Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: "The most
difficult scene you ever wrote and why."
If I have a scene that for some reason isn’t flowing well, I
remind myself that the first draft is supposed
to be ugly. It’s allowed to be
fragmentary and lacking details and maybe even full of X’s here and there or notes
to myself like “add more here”. I just have to get words on the paper (or into
the computer file) and build from there.
(Time for my standard disclaimer that there is NO one rule
for how to write and everyone should write their books in whatever way works
for THEM.)
I do as much as I have creativity for on the first pass and
then each time I re-open the file thereafter, to keep writing the rest of the
narrative rather than obsess over the one scene, I do go through the specific
moment again and build upon it, refine it, in a process I think of as ‘layering’. Each time I touch it, I end up adding words
and depth and color and actions and…by the time I finish the entire book, each
scene inside is finished.
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DepositPhoto - A classic fishbone diagram.
The ones I do for my writing do NOT look like this. |
If I’m really at a standstill, I fall back onto what I call ‘fishboning’,
in honor of a very useful process improvement technique from my days at
NASA/JPL. I end up building a structure
with the possibilities that flow from any decision a character could make in
the scene’s situation (or that I, the omniscient author might drop upon their
heads) and as I brainstorm and work through this, the path with the most
possibilities or the most exciting-to-me events along the way becomes clear and
off I go to write. I can’t tell you how many times this has worked infallibly
for me. I use my trusty, very sharp No. 2 pencil and a pad of legal sized
yellow (or lavender) paper. Something about doing this just really clears the
way for my Muse or my creativity or whatever one chooses to call it, to break
loose and enhance the story telling.
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| DepositPhoto |
In actual fact, it’s a combination of true fishboning for
root cause analysis and “The Five Whys” technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda,
where you drill down and down to what the ultimate root cause of any problem
may be. The fishbone is a cause analysis tool, which a trained facilitator
(which I used to be) might pull out to use when a problem solving team has hit
a dead end or finds itself in a rut.
I am a NASA Lean Six Sigma Black Belt so
trust me, I’ve had training in these and many more process improvement
techniques. I’ve amalgamated and adapted them for this creative purpose of mine
and it leads my Muse through the cluttered field to the right path for the
story.
Now most of the time I just sit down and write the book, and
don’t do any fishboning or anything else. The story flows, I type and it’s all
good. But every once in a while, perhaps once or twice per book, I resort to
pencil and pad and brainstorm.
As far as the most difficult scene to write because it
affected me so much – there’s a scene in Timtur, book 2.5 of the Badari Warriors series,
where Lily the human heroine sits through the night with a dying soldier and
does her best to comfort him, even forgiving him for participating in
kidnapping her. (And no, this is a supporting character, not the hero.) Folks,
I cried writing this scene. I’ve never had that happen to me before or since on
a book I wrote.
I have a feeling the scene might be mining an experience in
my own past where I sat vigil through the night by a person beloved to me who
was not going to survive. (I’m not normally too self-reflective or even
conscious of where and what influences my Muse is drawing upon deep inside my
own memory and experiences to spin the stories I write. Sorry if it seems weird
to discuss my writing process as disengaged somehow from my everyday, entirely
rational ‘thinking’ mind, but when I write, I’m in the flow.)
So anyway, here’s a portion of that scene. Lily and the dying soldier
are both imprisoned within an alien lab:
Hastily, Lily ran to the sink and filled a piece of lab
glassware with water, before going to the table where Hilkirr was restrained.
He lay still, fangs and talons extended, all the veins in
his body standing out and glowing blue as if filled with liquid
phosphorescence. As she approached the table she observed his eyes were open
and his breathing was labored.
“I brought you the water,” she said in a near whisper. “Can
you raise your head enough to drink?”
“Teacher?” He blinked as if his vision was impaired,
although even in the darkened lab he ought to be able see so much better than
she could.
“Yes, it’s me.” She slipped one arm under his head and
helped him get the right angle to sip at the water, although he didn’t take
much. His whole body trembled.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Stay?”
Lily shot a glance at the door, assessing the risk.
“Please?” His voice was a raw thread of its former volume. “I—I
don’t want to be alone, and I can’t hear the pack in my head anymore.”
“All right.” She searched for a stool or a chair and found
one shoved into a corner. She went to retrieve it then sat next to the table,
wrapping both of her hands around one of his, mindful of the extended talons.
“I wish I knew how to get these restraints off so you could lie more
comfortably.”
“No. It’s better this way.” Hilkirr shook his head feebly.
“Might hurt you.”
“I don’t believe you would,” she said as warmly as she
could. “Do you need more water? Are you cold? I could try to find a lab coat or
a blanket.”
“Just your company.”
“Okay.” She sat and closed her eyes, unable to bear looking
at his abused body for too long. His grotesquely expanded muscles and tendons
were distressing, as were the brownish-yellow bruises spreading over his body
as the experiment slowly extinguished his life. The glowing blue of his veins was
fading, to be replaced by more ominous colors, a vile mix of purple and black.
Hilkirr’s clasp grew lax, and she sat up with a start,
afraid he’d died, but he’d only dozed off. She went to the sink and got a wet
cloth. Back in her place beside the table, she brushed his hair off his face
then bathed his upper body carefully, as much as she could reach, drying him
off with another, softer cloth.
With obvious effort, he turned his face toward her. “Feels
good.”
“I wish I could do more.” After dropping the cloths in the
refuse bin, she resumed her spot in the chair and clasped his hand again.
“I’m sorry, teacher. We shouldn’t have kidnapped you. That was
wrong.”
“I forgive you,” she said and found she meant it. Hilkirr
had suffered so much as a result of following Vattan into this hellish lab that
she only had pity for him.
“Swore a blood oath to my Alpha,” he said. “Had to obey.”
“I understand.” Lily wasn’t sure she truly did but pack
meant everything to the Badari, and blood was the magic used to seal all their
most important bonds and agreements.
“Wish Aydarr had been my Alpha. The valley was so
beautiful.” Now his voice was wistful, and Lily had to blink back tears.
“I’m glad you got to live there in freedom for at least a
little while.” Sorrow in her heart like a stone, she patted his hand and wished
she could do more.
“Do you think the goddess will forgive me? Can she forgive
me?” His whisper was intense.
Lily bit her lip, throat tight with repressed sorrow,
pondering how best to answer the question. What would Timtur say to comfort a
dying comrade at a time like this? Words came to mind. “I don’t know much about
your goddess. But I know you call her your Great Mother, and I know a mother
loves all her children equally and forgives them. So, you hang onto that
thought.”
“You should be a mother,” Hilkirr said a minute or two later,
surprising her. “The cubs all love you, did you know that? The boys think the
Great Mother sent you to them.”
“Maybe someday I’ll have a baby,” she said, thinking of
Timtur and what a child born of the two of them might be like. Motherhood was a
dream far removed from her current situation and she pushed the happy subject
to the back of her mind with regret. Her
muscles were complaining at the awkward position so she shifted a bit and
stretched, while hanging onto Hilkirr’s hand. “Do you need more water? Are you
in pain?”
“Can’t see anything. Can’t feel anything.” His hand
twitched. “Other than your fingers. Warm. Nice. Would you sing? Like you do for
the cubs after classes, if they’ve been really good?”
Happy to have something she could do to comfort him, she
said, “Of course.”
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There's more to the scene in the novel but I think this gives the flavor...
Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is whatever is on our minds. With pretty much the entire world in sparkling isolation, there's really only one thing on our minds: COVID-19.
