Make a Weak Scene Strong With Three Simple Tips

Reference for writers: You can make a boring, run-of-the-mill scene amazing if you just take the time to expand your prose. Add description, add dialog, add emotion, all in just the right amounts - not too much, not too little - and BAM, you've got magic.

Let's start with this weak scene. Four people were running through an abandoned Little Debbie plant trying to escape the zombie apocalypse, and two are now unable to go on.


Glenn and Darren were too injured to be moved. We couldn’t do anything but leave them to the zombies. We ran through the door and locked it behind us. Their screams as the zombies began to attack them were muffled by the door as we ran down the hallway toward the exit.


Those four sentences go by so fast, the reader might just get further into the story and say, "Hey, wait, what happened to Glenn and Darren?" So now, let's make sure the reader can't miss what's going on. Let's make this scene as strong as we can by expanding the sucker out until it hurts with as much description, dialog, and emotion as we can use without tearing a hole in the fabric of spacetime (or causing readers to toss the book in disgust).


The bandage on Darren’s leg was now so soaked with blood that there was no sign it had ever been white. “I can’t do it,” he sobbed, dropping a semi-conscious Glenn from his shoulder and sliding down against the corridor wall. “My leg’s goin’. I can’t even feel the damn thing anymore.”

“No!” I growled. “I’m not losing anybody else to these freaking zombies. Get your ass up!”

Darren pushed down against the grimy concrete floor of the abandoned plant, straining to lift himself to his feet. With a frustrated roar, he collapsed back against the wall. “I can’t! Damn it!” Darren pounded his fist against the floor. “God damn it!”

Rose and I exchanged glances. Neither of us weighed half what either of the men did. There was no way we could carry them and escape, and Darren knew it. It would be impossible to save them.

The once-distant moans were now so close there was hardly any echo to them. “We gotta go,” sobbed Rose. “I can’t lose you, Darren. You gotta get up.”

Darren’s eyes glistened with tears. “Sorry, baby girl. You gotta go without me.”

Holding back a sob, Darren turned to me. “You tell ‘em,” he choked, “back at the camp, you tell ‘em Darren gave ‘em hell.”

“I will, Darren,” I whispered. “You bet I will.”

Darren pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster with a shaky hand and pointed it toward the end of the corridor just as the first zombie rounded a corner. "Run!" he shouted. "Run now!"

I grabbed Rose by the arm, pulling her down the hallway toward a set of flaking blue double doors. "No!" she screamed. "No! Darren!"

Above the sound of zombie snarls, I could hear Darren's Glock firing, each explosion echoing through the empty pastry factory. I hit the double doors running and threw a struggling Rose through, slamming them shut. I shoved the master key from the maintenance office into the lock and yanked it over, locking Darren, Glenn, and at least a hundred zombies on the other side.

Darren's Glock fell silent. I turned away from the door, not wanting to see the scene on the other side through the window slits. Rose's wracking sobs filled my ears."Don't fall apart on me, Rose," I ordered.

Rose nodded, sniffing. She was a good kid. She'd get over it, with time. I gripped her arm and began running toward the cracked sign marked EXIT, muffled screams chasing us down the hallway. "Don't think about it," I yelled. "Just run!"

The doors behind us began to shudder. The screams died in a barely-audible gurgling. And we burst through the outer doors and into the sunlight.


Now then... which story would you rather read? Both contained the same scene. But by expanding our scene, we gave our rewrite power. Gravitas. It made you feel something. And that's what great writing is all about.

On the SCOTUS Marriage Decision

To my social conservative friends and family members:

I support deregulation of marriage. Marriage is a social institution with a long history of redefinition. I do not believe that the federal government has any place in marriage.

 The federal government should be involved with protecting individuals from unfair treatment by state laws: true. This should include ensuring that the status of "married" has nothing to do with approving or denying any benefit.

I am happy that, within the current social structure, the federal government of the United States has affirmed that gender should have no bearing on the eligibility of two people to marry. However, I believe that a greater victory would be removing "married" as a federally recognized status of any sort.

Accordingly, I celebrate with my brothers and sisters the newly-granted recognition of their unions across the entirety of this country while simultaneously mourning the continued involvement of the federal government in the private sphere.

Why British Literature is Essential to the Communication Skills of the Future

Dr. Bryce Christensen, Chairman of the Southern Utah University English Department, recently posed this problem to his students:

Despite his own love for literature, commentator Tim Gillespie acknowledges that "literature . . . [is often] devalued in the conversation about communication skills of the future." Indeed, Gillespie finds himself having to respond to "pragmatists" who feel that "no one needs literature to be a productive worker, competitive in the global economy. In fact, one can be highly successful in the marketplace with no knowledge whatsoever of literature. . . . The important reading matter of the future will be information, the main reading skills information-gathering and information processing. In other words, "pragmatists" are convinced that "literature is not essential." ...How would you respond to the issue Gillespie raises? Why should 21st-century students study literature--British literature in particular? What are the benefits of such study? How can the doubts of the pragmatists and skeptics be answered?

