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STONE TWO OR PART TWO

Look out! Here I see the ship of cliché coming in the contemplative scene… It has sails all directed to East and here I lose the joke since I perfectly know what east means but didn’t what levante meant.

 The fresh breeze and a blue sky, a velvet kiss on your lips I tell. It rains you poor soul and she has left.

“Not always is the cliché a bad stuff”: the contemplative scene

When the host of “This is opera” speaks about Turandot and clichés, he mentions the ample possibilities of clichés as instantaneous contemplative scenes. Something akin to the chicken broth in a dice. That thingie that makes food tastier without the hour or hours of boiling chicken to get some thick and rich broth. No greater explanations or bureaucracies: The morning shimmered to the sun and he smile to his own reflect.

It all depends on how we help the cliché to work out with intentionality and direction or we stablish our “own” to contemplate or give voice to what should be hidden as part of the background since, it is the background.

In Yumi’s Cells[1]; Donggeon Lee employs a rock band called “The endorphines” to tell us how well Yumi fells given the circumstances[2].

Camilleri —my fetish writer since he breaks the rules by following them — says things like this in the open: the sky would rumble and Montalbano, who changes mood with the weather, would sparkle as well. Then us sparkle with the detective withour further ado of an explanation.

Thereafter there are the emotional scenes

In Conceal don’t feel: how to write fiction without naming feelings and sequel, I mention how to speak of feelings or emotions without summoning them directly but… It seems to me, we can really go and skip the physical repercussions to just say whatever the character is feeling. That gives an action feeling to something that doesn’t require as much contemplative description.

Are you writing romance? Of course you need better emotional scenes, where to describe physically the feelings of the ML/FL or main or whatever you’d like to call the character. This is what portrays the plot greatly.

In inner dialogue or monologue we lose ourselves in the character’s mind

It is not as if these scenes aren’t interesting. Some novels or tales are nothing but nonsense happening in a character’s mind. To Sarah Domet, advocate of modern scenes, they are only worth if I say I won’t go around beating the bush (I say I think) and after that; I tell you the newest exploit of the Liverpool as a great football team where heros are taken out of rough diamonds, without the least monetary patronage that counts as buying a championship. (I did something totally different).

The biggest the symbolism joining what is said, the greater the impact of the monologue in the plot further ahead in the game.

He finally signed the life insurance. He was absolutely convinced of her being a moron who might end up in the streets were he to suffer an accident. She said that the departing taxes wouldn’t be reduced by paying the prime and that they were young and would be together for many years to come. What would she know of taxesif she didn’t work! Besides, he didn’t want the child to suffer any neglect due to Shirley working. Probably as maid or housekeeper since she didn’t know anything else that cleaning and cooking.

In this plot idea, the life insurance could embody the financial genius of the woman who zas!, murders the man telling this to us. By adding 60% of ethanol to the petrol in his car to abandon the child thereafter in a cloister or some other place alike.

She answered: dialogue scenes

Sarah Domet never mentions them but this one that Chuck Wendig (and my mother) consider core of the plot, the dialogue scenes.

And…yep. There are very good plots without dialogue[3]. It is more than enough to read the black bean in the rice which has inspired one or two BL mangas: Daddy long legs by Jane Webster. I might have never read it if it hadn’t been for that reason. Used as background, almost unaltered (turn the girl into a boy and the handsome man into a school principal or anything else[4]) or as an excuse to have it adapted to shoujo manga; it is such a delicious one.

Why? It is a plot told thorugh letters! Dialogue, blinds us by abscence. It is all inner monologue and narrative description. And still, it conquered mangakas and filmmakers. No, my mother would never read it.

Consequently, the dialogue scenes can work out our problems with the “show, don’t tell”. If you have read The silence of the lambs by Thomas Harris you might remember the “»much obliged m’am» of Starling. This, added to her cheap shoes[5], tell tale her as a mere country bumpkin in Hannibal’s eyes. Dialogue, well encased —long difficult words, the right grammar or badly built phrases — together with interaction or betrayal between what is said and done, can introduce us to the character’s psyque.

According to Domet, dialogue rushes the rhythm as we’d like to know what is said later. I call it the window gossiper effect by the gossiper we all have inside.  Speaking of rushing things, we have the action scenes.

Scene 4, take 2: action scenes

The action scenes are scenes to take the plot forward —don’t ask, I didn’t get this either. Where is forward according to what? — This is the type of scene happens when a character feels like pushing down the red button labeled “DON’T PUSH”. We all know that equals disaster. And disaster equals plot.  It ain’t really relevant if they reflect they shouldn’t have touched the button or they didn’t get a right reading of Tarot’s cards. Domet explains it as a REACTION to the events. And to this case, she has a very interesting advice… to learn Latin. Yeah, since to start scenes a media res requires lots of training. To begin with, to become aware of what a media res means…

Media res means to begin an scene in the middle of the action by describing a lot what is seen, felt, saw and tasted by the character to offer the feeling of things happening. It is this feeling which makes us feel like there’s action and it can be stretched until tension is in the air.

On the other side, another good advice is to begin from the beginning.  Ah, writing/designing is difficult. Contradictory. And awesome.

Such is the dilemma: drama scenes

Are drama scenes simply action scenes but slower? No. If I were to compare them to cooking; a drama scene is a simply well done stew with action, discovery and emotion to the same share. All right, the gastronomical example might not work since I’m not calling a particular dish: mole de olla. Meat broth with diced potato, carrots, corn and guajillo chili… (if casually you have no idea what that is). A really balanced scene to say so.

And since I’m commenting a classification by Sarah Domet, I gotta mention she uses The great Gatsby as example. Which gets me into lots of hubble. One, I read the book in Spanish so I might have missed a lot of subtle stuff. Two, I didn’t love the book as much as she loved it. I don’t think it is genial. Three, I’m still far from analyzing things at the first reading.

However, if I understood anything, it seems a drama scene is very similar to what happens to Ana Karenina in …you seriously don’t know? No prob, the title is homonymous to the character. Ana realizes she can’t go on living as she is and then she throws herself to the train tracks. Discovery: life can’t go on as such. Emotion: guilt and over anything, desperation. Action: to throw herself into the tracks.

Fuuu, sure we can break our horns with these classifications. I realize I should have attacked first the problem of defyining an scene. What I might do will be keeping the inner and external scenes for future references. I believe dialogue and drama are more like result of how these two last types of scene are managed, than scenes by their own right.

You? Do you know instinctively what an scene it and won’t need definitions or would you have preferred to start there?

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[1] To good of a webtoon to not keeping using it as example.

[2] Anyone can tell the energy in the environment of a rock concert and over it, you get the frustation if it gets cancelled in the middle.

[3] My mother might not like those but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

[4] So long they have Money.

[5] Or was it the hand bag?