Scene by Scene

Sep 07, 2022

Let’s talk about writing scenes. If the outline of your memoir is the blueprint, scenes are the rooms in the house, or the places where things happen. Once your outline is finished, you essentially have a list of scenes to write. This is where I’m at with A Brief History of My Affairs, describing each moment and trying to get the whole thing down on paper.

A scene is a self-contained mini-story in which some sort of action takes place, ranging from simple dialogue to a full-on makeout session (for instance). The elements of a scene are setting (beginning), action (middle), and reaction (end), where the setting helps build the world and the action indicates something important about what’s going on in the broader story.

In memoir, scenes contrast with summaries of events, descriptions, the author’s interiority, or other information that isn’t rooted in time and place. Scenes are important for keeping the reader grounded with a clear understanding of what’s happening, when, and where. They also give energy to the plot or story: people move from one moment to the next, with tension swirling into a froth until the denouement. Fun.

Let me say here that my process of making a book varies from many (most?) graphic memoirists in that I write everything before drawing, and my books have a lot more text than many other graphic novels/memoirs (as a few of my one-star reviewers kindly noted, but whatevs). In many comics, the setting and action take place visually in the panels, and text is used for dialogue or narrative explanation. The image above, from Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics, shows different types of transitions between panels, which create the action.

For me, writing is a way to understand what happened and why, whereas illustration is a way to understand where something happened and how place impacts the past and present. One is psychological, the other is physical; of course, there is overlap. Illustration is the form I use to create the setting or environment (usually in full-page drawings or spreads), and language is the form I use to describe the action. Ideally, the reader uses mental theater to bring the characters and the story to life. My hope is that each form stands on its own merits, but that together they create an immersive experience. This is how I made And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: write first, draw later.

Here is a two-page spread from ANISTFS. Lots of text.

For comparison, here are two pages from other books. Craig Thompson’s Blankets is on the left, and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is on the right. Less text.

With so much text in my manuscripts, panels don’t work for me—unless I wanted my books to be a thousand pages long, which I very much do not.

In graduate school, where I studied creative writing, I don’t know if any professor ever even mentioned a scene (or dialogue, plot, momentum, or any other craft technique that would’ve been, shall we say, useful). Therefore, much of what I’ve learned is from analyzing stories on my own, and from my fiction-writer husband who really likes Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway.

Okay, back to scenes. Using your outline, you can create a mini-outline of each scene. For instance, in my First Things First newsletter, I listed “MFA Thesis Show” on my timeline. Here’s how I then outlined that scene:

Guests arrive to the bar
A special guest arrives (details in the actual book, obvs.)
A weird thing happens with my hair
Special guest leaves
My boyfriend pretends not to notice (spoiler: he does not become my husband)
My mom comments “Watch out for him”

Exciting, right? Once I have the mini-outline, I write the scene, add descriptions and details, and try to shape it into something interesting. All the while I ask myself, what am I trying to say? I imagine telling the story to a friend. How would I set it up? What does that person need to know to make the story interesting, to make them want to hear more? What can be left out? What language do I use? How can I make it meaningful? Can it be funny? (Because I DREAM of being funny.)

My first attempt at writing a scene is never good. (Anne Lamott comforts us all by calling these shitty first drafts. In her book Bird by Bird, from which I ripped the title of this post, Lamott says, “All good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.”) The first writing is thin, convoluted, digressive, lengthy. But, with any luck, the kernel of what I’m trying to say is there. After I have all the scenes of a section drafted, I can comb through to tighten up the language, clinch the meaning of what I want to convey, cut out anything unnecessary, and try to ramp up momentum.

An illustration of my text-only manuscript in ANISTFS (left), and an airplane.

One of my favorite scenes of all times takes place in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. My husband and I read the book together eight or ten years ago and I still reference it about six times a year. (Christian is patient, so he just smiles and lets me do this.) I won’t spoil the scene, but let me just say there is a moment in which all the characters are naked, outside, and they magically transform into birds. You feel the weather, the transformation, and the total freedom of being a bird. The writing really, truly makes you want to be a bird.

Here’s a little ten-minute scene-writing exercise to warm up you up.

Name the scene. (E.g. A sexy guest arrives at the artist retreat.)
Make a mini-outline of what will take place in the scene.
Time to write. Describe the setting. Be specific.
Note who is there and why.
Describe the action.
Close the scene. This can be literal (like people leaving a place), figurative (a reflection), or even a jump to the next scene (momentum!).

If you’re working on a graphic memoir or novel, what’s your process? Do you write and draw at the same time? Do you make notes and thumbnails simultaneously? If so, how do you edit? Do you work with scripts? I’d love to know.

Have a good week, everyone. Xo.