Transcript
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Welcome to lesson two of Writing Through To Kill a Mockingbird. In this lesson we’re going to talk about the idea or the difference between writing in scene and writing out of scene. So what do I mean when I say writing in scene? Well really what I’m talking about is inviting your reader into the space where the action of a scene is happening. Let’s just pretend you’ve got a scene that’s happening in the parlor. You’re writing in such a way that your reader feels that they’re in the parlor. They can see who says what. They can see what the walls look like. They can see how high the ceiling is. But the action in the parlor unfolds at the pace in which the action actually unfolds. In scene writing, it attempts to replicate the experience of the action that’s being depicted, okay. Experience is the key word there. It tries to replicate experience. It’s as if you’re in the room. Remember in real life the way information comes to you is it comes in through your sensory organs, your eyes and your ears, maybe your nose or you know in the textures and then once that sensory data comes in then your mind goes to work.
It passes judgment or it has feelings or it makes logical connections but it all comes comes in through the senses. And so when you’re writing in scene, that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to present information to your reader the way it would come to them if they were there. Now, this is probably starting to sound a lot like what we call showing. And we’re going to get to that in a minute. Showing and telling is related to writing in scene and writing out of scene. it’s not quite the same thing. We’ll get to that in a minute. So if that’s writing in scene, what is writing out of scene? Well, writing out of scene is where you pull out of the scene of action in order to give the reader the big picture. You know, you are–you may be commenting, maybe explaining, giving background information. You know, like So at the beginning of The Kill a Mockingbird, it’s all out of scene, right? Scout is just telling us some things that she thinks we ought to know before she dives in and actually puts us into a scene.
I think it goes– in this edition, she goes seven pages before she ever actually puts us in the same room where the activity is happening.
It’s not a room. It’s actually outside. So all that business about where she’s saying, Well, if General Jackson had to run the creeks up the creek, and when she describes Macomb and all that kind of stuff, that’s all out of scene. It’s all helpful. It’s all good information, but it’s all out of scene. As I said, this is related to showing and telling. So showing and telling– showing is what a video camera would see if it were set up in the scene of action. Just kind of here’s what you would experience if you were there. Sounds a lot like what I said about writing in scene doesn’t it? And then telling is everything else. Summarizing, commenting, explaining, describing interstates, moving the clock. In other words, you know, skipping three months to the next scene. And you know, that’s all. You all do that out of scene. Now what do I mean when I say, I’d said a minute ago that these are related but they’re not quite the same. Writing out of scene is always telly, right, kind of by definition. You, because you’re not in the scene, there’s nothing, you’re not really showing anything, really. You’re just kind of, you know, giving, so, so out of scene writing is always telling and writing in scene is usually showing but the one way, the one time that you can be in scene and not showing is maybe you’re in scene and then you start talking about what’s going on in somebody’s mind. That’s technically telling but you’re still in the scene. So you can almost use showing and telling as a synonym for in scene and out of scene but not quite. And I like thinking, I like keeping that distinction open for a couple of reasons. The big one is I just think it’s really helpful to think is this a moment in my story when it’s better for me to really zoom in and really get into the scene or am I going to serve my reader better by backing out and giving some summary, some explanation, that kind of stuff.
Showing and telling, if you’ve taken creative writing classes, you know that creative writing teachers like me are just a little too insistent on show don’t tell. And so I think we think of show is good, tell is bad. Well one reason I like to say in scene and out of scene is just because people aren’t as familiar with the terms writing in scene and out of scene, then they don’t have quite the same feelings about them, right? And if I say showing versus telling, then people already think, well, showing is good telling is bad, but maybe in scene and out of scene, I hope it’s a little more neutral. Here’s an example of writing out of scene. This is the very beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird. When he was nearly 13, my brother Jim got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed and Jim’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. We are not being invited into the scene where Jim got his arm broken. Now, by the way, we are going to be in scene when he gets his arm broken, you know, later in the book. So we’re going to get there. But this is out of scene. Look, look at this. When it healed and Jim Spears of never being able to play football were assuaged. All right. We just covered in that sentence, what, how does it take for a broken arm to heal? Six, eight weeks? I don’t know how long it takes, but it takes longer than, You know, one sentence. And so this sentence skips a whole bunch of time. Again, we’re not in scene. Thank goodness, right? I don’t want to have, I don’t want to be, you know, an in-scene description that lasts six weeks or eight weeks or however long it takes for an arm to get healed.
