The Green Knight's Quest

nycshelly asked how I tighten a scene in revision (and sometimes as I write, or the next day etc.)

This is work I do in Apple Works - the best tool for collapsible outlines I know, because I can use colours and different fonts and assign keystrokes to styles.

I go through each scene and add a top level of scene questions to them:

Who is involved?
Where does it take place?
What happens?
What's at stake?
Why does it matter?

This usually gives me the place of the scene, and it addresses both warp and weft of the scene. (The weft being 'what happens' - this is the flexible part, the warp being 'why does it matter'.

There's flexibility in all of this, and what and how much I change depends on the circumstances. The more sketched out the scene is, the more I can reimagine it. I had one scene where the important stuff was dialogue between my protag and someone else. Originally, I had thought it would take place in the salon, but that was just lazy because yes, while getting together in somebody's house was part of what those people did, I had too many of those scenes already. So I looked at it again and thought where else could it happen? What else would they do?

I ended up with a picnic-cum-entertainment, which gave me many more opportunities for people to interact, be humiliated, bond with unlikely companions (my protag makes a friend that day, and it's far more natural they should find things in common at the picnic than inside where they are watched all the time) etc.

Quite often it's only in writing out 'why does it matter' that I can spot *why* I have this scene - often the scenes themselves feel trivial (like 'research in library') - but once I analyzed it, I found that it was a key turning point for the three-book series. Until now, my protag has accepted that 'the Fey have their own customs' and 'it's not her place to question them' - now she says 'actually, respecting other cultures is all very well, but I need to draw a line somewhere.' It's the first time she is prepared - very cautiously, and while feeling anxious about it - to stand up to Faerie.

(Think, oh, forced marriages. It's not the issue, but on that scale. Yes, it might be somebody else's culture, but that doesn't mean I'll accept it. In this I feel that human rights trump cultural sensitivity.)

So now I have a progression of scenes, and I can see what role the scene plays within the narrative. I am usually looking for progressions - the first spark of something, some development in 1-3 further scenes, until it comes to a climax, so if I have too many, or too few scenes on any particular subplot, I am looking to cut/combine/write new scenes.

Sometimes that takes the shape of thinking 'what else can happen/can I show in this scene. Sometimes it takes the shape of 'how else can I show that (these characters become friends, my protagonist has a blind spot when it comes to x, there's something wrong in the state of Denmark)'



This work gives me the general shape for a scene - what happens, what I want it to achieve.



Next I look at the amount of words in a scene, because while wordcount isn't everything, there's a certain relation between wordcount and the weight a scene is given. If something is important but it's only a single thought, a key turning moment (in character development, in a relationship) then I expect the scene to be shorter, snappier, more condensed than if something complex happens in it. Corrections can go in both directions - sometimes I don't give events enough time to develop (it's more believable to see them unfold on screen. In the above picnic example, for instance, my protag first bonds with [person who had been obnoxious and behaving inappropriately in other settings] over a chance meeting (he says something, she finds it amusing, she realises who she is talking to, she starts to have doubts about her judgement of him) and develops while he proves that he's not always as boorish and horrible as she had first encountered him. By the end of the picnic, I hope that the reader likes him, too.

After that, I do the outline thing for every beat. I have sometimes discovered that I've had similar beats in different scenes - there was a thought I wanted to get across, an observation, a piece of character development, an exchange between two characters - that ended up in more than one scene. Err, ooops.

This is where I see whether (and how) the scene flows: are my characters jumping from one topic to the next? Am I alternating between great tension and leisurely bonding? Do I have the right balance between description, action, internalisation, and narrative summary?

What is 'right' depends on the individual scene, but 'wrong' often will stand out - sequential events without a unifying thread, for instance, hopping from one topic/subthread to the next, 'you did I didn't' exchanges that do not escalate, whatever.

I very often rewrite those scenes en bloc, thinking about what I want to achieve and seeing whether I like the new version better than the old.



If all of this sounds like a lot of work, yes it is - it's also the best way I know to get to the best book *I* can write. I don't resent the work, though I do resent the time it takes; but I end up with something that is considerably better than my first draft, and that is better than my drafts would be if I merely read through scenes.

This comes back to 'span of control' I think - I simply *cannot* hold my books in my head - they are not just too long (a trilogy usually runs around 350K) but also too complex (I love lots of little subplots driving events rather than a clear-cut challenge). I just don't have enough brain to do those books justice if I don't condense them.

On the other hand, once I have my scene questions in a row, writing a 3-5 page synopsis tends to be a piece of cake. (Writing a one-page synopsis? A skill in itself, and one I haven't mastered.)