How to write fiction writing scenes

Scene 1 Take 2

It seems that for once, I won’t hate its very own and bureaucratic habit of his in which the dictionary orders you to go from here to there; in your quest for knowledge without it clarifying absolutely nothing. Dictionaries are a pool filled by wisdom… a very dark and twisted wisdom but the same they’re the Mimirs of words’ kingdom.

Do you remember what an ACT is? No?

Act. m.  Heroic deed

Or such are the words of Mr. Larousse. Heroic deed. Given such clue, we’re in green light to pursue the clue Nuval Yoah Harari mentions about the actantial worth of characters: only the facts of kings matter.

               Narrative happenings are born with the heroic deed. To rescue the lass. Decapitate the dragon. The act as an artificial subdivisión was born later; when little by little the idea[1] that worth telling facts were not just kingly or knightly ones, started to percolate. And even then, daily stuff (nonetheless the existence of something called slice of life) is not heroic. Unless it means to survive extraordinarily to the incitation event irrupting EVERYDAY life.

               From this moment I can start summing two and two. Heroic deed + a set of decorations. In this, I’ve cornered the elusive unicorn called scene. No matter if what I’m holding inside my fingers is nothing but shiny mane hairs due to the fact the beast escaped.

               Since it comes[2] (it might seem obvious but it might not be, evolution is a business involving a lot of things which used to be there and now aren’t or very few trustable rests still stand) from the theatre, we can agree physical limitations circumscribe a plot to happen only in a single place or a limited set of places; reducing our choices to a limited physical space.

Therefore, a scene happens in a single place and stage change is automatically a scene change and the beginning of another; where the most important thing id this physical change. I won’t discard there being scenes happening in two physical spaces  —despite them being ultra complicated to accomplish given space-time continuity and I don’t want to bring anyone from Back to the future here!

Is the scene limited to physical space? Maybe. It might be posible to limite it to mental/emotional states. Something like phone calls, monologues, schizophrenic hallucinations. A vision is interrupted and we change scene, the telephone call makes place for another and the monologue is interrupted or ended. Thus, interruption and change of <<place>> or <<space time continuity>>.

All right, I’ve summed two plus two. Can we add another number to the possibilities in a scene definition?

An “event considered as a spectacle worthy of attention” is a new possibility. There are activities, daily life or not, that matter to us. They matter because they make us get up in the morning instead of staying tucked in our warm beds.

They matter because they tell us things. They matter since, disregarding the mental sewers, the dark cringe corners of mean wishes and strange ideas next to blue prairies; they tell us who we are. Like letters or half sincere posting in Facebook we laugh of due they’re full of meaning.

This is it. My brain is running in the backstage the app “I must finish that crimson stupid thing[3]” or “I need to write more paragraphs about that witch” or “Oh no, I must read more narratology”. Being things as they are, I must settle a period about. Till next nonsense.

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[1] Can we unsafely say Shakespeare and Cervantes started to introduce the idea in The merry wives of Windsor and Don Quixote?

[2] Plus, I can be wrong.

[3] Stupid novel… It’s not stupid but sometimes it irks me. I’m still fixing it cause the sentences were too long and devoid of commas and semicolons. I need to breathe looooongly to read it aloud.