Exercise #13: Using Habitual Actions to Generate Specific Scenes
Hi friends,
Hello and welcome! I hope this letter finds you and yours healthy and safe, and that you’re experiencing some relative calm as we move further into 2021: in so many ways, February 1 had more New Year’s Day energy for me than January 1 did, given what a fraught last month of 2020 and first month of 2021 we had here in the U.S. Hopefully better things are ahead, even with all the challenges that remain in front of us.
In my own writing, I started a second draft of a new novel at the beginning of the year, and have spent most of January writing and rewriting the opening chapter over and over, trying to get as right as I can before I move on. Doing so has made me think of Zadie Smith’s “That Crafty Feeling,” one of my favorite essays on writing, where she relates a much more extreme version of the same process:
Opening other people’s novels, I feel I can recognize fellow Micro Managers. Their first twenty pages are like mine: a pile-up of too careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed. In the case of On Beauty my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. I really felt I was losing my mind. I can hardly stand to look at my novels in general, but the first twenty pages of each in particular give me heart palpitations. It’s like taking a tour of a cell in which I was once incarcerated.
Two years, writing twenty pages. I’ve been lamenting how little “progress” I’ve made this month, but that’s only because it’s hard to give up the perceived pressure to be “productive” or “efficient.” Really, I know I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing, and that the time I spend getting this opening right will pay off later, in other parts of the manuscript. I’ve been through this a few times now, with other books, and I know now to trust in my writing habits, to let myself take the time my process needs on each stage. Even if I sometimes wish it were different!
This month’s exercise is about habits too, specifically those you give your characters in early drafts. As always, if you write something you like from it, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this month, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
“I Just Want to Hang Out in the Wardrobe” by Amber Sparks, published at Electric Literature: I love this essay so much, about the adult desire to inhabit the in-between spaces of childhood portal fantasies: “The liminal space, as it relates to children’s literature, is a truly transitional place into magic, a hushed, dusty hallway between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Perhaps the most tragic thing about them is that you can’t stay there, no matter how much you may want to. They are not like Oz, or Narnia, where you can stay for a hundred years, becoming kings and queens and heroes before you finally decide to go home. They are not stopping places at all.”
On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu: I’ve been a fan of Yu’s speculative stories for years now, and have had the pleasure to be on two panels about eco-fabulist fiction with her over the past decade. She’s a marvelously smart and generous writer, and her debut novel is not to be missed: a fabulist story about refugees fleeing Afghanistan for Australia, it’s one of the most surprising and moving books I’ve read recently. (I’ll be in conversation with Yu at her launch at Auntie’s Bookstore on 2/3, if you’d like to join us.)
Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses: Craft in the Real World is almost certainly going to be one of the most discussed books on writing and teaching writing published this year, and I can’t recommend it enough. This is a generous, intelligent, challenging book, by one of my own favorite writers on writing. Don’t miss it.
Exercise #13: Using Habitual Actions to Generate Specific Scenes
As I begin a new draft, it often takes me a while to figure out where exactly a story begins—what’s the inciting incident?—as well as what the status quo of the story was before that incident. That doesn’t usually stop me from writing, but it does affect what I write: in the earliest pages, I find myself penning lots of habitual action, where many similar events are combined into one aggregate rendering.
Here’s an example, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:
Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad. The child had his own fantasies. How things would be in the south. Other children.
There’s nothing wrong with habitual action, in and of itself, and this is a particularly well-written example of the form. It depicts an activity the characters frequently engage in, especially as it occurred before the start of the present narrative, providing compressed, efficient backstory and character depth. It also can be a jumping off point for change: things were like this, back in the status quo; later they will be like this, once the story properly begins or once the characters undergo some change.
One way to learn to recognize these passages is to look for indicator words or phrases—sometimes, often, always, usually, every day, on Saturdays, and so on—which tend to preface habitual actions. Here’s an example from Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, this time with the indicator words in bold:
Mr. Parker was not the only one who saw a worthy employee in Elwood. White men were always extending offers of work to Elwood, recognizing his industrious nature and steady character, or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with this passage, as it stands: it’s letting us know that there’s a pattern surrounding Elwood, in the way white men see him, without taking up much time on the page. But it’s worth noting that Whitehead could have given us a scene in which one of these job offers was made, which would’ve delivered similar information in a different way.
The danger of habitual action, as it manifest in my own early drafts, is when there’s almost nothing but habitual action on the page: so many summaries of what a character always does, so few specific, telling scenes in which they do it. Eventually this creates a narrative drag, where no matter how wonderfully I think my prose is, nothing is ever happening in some specific time. Instead everything is always continuously happening, defeating any sense of progression or change the story might otherwise create.
(A couple brief asides, hunches presented with no real evidence: my guess is habitual action takes up proportionally more space in published short stories than novels, and more again in flash than in full-length stories. I’d also guess that the more lyric a prose style, the more habitual action, because many more sound-driven writers tend toward narration and summary over scene.)
But habitual actions isn’t the only way to deliver the status quo. In fact, in the early pages of novels, savvy readers will naturally assume that most of what’s presented represents the general state of the character’s life, without this being explicitly stated. Therefore, instead of constantly presenting the character’s current state or backstory in summary, we can change at least some of the habitual action to specific scenes in which we see a character act in a way that is representative of a larger trend in their behavior, with the added effect of scenes have more opportunity for action, dialogue, and direct expressions of character and emotion.
My gut sense is that anything that occurs before the clear inciting incident of the story will be taken as habitual action by the reader. If we see a character being cruel in the first scene of a story, then we will assume that character is generally a cruel person; if we see them failing to stand up for themselves once, we know that they’ve probably failed in this way before. Showing a character at their job in scene suggests all the other days and years they’ve spent working in their field, without needing to detail them.
This month, your exercise comes in two versions, one for one for revision and one for generating new work:
For your revision exercise this month, rewrite at least one habitual action passage from a work-in-progress into a specific scene. Take a draft of a novel or story already written—especially one that feels like it’s dragging somehow—and do a search for the habitual action indicator words you know. (Try: Sometimes, often, always, usually, every day, on Saturdays, every summer, every weekend, every workday, etc., as well as certain uses of would.) In each passage you find, ask yourself if there would be any benefit to writing a representative specific scene, instead of the habitual action. What would be gained? What would be lost?
One metric to help you decide whether or not to translate the habitual into the specific: does the action pertain to something that needs to change about the character or their situation over the course of the story? If so, consider writing it in scene: anything directly related to the plot of the story probably does the most work presented as in as dramatic a form as possible, which usually means in-scene.
Pick at least one passage that seems like it might benefit from the change and give it a go. You might be surprised how much urgency gets generated as you rewrite: in my own early drafts, I often find that habitual action rarely suggests what to write next, while in-scene passages almost always do.
For your generative exercise, you’ll practice writing both kinds of passages, beginning by writing a passage consisting of nothing but habitual actions, one after another. Aim for 500 words or so, or whatever length it takes to generate at least a half-dozen habitual actions, in sequence. Once you’ve finished this, reread your passage and analyze what’s there as in the revision passage above. Of the habitual actions you’ve written, which one would benefit the whole piece the most, if translated into scene? Go ahead and write that scene, trying to leave the surrounding habitual actions as intact as possible, to maximize the contrast between the two levels of dramatic detail.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.