scene.
Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife, and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter ... We had several fines after the coffee, and I said I must be going. Cohn had been talking about the two of us going off somewhere on a weekend trip. He wanted to get out of town and get in a good walk. I suggested we fly to Strasbourg and walk up to Saint Audile, or somewhere or other in Alsace. "I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town, "I said. Somebody kicked me under the table. I thought it was accidental and went on: "She's been there three years and knows everything there is to know about the town. She's a swell girl ". (Surmelian 25)
I was kicked again under the table and, looking, saw Frances, Robert's lady, her chin lifting and her face hardening ...
The scene reproduces realistically the very process of living, and each individual scene gives us a close-up of a particular act. It is a single specific moment in the plot, a single dramatic picture, and these single acts together give us the movement of the whole action. The modern tendency is to write the story as a series of single acts, scene by scene, and to give a dramatic or cinematographic imitation of life. The scene shows us the actors in action, but some narration is usually mixed up in it, and we hear the narrator's voice also as he describes the gestures of the speakers and gives other stage directions which in a play would guide and inform the actors and not form part of the dialogue. In its pure form, with no stage directions, no commentary, the scene eliminates the narrator's voice and is, as in an acted play, only character voice, and this heightens the illusion of reality. In the scene the burden of narration is shifted to the characters themselves and they do the work, they carry the ball.
In the scene the reader is taken through the process by which the result is obtained. The scene gives the story recentness or immediacy. We cannot narrate events that have not taken place, but the writer can give the impression that it is happening now, as though for the first time, and it is a unique event that means that you can start your story at a specified time, then go back in time and set the previous scene using the Past Perfect. Continue your story using normal past tenses, leading your readers up to the specified time, then go on to the end of your story. Using the flashback technique makes your story more exciting. (Surmelian 5-10)
The scene shouldn't be cluttered with information, comment, biography, psychological analysis, description of the setting - the author introducing in third person. At its best it is somewhat stark, unfurnished. Ideally and by its nature the scene is action pure and simple, and should be freed of those elements in the story that do not quite belong to it, though necessary for the total picture. Much may be smuggled into a scene, especially if it is a long one, in small doses, a little there, and the reader will take it in with the action without pausing to distinguish the narrator's voice from the character voices. There are few pure scenes in fiction, but the writer should clear the decks before he gets to the action and make it carry, if possible, the final punch. A good scene requires preparation and is the crest of the waves in the story line.
2.10 The Summary
Not everything can, or need, be shown in fiction. The writer can also tell a story. Summary needs a teller and this is admittedly a weakness, it does not have the seemingly spontaneous movement of the scene, it is not something acted out before the eyes of the reader, who is listening to somebody tell him about it. But summary has its rightful place in the structure of the story and can be extremely useful. Summary brings in the author, or his alter ego, his spokesman, unless it is summary by character, in which case it becomes dramatic. There is a change in voice from scene to summary and from summary to scene, and the r...
