Thursday, September 30, 2010

THE WORST ELEVATOR PITCH IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

Sometimes it seems freaking is my life function. Here is my latest freakout.

L: I'm dividing my young adult book into scenes and I am realizing a small problem. My book has no scenes.

K: How do you define scenes? You can fix it!

L: Imagine my book were a movie. Somebody would be talking deep thoughts about the past with meadows flying by in the periphery. That is it.

K: Oooh -- that would be a good elevator pitch if people thought that would make a good movie. Which, admittedly, most would not.

K: By the way, I define scene as one setting, some conflict happens, or some resolution happens, then it moves onto next setting/scene, for example:

Scene 1: Jane goes to the hospital, finds out her mother is going to be okay from choking on chicken bone, but one small thing: She has throat cancer and that is why she choked. She has three weeks to live.

Scene 2: Driving home with her brother Joe, Jane is crying but it is revealed . . . from happiness. Because her mother exposed her and Joe ritualistic satanic abuse and she's been hoping her mother would die for years.

K: Did you just make those scenes up? I think you just wrote a short short. Send it out?

My other friend K said to me, "Many brilliant books have been written without great attention to scenes. That's what screenwriters are for, writing scenes from non-scene-y books."
Still, I really want some scenes.

Have you ever read a book with no scenes? If not, it's because you haven't read mine.

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