Make the Situation Different by the End

Two sisters sit in their mother’s kitchen and discuss what to do with the house. The dialogue is accurate, the objects are well chosen, a kettle is observed, and forty minutes of reading later they leave carrying the positions they arrived with. Every line is true, which makes the scene hard to cut, and truth to life is a poor guide to whether a scene is needed.

In the third act of Hamlet the prince comes upon the man he has sworn to kill and finds him on his knees. Claudius is alone, and Hamlet has a sword. “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.” Claudius has just admitted, to no one, that he cannot pray while he keeps what he killed for, the crown, his ambition, his queen, and Hamlet has the chance he has circled for most of the play. The audience holds both facts and Hamlet holds one.

Hamlet sheathes the sword on an argument. To kill a man at prayer would send him to heaven, and that is wages, not revenge. He leaves, and Claudius rises and says it plainly: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” The prayer failed, and Hamlet’s reason rested on something false that only the audience knows. Nobody on stage announces the change. In the next scene Hamlet drives his sword through a curtain at a cry behind it and kills Polonius, who is not the king.

Robert McKee, writing for screenwriters in Story, boils the test down to two questions. At the top of the scene, name the value at stake in a character’s life (love, truth, safety) and whether it is charged positively or negatively; at the bottom, name it again. If the notes match, he says, the scene is a nonevent with activity but no change. His stated ideal, a story design in which every scene is a turning point, large or small, he offers as something to work toward.

The change need not be a bigger event. If one sister realizes the other has already called the realtor, and says nothing, the kitchen scene has changed more than a car chase that returns the driver to where he began. In memoir the test becomes what the narrator understands at the end that she did not at the start, a form that comes from Vivian Gornick’s distinction between situation and story, which she illustrates with Elizabeth Bishop’s waiting-room poem (Practice 15 tells it). In reported nonfiction it is what the reader now understands about a person.

The reason seems to lie in expectation. An unstable condition is an open question (will he strike, will she tell?), and attention tends to attach to one; a changed ending answers part of it and opens another, while an unchanged one leaves the reader’s forward pull nowhere to hold.

Some scenes set up a stable condition so that a later one can break it, the ordinary morning or the household routine. Even they earn their place by being charged, by hinting that they cannot last, and a work whose subject is stasis has to change the reader’s sense of how long it can go on.

Practice. Choose a scene you suspect is flat and spend twenty-five minutes on it. Write two sentences, one for its opening condition and one for its closing condition, each saying who knows what, who holds power, what each person intends, how they stand to one another, and what could happen next. Underline whatever differs, and if something does, check that the page makes it visible. If nothing does, ask what the scene is protecting: information the reader needs (move it into a scene that turns), a mood (can it ride inside one?), or your affection for it.