FURTHER LESSONS LEARNED WHILE WRITING A NOVEL OF INCIDENT

HOW TO DECIDE IF YOUR SEX SCENE, FIGHT SCENE, OR ACTION SCENE STAYS IN YOUR STORY

Marcel Dzama’s Charity, empathy & hope

A year writing incident has given me interesting insights into my own character-driven fiction and of course, as discussed earlier, into narratives of incident. There are the pebble insights important for mortaring the walls of your craft — such as accepting the fact that in dialogue a string of “she said” or “I said” are inevitable and an dialogue tag variations like “she blustered” and “he averred” usually only clunk up the works or make you sound pretentious. As formulaic as “she said” "or “he says” can be, this tends to be something that bothers the writer more than the reader, especially if the dialogue is good.

(I tend to side with Elmore Leonard who said: Never use a verb other than ‘’said’‘ to carry dialogue.)

Pebble insights and mountain lessons. Many of these I’ve discussed in earlier newsletters but two still stand misty on the horizon, unaddressed. The first involves something that should have obvious to me from jump, but alas wasn’t.

Of course narratives of incident are going to have incident, often on a scale (both in numbers and intensities) that would send some literary fiction heads crying for their madelines. In certain genres, Action Scenes — whether combat, lovemaking, competitions, dance maneuvers — will be ubiquitous, as these are the sine qua non of narratives of incident.

For a writer like me, getting use to the amount of incident was one challenge. The real problem, however, is that narrative incidents have a tendency to proliferate. And I don’t mean just a little proliferation. Incident is the bamboo of narrative and if you ain’t in there constantly chopping you’re always going to end up with more than you’ll ever need, which will ruin the story.

Talk about irony. Narratives of Character tend to die because there’s too little Character. Narratives of Incident tend to die because there’s too much Incident.

One narrative tradition trends towards attenuation; the other trends towards amplification.

Both have to be managed assiduously, which is why writers of Incident need to keep narrative shears at the ready in order to battle Incident Proliferation Syndrome.

Being aware of the Incident Proliferation Syndrome is one half the battle; the other half is identifying exactly the kind of incident that tends to run rampant under your watch.

In my case I tend to do too many Action Scenes; Actions Scenes are my bamboo menace — proliferate in my work like the red weed in The War of the Worlds. (For another of my writer friends, Sexy Scenes are her bamboo menace; she’s always including way more than her Stories can handle.)

After I write an Action Scene and give it a few days to cool — a necessary pause for me as I need distance from the creative smithing before my judgment re-emerges — I simply ask myself: can this Story sing without the scene? After all, an Action Scene can be awesome in and of itself, and yet add zilch to the overall Story. Those Yes-But-No scenes you need to snip and maybe recycle in a later chapter or book.

Remember, you need to be as ruthless pruning your Incidents as you are diligent in creating them.

I find that the Action Scenes that I write that always survive the ruthless shears are those that hew closest to the following definitional ideal:

Good Action Scenes are either salvific or alter a Character’s body, identity, or standing in an original and a diegetically meaningfully way.

In other words, the Action Scenes that stick

— don’t echo earlier Action Scenes (are always original enough)

— have a diegetic impact that alters the way the Character interacts with themselves, the World and/or the Conflict. (sprained ankles or broken hearts or a new sense of self or a change of status or best of all more peril.

— or dramatize a clutch moment where someone or something is saved or not saved.

For me, original-impactful or original-salvific survive — everything else does not.