I won’t name them of anything but it’s the one day of the year I like a bit of peace. Indeed, I might end up presenting myself to you and Father Flood as a person in need. Just to get a bit of peace.’

‘I’m sure you would be very welcome, Mrs Kehoe,’ Eilis said, and then, having realised how offensive that remark might sound, added quickly as Mrs Kehoe glared at her: ‘But of course you’ll be needed here. And it’s nice to be in your own house for Christmas.’

‘I dread it, to be honest.’  Mrs Kehoe said. ‘And if it wasn’t for my religious convictions, I’d ignore it like the Jews do. In parts of Brooklyn, it could be any day of the week. I always think that’s why you get a biting cold on a Christmas Day, to remind you. And we’ll miss you now, for the dinner. I was looking forward to having a Wexford face.’

One day as she was walking to work crossing State Street, Eilis saw a man selling watches. She was early for work and so had time to linger at his stand. She knew nothing about types of watches but thought the prices were very low. She had enough money in her handbag to buy one for each of her brothers. Even if they already had watches – and she knew Martin wore her father’s watch – these could serve them if the old ones broke or had to be repaired, and they were from America, which might mean something in Birmingham, and they would be easy to package and cheap to send. In Loehmann’s one lunchtime she found beautiful angora wool cardigans that cost more than she had in mind but she came back the next day and bought one for her mother and one for Rose and wrapped them together with the nylon stockings she had bought in the sale and sent them to Ireland.

Slowly, Christmas decorations began to appear in the store and streets of Brooklyn. After supper, one Friday evening, when Mrs Kehoe had left the kitchen, Miss McAdam wondered when Mrs Kehoe would put up the decorations.

‘Last year she waited until the last minute, and that took all the good out of it,’ Miss McAdam said.

Patty and Diana were going to stay near Central Park, they said, with Patty’s sister and her children and have a real Christmas, with presents and visits to Santa Claus. Miss Keegan said that it was not really Christmas if you were not in your own house in Ireland, and she was going to be sad all day and there was no point in pretending that she wouldn’t be.

‘Do you know something,’ Sheila Heffernan interjected. ‘There’s n taste off American turkeys, even the one we had at Thanksgiving tasted of nothing except sawdust. It isn’t Mrs Kehoe’s fault, it’s the same all over America.’

‘All over America?’ Diana asked. ‘In every part?’ She and Patty began to laugh.

‘It’ll be quiet anyway,’ Sheila said pointedly, glancing in their direction. ‘We won’t have so much useless chatter.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t bet on that.’ Patty said. ‘We might come down the chimney to fill your stocking when you’re least expecting us, Sheila.’

Patty and Diana laughed again.

Eilis did not tell any of them what she was doing for Christmas; at breakfast one day the following week, however, it was clear that Mrs Kehoe had told them.

‘Oh God,’ Sheila said, ‘they take in every oul’ fella off the street. You’d never know what they’d have.’

‘I heard about it all right.’ Miss Keegan said. ‘They put funny hats on the down and outs and give them bottles of stout.’

‘You’re a saint Eilis,’ Patty said, ‘A living saint.’

At work Miss Fortini asked Eilis if she would stay on late in the evenings in the week before Christmas and she agreed, as the college had closed for two weeks’ holiday. She also agreed to work Christmas Eve up to the very last minute, since some of the other girls on the floor wanted to leave early to catch trains and buses and be with their families.

When she finished at Bartocci’s on Christmas Eve she went directly as arranged to the parish hall so that she could take instructions for the next day. Long tables were being carried in from a truck parked outside, followed by benches. She had heard Father Flood before mass asking some women to lend him tablecloths that they could then retrieve when Christmas was over. After his sermon he had asked for donations of cutlery and glasses and cups and saucers and plates to add to his store.  He also made clear that the parish hall would be open from eleven in the morning until nine in the evening on Christmas Day and anyone passing, irrespective of creed or country of origin, would be welcome in God’s name; even those not in need of food or refreshment could drop by at any time to add to the day’s cheer, but not, he added, between twelve thirty and three, please, when Christmas dinner would be served. He also announced, that, beginning in the middle of January, he was going to run a dance in the parish hall every Friday night with a live band but no alcohol to raise funds for the parish and he would like everyone to spread the word.

As soon as Eilis had pushed past the men setting the tables and benches down evenly in rows and women hanging Christmas decorations from the ceiling, she saw Father Flood.

‘I wonder would you count the silverware to make sure we have enough,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, we’ll have to go out into the highways and byways.’

‘How many are you expecting?’

‘Two hundred last year. They cross the bridges, some of them come down from Queens and in from Long Island.’

‘And are they all Irish?’

‘Yes, they are all leftover Irishmen, they built the tunnels and the bridges and the highways. Some of them I only see once a year. God knows what they live on.’

‘Why don’t they go back home?’

‘Some of them are here fifty years and they’ve lost touch with everyone,’ Father Flood said. ‘One year I got home addresses for some of them, the ones I thought needed help most, and I wrote to Ireland for them. Mostly, I got silence but for one poor old divil I got a stinker of a letter from his sister-in-law saying that the farm, or homestead, or whatever it was, wasn’t his and he wasn’t to think of ever setting foot in it. She’d scatter him at the gate. I remember that. That’s what she said.’

1494 words

As evidenced in this scene, chosen at random, the five commandments of storytelling can be subtle, they can be inferred, they can happen off the page or in ways that are indirect. The commandments are a framework rather than a formula. The movement in this scene happens through Eilis’s interactions with others and through the choices she makes. At times, it is Eilis’s silence that tells us most about her interior world.

In this scene, as with all scenes that serve a story well, there is a sense that something has been accomplished. When you are writing your own scene, something has to change. In the scene we have looked at above, several things have changed. The character has made preparations for her first Christmas in a new country. She has put other peoples’ needs before her own and as a reader we understand that there are motives at play beyond the character’s altruism. She made a choice not to disclose her plans to her housemates and the reader has understood the possible reasons why without being told. She spent time lingering over the gift selection for her loved ones and prepared to send these gifts home in time for Christmas. These details are all small but they represent a shift in this character’s thinking and they propel this story forwards which is absolutely essential. If you have written a scene that you know does not work, consider whether there is any forward momentum, new knowledges, specific choices that your character has made. Consider how your character makes their choices. What is the response of others around and how does this fuel tension and conflict?

When planning your scene ask yourself these questions about every one you sit down to write:

1. What is my character’s goal in this scene?
2. What are the obstacles they encounter?
3. How are you moving the story forward in terms of character and plot?

I have applied these questions to the scene we have just read.

1. Eilis’s goal is to avoid her emotions around missing her family at Christmas
2. She is unsupported by her housemates and her landlady. She takes care to buy gifts for her family but excludes herself from joyfulness at Christmas
3. The reader gets a deeper insight into this character – her single mindedness, her existence at the periphery of a household, and her self-sacrifice. Plot is propelled through Eilis’ greater understanding of other people’s migratory experiences and the severed ties that mirror her own

You may want to practice this exercise with other novels of different genres – some are easier than others. You will quickly get a good sense of the fundamentals that lie at the heart of every successful scene – sometimes these are subtle, sometimes explicit, but they should be there in every scene you write.