Okay, so this is out of scene. Notice you can cover so much ground when you’re out of scene. He was seldom self-conscious about his injury. Okay, so again, see how much, see what we accomplished with this out of scene moment? We’ve got a, just a little introduction to Jim, we’ve covered, you know, we know that he got his arm broken, and then we get all the way through his healing and, you know, what is this?
Four, four lines and now we’re moving on to something else. Okay, that’s a great example of writing out of scene. Here is a situation so you can see the difference. This is on page seven of my edition is when we’ve had seven pages of writing out of scene. Just Scout saying what’s on her mind, describing Maycomb, doing all kinds of, you know, kind of giving us all kinds of introduction to stuff that you’re going to find helpful to know later, but she’s not in any scene. And here’s where she first, at that line is where, you know, once you cross that line we’re now in scene. The Radley place was inhabited by an unknown entity, the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end. Mrs. Dubose was playing hell. That was the summer Dill came to us.” Okay, so we’re not in the room with anybody here, right? We’re not in the presence of either this unknown entity, Boo Radley, or Mrs. Dubose. And even we say that was the summer Dill came to us, the fact that we’re talking about a whole summer tells us, tells you that we’re not in scene, right? You can’t be in summer. You can only be on a day in a summer. So I’ve obviously stuck that line in myself, but this is straight from the book. “Early one morning as we were beginning our day’s play in the backyard, Jim and I heard something next door at Miss Rachel Haverford’s collared patch.” All right, you see how that’s different? This is all general. It’s broad. Give you the big picture. And then early one morning, now we’re on a day. We’re not in the summer. We’re in one morning. We’re in a place, the backyard. And then, look, Jim and I heard something next door. We are getting their experience. They heard something, so we hear something. This is the difference between writing in scene, below the line, writing out of scene, above the line. By the way, this is something to look for as you read through “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Harper Lee tends to start each chapter out of scene. She’s going to give you some background. She’s going to give you some information. And then she dives in. Pretty common way to do it, right? That’s not in any way unique to Harper Lee. But in this particular– think about it. There’s a lot of time covered in this book. And so what she tends to do is each chapter covers a very short period of time. And then she, at the beginning of the next chapter, she kind of catches you up on the next– I’m making this up– let’s say three months. And then here’s something else that happened three months later. And then she gets into that– wherever you see quotation marks in dialogue, you know you’re in scene. That’s kind of the– And for Harper Lee, almost all of her scenes involve dialogue. And so where there’s no quotation marks, she tends to be out of scene. And then when you start seeing quotation marks, she’s back in scene. And so that’s kind of the rhythm of this book. We’re out of scene at the beginning of the chapter. She’s catching up on everything that happened since the end of the last chapter. And then we go in scene for the remainder of the chapter. And then she pulls out at the beginning of the next chapter moves us on. Because as I said, you can cover a lot of ground when you’re out of scene. In that first, here we covered six weeks, six, eight weeks in one sentence. Here we’re kind of, well, we’re not really covering action here, we’re just describing stuff. And then once you go in scene, everything slows way down. one morning, now we’re in a specific day and we’re slowing down. What is out of scene writing good for? Well, it’s good for a lot of things. It’s really good for exposition and background. Pretty much by definition exposition and background is writing out of scene. You can’t, well I take it back. You can, the one way you can do exposition and background in scene is to have a dialogue between two people where one person says to the other, “Here’s some stuff that happened in the past.” So that, you can do exposition and background in scene but it tends to be out of scene. You can convey a lot of information out of scene. Okay, remember in those whole first six or seven pages of To Kill a Mockingbird, we’re You’re getting all this information about Maycomb, about the family dynamics, about all kinds of stuff. So lots of information and then you can really move the story ahead, especially when you’re skipping from this scene happened in June and now the next scene is going to happen in October. Well, a nice little page of out of scene writing can cover all that ground pretty thoroughly a short amount of time. And then, this is a big one, establishing the tone and voice. So lest you think writing in scene is good and writing out of scene is bad, bear in mind the stuff people love about The Kill a Mockingbird, most of it’s out of–it’s this narrator kind of talking out of scene. It’s her, in the last lesson I talked about the scene in chapter, I don’t remember which chapter it is, but where she says, “My dad was, Atticus was feeble, he was almost 50 and he didn’t drive a dump truck,” and all that kind of stuff. All that stuff we love, that’s all out of scene writing. And so it’s really the tone and voice, a lot of that comes from out of scene writing. way to put it is a lot of it comes from the telling. So when you’re, even though I’m always pushing my writers to show more and tell less, the truth is telling is really important for this kind of thing, for establishing tone and voice.
