Visions of Scene and Sequel dance through my head!
Lesson #6– we’re halfway through! OMG!– focuses the class on the use of scene and sequel. The purpose of scene is to move the story along, and contains three elements: Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. The sequel is the followup– how your protagonist reacts to the scene: Emotion, Thought, Decision, Action. Every piece of fiction has scene and sequel and as our instructor points, out the best works have a great balance of the two.
Our assignment for this lesson was to take a story or a scene and identify the elements of scene and sequel– are they included? Were they used welll? Could the scene or sequel be beefed with dialogue or action? Does this scene move the plot along? After identifying the elements, does the scene read better? Like professional writing?
I decided to use one of the prompts that I wrote for a writing exercise last month, and was thinking of developing it into a full fledged story . This scene has two levels, so to speak, so I’ll sketch them both out.
The scene begins with characters Daniel and Sherry having a cigarette outside a bar, in the middle of a tense conversation.
GOAL: Daniel is asking Sherry about the murder of their father, if she was the one who shot him.
CONFLICT: Sherry won’t answer the question, stalls, makes Daniel ask again
DISASTER: Sherry answers, but it appears to have destroyed her emotionally to answer the question.
EMOTION: Daniel begins to feel sorry for Sherry because he’s dredged up a painful memory.
THOUGHT: Daniel realizes that her actions saved his life.
DECISION: The subtext is a quiet undertsanding that no one need to know that it was her that killed him.
ACTION: They leave the bar and get in Daniel’s car.
Level 2:
GOAL: Daniel is trying to get Sherry to admit she shot their father, and not [unnamed character ] who is serving a prison sentence for the murder.
CONFLICT: Sherry won’t answer the question directly or she stalls, making Daniel ask again, more pointedly.
DISASTER: Sherry answers, but the supporting explanation could be grounds for self defense, or even defense of him. .
EMOTION: Daniel begins to feel sorry for Sherry because he’s dragged her into a trap that he can’t get her out of.
THOUGHT: Daniel realizes that her actions saved his life and for a brief moment, shows pity and brotherly understanding.
DECISION: The subtext is that Daniel must move forward with his plan to trap her.
ACTION: Daniel drives Sherry to her house, where the rest of the plan falls into place.
The resulting scene:
[
[GOAL] Daniel watched Sherry light a second cigarette, the tip a glowing red ember against the pitch black of the alley. The sounds of the bar were muffled by the sounds of the busy street, feet away. She was avoiding his concentrated stare, and though he was patient, he wasn’t going to wait all night for an answer.
CONFLICT] “Why you askin’?” She handed him the cigarette and Daniel took it, sucked a long drag on it and handed it back.
“Maybe I just want to know. So Did you?”
DISASTER] “So. Yeah. I shot him, okay?” Sherry turned her head, so he couldn’t see her, couldn’t see the shine of tears coating her eyes or the pallor of pain and hurt and memories erase her vibrant glow. “Anything else you wanna know?”
Daniel stopped himself from asking the question he most wanted to ask, the question on the tip of his tongue and the front of his mind, that possessed his every waking moment. He really wanted to know why. And how. HOW she could have done it. But mostly why, but for some reason he couldn’t ask. The word stopped just short of flying out of his mouth and no matter how he tried to force it out, he looked more constipated than inquisitive, so he’d long since stopped trying to make himself ask.
There was something he did want to know, that would come out, and so he asked it. “Would you do it again?”
At first he thought she didn’t hear him and he was about to repeat himself but then she moved, ever so slightly. Her shoulders, they jerked and her stomach, it lurched and before he realized what was happening he had his arms around her and she sobbed into his neck, soaking the collar of his dress shirt.
“I didn’t want to do it in the first place,” he thought she said, through tears and fierce, violent sobs. “I told him, I told him to stop. He wouldn’t stop. I told him.”
Sherry pulled away, working her way out of Daniel’s grip and faced the wall. He didn’t know if he should reach out and comfort her or leave her be. He opted to leave her be, with one hand on her hip and the other covering her face, residual hiccups riding through her.
[EMOTION] “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered.
“What?”
“It wasn’t your fault. He was on you, beatin’ you for something you didn’t do. You were so young; you didn’t even know what was happening. And I don’t know why or when I decided to do it, I just… I just grabbed his gun and pointed. Got him on the first shot.” A dry, raspy chuckle bounced off of the wall and hit Daniel’s ear. “I should be some kind of hit man, or something.”
“Or something.” A few more seconds of silence, and then a quiet, “thank you. Really. You saved my life.”
Sherry turned, then. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks stained with mascara, more of her lipstick on her now discarded cigarette than on her thin lips. “Well then, you owe me,” she said. “Uhm. So, Can I get a lift?”
[THOUGHT] “I suppose,” Daniel answered, nodding toward the street where his car was parked. They walked in silence, a quiet understanding between them. No one had to know what was said there, in the dark alley behind the bar, while sharing a Marlboro Light.
[ACTION] Daniel unlocked the passenger door and tucked her inside the matchbox sized compact car. She wasn’t a large woman, but she barely fit, and had to push the seat back in order to be comfortable. He jogged around to the driver’s side, got in and started the car, the rickety jalopy shuddering to life.
“You’re not gonna say nothin’, right?”
“Naw, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t even know how to explain it.”
“Good. I got a good life now. Don’t want him messing it up from the grave, you know? He deserved that bullet.”
“I guess he did,” said Daniel, taking the on-ramp to the freeway, in the direction of Sherry’s house.
He squirmed in his seat, against the bulge pressing into his back– the battery pack. It was uncomfortable. The tape along his chest was itchy and he couldn’t wait to rip the microphone off.
Just a few more minutes. A few more exits, a few miles of leafy Evergreen trees planted along the lonely two lane highway. A few bland, flickering streetlights on tall, rusty steel poles, and they would arrive at her small, understated suburb on the north end of town. And then a few blocks until she would fall right into the trap. He almost felt sorry for leading her to it, and slowed the car down. Gave her a few more minutes of freedom, before he would selfishly trade her life for his own. ]
I hope I did this correctly! Or in the general neighborhood of correct. :\
As far as improvements, it has helped me to see where the scene was weak, and I beefed it up a little. I think the dialog helps the story along as well. it would be really sparse and boring without it, plus I sort of read them with harsh New York, maybe Brooklyn accents so there’s a lot of gesturing and shrugging, etc. I think it reads pretty well!
