estepheia | Weekend Workshop stuff

~~Did anybody manage to download the Bonus DVD of the complete Buffy series via torrent? The file was too big for me... I'd love to see all the extras. *makes puppy eyes* I'd pay your postage...~~

The weekend seminar was very entertaining and also quite helpful, at least in places. Some of the aspects of scene-writing that had been advertised in the brochure, never materialized. Instead, we did a revision exercise. We got a checklist of ten ways to cut and trim and tweak, and were asked to apply them. It was useful to actually sit down and follow that list. I had read all the dos and dont's before, but I always thought that keeping them in mind while writing helped. Nope. You think you are sparing with your adjectives until you print your text out and mark each adjective and adverb in red. And then it's worth reconsidering which ones you can do without.

However, I would have liked to learn more about scene writing. We got a bit of preliminary theory on what a scene is, and I'll try to share it with you guys:

The tutors likened a scene to a stage or a square frame (which reminded me of Anne Lamott's bird-by-bird metaphor). You have unity of time, place, and perspective. A story is like a pool billard table, where the balls move around on their trajectories. Wherever the balls change course because they ricochet off the bands or because they collide, that's where the author has to place a scene, that's the event you put on stage. The stress is on change. Every scene needs to lead to some kind of change, even if that only takes place inside a character's head. The straight paths that the balls travel usually don't need much detail and usually ought to be narrative sections, unless you need to plant your "mines" for later detonation, i.e. unless you need to establish characters, places and objects before they play an important part in later scenes.

I will look at my notes later, to see if I've forgotten to mention anything important. I will probably write another post about this, to let you know how the workshop went...