You Need This Book
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One of the hardest tasks of learning to write is learning to read like a writer. A carpenter sees a house differently than a real estate agent, an architect, or a homeowner. A writer must learn to read books not like an English major or a reader in an airport, but with an eye for breaking apart and studying aspects of his or her craft.
With her book, The Scene Book: A Primer for Fiction Writers, Sandra Scofield offers writers a step by step guide for skillfully crafting fictional scenes. "Events may be mentioned in summary," she writes, "even tossed away in the telling of a grand tale, but it is in scene that you capture the hearts and imagination of your readers."
While many books help writers develop three dimensional characters, improve setting description, learn to write dialogue or improve their plots, there are very few books that give writers the tools they need to create their own compelling scenes. The Scene Book gives you a language for talking with yourself and others about the components of a well- written scene. It also offers tons of great exercises to help you add layers of complexity to your own work.
In her first chapter, Scofield defines the terms she uses to break apart the different components of good scenes, the first step to demystifying a complicated art form. According to Scofield, every scene has event and emotion, a function, a structure and a pulse. It also has beats of action which keep the reader grounded in the world the writer is trying to create.
After Scofield defines her terms, she spends a chapter on each one, explaining their significance and analyzing published examples of the craft aspect she is trying to teach. At the end of each chapter, she provides exercises for coming up with your own scenes, using what you have learned.
Later chapters offer readers advanced skills, writing scenes with lots of characters, or turning a flat character into a more rounded one by having them respond in meaningful ways to what is going on around them. It is a character's response to the conflict in a scene that helps a reader connect. Scofield's well-written exercises guide writers into creating believable, moving, reactions for their characters.
Scofield's guide to writing scenes is so jam packed with strong- minded insight into the writer's craft, that it will more than likely take you the rest of your life to master everything in it. It is a book you will return to again and again no matter how long you have been writing. And each time read it, you will learn something new. The Scene Book will teach you to study the books you read like a writer.
