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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