What about in-scene writing? What’s good about that? Well, it’s really good for inviting your reader into an experience. Remember, experience is more important than information. An experience, you’re not going to invite your reader into an experience through writing out a scene. So let me say this, I was just bragging on the virtues of writing out a scene and I meant it, but you’ve still got to go in scene. If If you are telling a whole story and it’s all out of scene and you’re not inviting your reader into an experience, well, you got a problem with your story. Okay? So as much as I appreciate out of scene writing, you got to have in scene writing. And I mean, you’re probably going to need both, but I think you could probably get away with an all in scene story, but if you try to do an all out of scene story, you’re not doing your readers any favors. So your reader is here for an experience and the experience happens in scene. So think of out of scene writing as a way to set up your in scene because your reader is not here for information. It’s all like the information is all made up anyway. I don’t need the information. I need the experience. It’s really good for establishing relational dynamics, right? And I know you can out of scene kind of explain or discuss relationships, but what you really need is to have two people in a room, have them interacting and let your reader judge the relational dynamics, okay?
Now, let your reader understand the way these people interact with one another, how they feel about each other, that kind of stuff. Okay, that’s that’s in scene writing is much better for that than out of scene writing and then emotional impact All right, there’s a limit to how much You’re going to hit your reader at the emotional level when you’re not in the room with the characters But just I mean this is sort of a another way of saying rate relational dynamics You know a lot of that emotional impact is going to come from from experience in the relational dynamics And so out of scene writing can be, it’s often funny and it’s often interesting and it’s often, you know, there’s a lot to recommend out of scene writing but in terms of the real emotional impact of your reader really feeling for the characters, really having sympathy for the characters, you need to put them in the same room with the characters and let them experience what it’s like to be those characters. Okay, one thing I want to point out, this This is one of the last points. When you’re writing out of scene and you’re getting in tele mode, that doesn’t let you off the hook for specific concrete sensory language. You still need to give your reader something to look at. Your reader wants something to look at. And if you’re giving them something to look at, they might not even notice that you’re not in scene. They may think of this as being in scene. They may not even realize that you’re being telly instead of showy. So I mean look at this for instance. In rainy weather, okay this is very out of scene, it’s very telly. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop. Grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow it was hotter then. It was hotter then. A black dog suffered on a summer’s day. Bony mules hitched to hoover carts, flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. All right, look at all these great concrete images. Streets are red slop, we got grass in the sidewalks, we got a saggy courthouse, this poor black dog is suffering in the heat, we’ve got bony mules, we’ve got shady live oaks. Those are specifics. Those feel like South Alabama. It makes you feel like you’re there, right? You don’t even notice when you read this that this isn’t in scene. It feels like you’re in a scene but you’re really not. You’re just getting some description. So when people get on to their students about not being, when they say show don’t tell, what they really mean is be specific, be concrete. And so even when you are writing out of scene, even when you’re in telling mode, be looking for opportunities to be this specific. And if you do, nobody’s going to get onto you for doing too much telling. And nobody’s going to get onto you for being out of scene instead of being in scene. Because the reader doesn’t even realize it. This starts to feel like real life, a real world. We’ve got these live oaks. We’ve got this muddy red street. This feels like the world that God made. And so the fact that it’s not in scene doesn’t really matter. Alright, that brings us to the end of lesson two. On lesson three, we’re going to talk about mannerisms and manners.