Make A Scene Read Online Free PDF Page A

action. Then, as she stands there huddled against a barstool, frightened and unsure, a seedy looking man approaches her—and so your drama begins.
    Perhaps this man makes her an indecent proposal—to do something she does not find palatable in return for money—and she is desperate enough to consider it. This is a complication. You have just upped the ante, and she now has something to lose—possibly her health, integrity, or her morality—in order to gain what she needs—money, food, and shelter. The reader will worry for her, which creates suspense and anticipation. The reader will not be able leave this poor girl's side; they will have to know what happens next.
    And what will happen next? First, remember that the reader is your omnipresent witness. Don't draw the curtain between yourself and him and then report back passively later. Don't stop the complications either. Though you may want the bar fellow to turn out sweet and help Britney out of the kindness of his heart (because you love your character), the middle of your scene is no place for him to turn out to be a saint. Save that for a surprise ending. Scenes need dramatic tension in order to enact their tugging power on a reader. If he turns out nice, the reader can put down your narrative and sleep easy, and you don't want that!
    Consider using a handy little graph that one of my editing clients found useful for working out complications in her scene middles. Make four columns and rows on a page like so (they can be longer rows than these):
    A scene can unfold in a couple of paragraphs or two dozen pages. As long as Britney is engaged in the action with this seedy stranger in fictional real time—a streamlined series of events without a break in time—and in a single location (the interior of a moving car or other vehicle counts as a single location), your scene can be as long as it needs to be.
    You need to make whatever happens to Britney in this scene complicated enough that it compels the reader to go on to the next scene or chapter. And you have the same task ahead of you for future scenes.
    TECHNIQUES TO UP THE ANTE
    Learning how to torture your characters and complicate their lives takes practice and a bit of a thick skin, which can be built up. A note of warning: While complications build anticipation and drama, you should not make things difficult on characters just because; complications have to reveal character and push your plot forward. It's hard to be cruel, so here are some specific techniques to add complications to your characters' lives in the middle of scenes.
    The Withhold
    Your characters need goals, desires, and ambitions to appeal to the reader's sensibilities. But to create the juicy tension that keeps a reader turning pages, you must dangle the objects of desire just out of reach at times, using a technique known as withholding.
    There are many things you can withhold in scenes, such as emotions, information, and objects. Let's take a closer look at each.
    Emotional withholding comes in many forms: A father withholds his approval of his son, no matter what the son does to win him over; a woman withholds her love for her abusive husband, and he abuses her more in the hopes of securing it.
    One of literature's most powerful illustrations of emotional withholding is found in the novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Even after protagonist Humbert Humbert, who has a predilection for nubile young girls, possesses young Lolita by becoming her legal guardian after the death of her mother, Lolita gives him her body but withholds the one thing he truly wants: her love and respect. The entire novel is a series of intense, often difficult, scenes that show Humbert's desperate attempt to finagle the perfect circumstances for Lolita to love him. The act of withholding, which Nabokov employs in one form or another in nearly every scene of the book, makes it possible for the reader to tolerate and even empathize with Humbert and nearly forget what he