Scenes

Hey, everyone. Neph here. I just finished reading a book that I bought a little while ago from Half Price Books called Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes, by Raymond Obstfeld. In concept, it is an extremely helpful book for me personally because, honestly? I had no idea how to work with scenes before. Not for novel-length stories, at least. Though I tried repeatedly to write a scene, from different angles and different character perspectives, nothing seemed to work out for me, and that made me really discouraged about my ability to write a good novel-length story. So when I visited the bookstore and saw this book on the shelf, of course I snatched it up, flipped through it a little, and then bought it.

The chapters include topics such as 'Determining Scene Length,' 'Using Setting,' 'Payoff Scenes,' 'Comic Scenes,' and 'Romantic & Sex Scenes.' In short, quite likely there is something in this book for every writer who is engaged in a struggle to write out a scene that does not suck--first and foremost to themselves, and secondly to potential publishers.

I currently fall into the former category, and as soon as I finish this blog post, I am going to attempt to apply a chapter's topic to the story I am working on, tentatively titled Six Gifts. The chapter will probably be 'First Meetings' or 'Focusing a Scene on Character, Plot, or Theme,' as I am currently in the process of planning out the first part of the story when two of the protagonists meet.

FOR TODAY, HOLD ME TO: Attempting to apply a chapter of Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes to the first part of my story Six Gifts.