Honoring the in-between–those stretches of time between reading a story and writing about it–requires respect for how idea inspiration may arise. Conditions that advance the writing life involve elements that nurture the “seeds”: nurture prewriting time.
Soil: space and time rituals for turning over the memory fossils in the ground.
Air: room to let the writing breathe and cool off.
Sunlight: a workshop audience that can illuminate what works and what can be reworked further.
Nutrients: a storage of varied life and reading experiences that allow the writer to go beyond what they know on their own.
The delay to write, to borrow a memorable phrase from Donald Murray’s “Write Before Writing,” isn’t always a symptom of procrastination. Murray explains there are multiple forces moving writers to the first draft: increasing information; increasing concern; a waiting audience; an approaching deadline. Once these external pressures begin to work on the seed, writing development occurs at the behest of outside voices in addition to our own.
I encourage my students to treat this time between reading a story and writing about it as necessary dormancy before growth. But I also think about what I’m doing in my classroom that is advancing or obstructing the development of their ideas. Luckily, I’ve developed a prewriting strategy that encourages responsiveness and is easily implemented.
In Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook, he enumerates four elements by which writers progress the plot: discoveries, complications, reversals, and resolutions. To help students nurture ideas before drafting, consider doing a scene study anchored by these four story elements.
What does this look like on the page:
Create an organizer with the four story elements. Use this organizer as a note catcher as students mull the placement of these scene types in the story plot. I’ve found this scene study strategy works with short stories, novels, plays, films, and graphic novels and can be used in whole class discussion, reading groups, or by a sole reader.
What does this look like in the classroom:
You can model the strategy with stories your students are already familiar with. For example, when I’m introducing the scene types, my “think-alouds” can sound something like this:
- Discovery Scene: What are the implications of the first prophecy uttered by the Weird Sisters in Macbeth?
This scene “zoom in” can help students sift through some surface impressions. How would the play be different if this “discovery scene” was not plotted in Act I? What was implied by Macbeth’s responses? What did the scene reveal about his character?
- Complication Scene: What do Lauren’s and Joanne’s differing responses to the prospect of moving to Olivar in Parable of the Sower suggest?
Complication scenes, while usually conveying an emerging conflict, can help students understand specific attitudes or beliefs that are interrogated by the full unfolding of the story. Her willingness to disrupt “status quo” thinking about existing prospects in the dystopian setting makes Lauren an outlier among the walled residents in the Robledo community.
- Reversal Scene: Why does Victor Frankenstein struggle with the Creature’s request for a companion?
Reversal scenes intensify the stakes of the story, creating a fresh complication for the protagonist. While Victor can understand the Creature’s desperation for companionship, he sees agreeing to the request as a zero-sum game. These scenes send the story in a new direction, often undermining or subverting what a protagonist previously understood to be the stakes.
- Resolution Scene: Does the final scene of The Kite Runner suggest Amir might someday achieve the atonement he seeks?
In my classroom, discussion of resolution scenes are often the most interesting. Instead of neatly tidying things up, the scenes help students understand if an identified theme has been reinforced by a story’s final notes, or if a character has found a way to heal an emotional wound.
Takeaways:
Through scene study discussion, the ability to see the story for its elastic quality, for the ways it can be stretched out for a more panoramic view of its thematic concerns, and then pulled in for a zoomed-in combing, becomes more obvious. Scene study can be an important part of prewriting time, occurring before and between drafts, alone and in the company of classmates.
How do you help students engage in scene study? What prewriting strategies can we use before writing about fiction? Share your reflections in the comments below or find me on Twitter @dispatches_b222.
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