I have to chuckle at these "pragmatists and skeptics" who would say that literature is not necessary for the workplace. Where did they learn their theories? What training did they receive that gives them the authority from which to comment? The answer is that they learned it from the literature, invalidating their own arguments!

Sadly, for many years pedagogical training focused on the pragmatist point of view - children in public schools need to be taught only the basics of reading and writing, some mathematics and technical skills, and they will be ready to go be good little worker bees on assembly lines across the country. This idea was based on skills actually used in the most common workplaces when these theories were generated (the early 1900's).

But, In order to remain competitive in a global marketplace, businesses now need entry-level employees who can think on their feet, communicate fluently, perform in a variety of positions, and come up with better ways to do their own jobs. Students graduating with the skills required for 1912 are completely unprepared for 2012, making a college degree a requirement for many entry-level positions. Why? Because experience has taught employers that most high school graduates are not ready for the workplace. The majority of high school graduates were unable to think beyond what was presented to them, trying to find better solutions - they could only implement the solutions given by others. The more advanced training in university science and liberal arts programs focuses on getting students to think for themselves, try out several answers and come up with something that might work. Most new graduates, taught to sit in a classroom and be quiet, were also completely unprepared to communicate with other members of their team and their supervisors. The emphasis on discussion in literature and theory classes in universities and the requirement to succinctly state a problem and the possible solutions in advanced science courses prepares young people to communicate in the workplace.

British literature, in particular, is necessary for communication. Many high school students are graduating with little understanding of anything more than the conversational language they speak in their homes. Words such as eschew, ubiquitous, superfluous, uncanny, and poignant (now among my pet words) are lost on the average high school graduate (I've had many comments on these words as people have read my writing). The difference between latter and former when selecting between two options may be as inscrutable as an ancient Egyptian papyrus. Yet these terms may well be found in any number of work-related essays, proposals, and instruction sets. For a supervisor to continually have to explain the "big words" to her team members is a waste of time, energy, and money.

The current pedagogical push from kindergarten on is responding to this new paradigm. Children are now expected to read classics in their public school classrooms. The new Common Core exemplar texts range from excerpts by Homer, Ovid, Voltaire, and Kafka in 9th grade to Chaucer, Poe, Austen, and Hawthorne by graduation. In the past, many of these books may have been presented to Honors and AP students, but these texts are now recommended for all English/Language Arts classes. The thinking has shifted. Pragmatists and skeptics who still believe that literature is not required are out of touch with the realities of the modern workplace. Literature, far from being unnecessary, is vital to the communication skills of the future.

A Particularly Poignant Word

Poignant - resulting in keen distress. The word comes to English from Old French, descended from the Latin pungere: to prick or pierce.

Over the past week, I've felt precisely this distress as three separate students in three separate upper-division English classes talked about how "poyg-nant" a certain passage was to them.

Allow me to point back to the definition - the word comes to us from Old French! Just as mignon is not "mig-non," poignant is not "poyg-nant" but "poin-yant."

It never ceases to amaze me how many people learn a word from a book and proceed to use it without ensuring they are pronouncing it correctly or even using it in the proper context. In a previous class, a student began speaking of Poe's work as "MACK-a-bray." Really? Because I've always found it to be quite macabre myself. But nothing beats when a classmate described the ideas of a literary theorist as "fick-TITTY-ous." After the initial reaction of holding back a blast of laughter, I couldn't help but wonder if he was even sure what "fictitious" actually meant.

If we were living in the 1980's, I could understand some of the errors. After all, checking a dictionary or encyclopedia for pronunciation and usage in that era would, for many, have involved a trip to the local library. But today we have both dictionary.com and Wikipedia. There's simply no excuse - the answers are just a mouse click away. If anything is poignant, it's the fact that these painful mispronunciations still exist in the age of information.

Star Wars as a Nō Play

I recently discovered the art of the Japanese Nō play. Nō is a highly stylized form of performance art, acted by skilled male artists. A Nō play is acted on a polished cypress stage of a specific size, with a "bridge" linking the stage to a curtained green room. The actors perform a sort of dance as they speak and sing their lines, each tiny gesture filled with meaning.

Nō plays traditionally involve an aspect of the supernatural, with ghosts or gods making an appearance in the play. At some point in each play, there must be a point where some character reveals himself to be other than he is, often a god or ghost posing as a man (or woman). These plays involve the use of masks to show that an actor is old or young, male or female, man or god.

So what does Nō have to do with Star Wars? As I was thinking about the idea of someone in a mask revealing their true self, I couldn't help but imagine an actor making that terrible revelation: "No, Luke. I am your father." At first it was just a comical extension of Star Wars into a place it didn't seem to belong. But then, suddenly, it wasn't.

You see, George Lucas loves to pull ideas from other cultures, including Japan. In large part, the original Star Wars film is based on Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. So why couldn't Star Wars show the influence of Nō?

As I pondered I came to my own revelation: Most of the big revelatory scenes occur during lightsaber battles, and most of the lightsaber battles occur on catwalks or in narrow hallways. This felt suspiciously like the revelatory bridge from a Nō play. I'll point out two examples:

1. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan battles Vader in a narrow hallway. As they fight, they reveal their past relationship. Then, at a key moment, Obi-Wan raises his lightsaber in a sort of salute and is struck down by Vader. But suddenly he is not there, revealing himself to be more than just a man, returning later as a "Force ghost."
2. Empire features the famous climactic scene scene in which Luke battles Darth Vader. They range all over a "stage" (the carbon freezing platform) and end up on a catwalk, where Vader gives his infamous pronouncement, revealing himself to be Luke's father (a man, rather than a faceless god).

A further bit of evidence relates to motions with the Force. Just as in Nō plays, a small gesture is intended to signify a larger effect - Obi-Wan moves his hand slightly to show that he is influencing someone's mind. A twitch of a hand can Force-push someone across a room. And what about Darth Vader's famous Force choke?

The more I look into this, watching scene after scene of the various Star Wars movies, the more I come to realize: It's not so much that you could adapt Star Wars into a Nō play, it already is an adaptation of Nō play. Bravo, George Lucas!

Writing Dialogue

Dialogue is always troubling to a grammar nazi. Since good dialogue imitates actual speech, it is rarely if ever grammatically correct. In fact, if you as a writer find yourself writing grammatically correct dialogue, it's time to start over.

Grammar nazis, pay attention here. Dialogue should be full of partial sentences, interjections, incomplete thoughts, etc. But you can't just record people talking and use that. Strangely enough, some real dialogue, when written, doesn't work at all. There's a strange distance between what people really say and what they think they say. Because of that disconnect, real dialogue often looks odd on paper.

The best bet is to write your dialogue, then read it out loud. If it sounds strange, revise, revise, revise. Read it out loud to people. See what they think. Have different people read different characters. Give the characters their own voices.  Don't be afraid to use slang. And write a lot of short sentences.

There is no reason to be afraid of dialogue. You use it every day. Just don't try to be Herman Melville.

The Bathroom Stall Dilemma

If you're anything like me, your mother always told you never to use the first stall in a public bathroom. There was never any explanation, just a statement of rule - as if it were written on a stone somewhere in the Universe by the hand of an immortal being.

Of course, there's a problem with this maxim - if everyone's mother tells them not to use the first toilet stall, then who is using it? Which stall SHOULD you use? In this odd installment, I'll outline the pros and cons of each toilet stall.

Stall #1: Your mother always told you not to use it, because logic would appear to dictate that, as the closest stall to the door, it would be the most used and therefore the filthiest. It follows, then, that the first stall is used by those who weren't warned away by their mothers. These are often children, who can be very messy in the bathroom. Also, the first stall is often the "emergency stall" for people who are having intestinal issues. So stall #1 may be a bad choice.

Stall #2: For those who automatically skip stall #1, stall #2 may be the automatic first choice. This means it is used at least as often as stall #1, but probably by more conscientious bathroom visitors. As such, it is likely to be cleaner at the very least.

Stall #3+: If the bathroom has at least 4 stalls, stall #3 may be the best bet. It probably gets used less than stalls #1 and #2, simply because it is further from the door. Any stalls between #3 and the last stall are probably okay to use without too much worry about how often they get used in a day.

The Last Stall: Always avoid the last stall, if possible. Just like the back seat of the bus and the last row of the classroom, the last stall is an invitation to troublemakers. The last stall is often where toiletgoers will find the most offensive graffiti and carvings in the entire bathroom. It is also the most likely to be the only stall in which the toilet paper roll has been torn completely from the wall, with any toilet paper perched precariously near the toilet and bearing suspicious-looking water stains. At all costs, avoid the last toilet.

And, now that this bathroom bit is coming to its conclusion, some simple words of advice: don't just blindly walk into a stall or skip a stall based on rules. Whatever the number of bathrooms, check each stall until you find one that meets your standards. And always, always make sure it has toilet paper before you sit down!