So I personally find it helpful to look at examples of literature that I like, and one of the best authors I know for drawing you immediately into a scene is Roger Zelazny.

If you try to dissect his technique then I would say that he tries to build two or three scenes into every chapter, so every chapter contains some sort of action or movement from one place to another. Then within those scenes, there may be a paragraph of description, usually short (~50 words), occasionally longer (~150 words). This is seldom the first paragraph in the scene, usually there is some sort of action leading into the scene, then this description comes out of it, and then there is some immediate response to the change-in-scene from the characters.

Two examples of those principles

So for example in The Courts of Chaos chapter 4, there is a conversation between the narrator and his brother which ends on a very negative and threatening note, then his brother fades away and the narrator spends the second half of the chapter racing into different worlds in the multiverse. Finally he gets tired and pauses to sleep in a cave where hopefully his brother cannot murder him in his sleep.

As chapter 5 begins, there is indeed a short period setting the scene, but it is interleaved with dialogue and action:

CHAPTER 5

I was awakened by a sense of presence. Or maybe it was a noise and a
sense of presence. Whatever, I was awake and I was certain that I was not
alone. I tightened my grip on Grayswandir [his sword] and opened my eyes. Beyond that,
I did not move.

A soft light, like moonlight, came in through the cavemouth. There was a
figure, possibly human, standing just inside. The lighting was such that I
could not tell whether it faced me or faced outward. But then it took a step
toward me.

I was on my feet, the point of my blade toward its breast. It halted.

“Peace,” said a man’s voice, in Thari. “I have but taken refuge from the
storm. May I share your cave?”

“What storm?” I asked.

As if in answer, there came a roll of thunder followed by a gust of wind
with the smell of rain within it.

In some sense, Zelazny doesn’t draw a distinction between “jumping straight into the action” and “setting the scene.” The opening paragraph does not end without the narrator reacting to the thing that he is seeing, but then a new paragraph sets a little more of the scene, and then a new paragraph of his reaction to the scene, some dialogue, and then even more description of the scene.

So he makes the scene setup interactive with the characters so as not to lose focus. We see some new details and then we see people responding to those details and then we see more details. Zelazny could have put the soft light and rain into the very first sentence, but neither goes there. He wants to start the chapter with immediate action, where something threatening is happening and some conflict is created. But then he backs off of that into some description.

The next big scene in that chapter begins with a slightly more longwinded description as there is more to convey.

So: the narrator makes peace with the stranger, discovers that his horse is missing, sets out of the cave into the rain, which gives us a micro-scene where he traverses the rocks, finds some humanoid shapes moving behind a hidden rock door in the cliffside, busts open the rocky door to enter. Then comes the second major scene of this chapter, which is introduced like so:

Light . . . There was illumination beyond . . . From little lamps depending from hooks along the wall . . . Beside the stairway . . . Going down . . . To a place of greater light and some sounds . . . Like music . . .

There was no one in sight. I would have thought that the godawful din I had raised would have caught someone’s attention, but the music continued. Either the sound—somehow—had not carried, or they did not give a damn. Either way . . .

I rose and stepped over the threshold. My foot struck against a metal object. I picked it up and examined it. A twisted bolt. They had barred the door after themselves. I tossed it back over my shoulder and started down the stair.

The music—fiddles and pipes—grew louder as I advanced. From the breaking of the light, I could see that there was some sort of hall off to my right, from the foot of the stair. They were small steps and there were a lot of them. I did not bother with stealth, but hurried down to the landing.

When I turned and looked into the hall, I beheld a scene out of some
drunken Irishman’s dream. In a smoky, torchlit hall, hordes of meter-high
people, red-faced and green clad, were dancing to the music or quaffing what
appeared to be mugs of ale while stamping their feet, slapping tabletops and
each other, grinning, laughing and shouting. Huge kegs lined one wall, and a
number of the revelers were queued up before the one which had been
tapped. An enormous fire blazed in a pit at the far end of the room, its smoke
being sucked back through a crevice in the rock wall, above a pair of cavemouths running anywhere. Star [his horse] was tethered to a ring in the wall beside that pit, and a husky little man in a leather apron was grinding and honing
some suspicious-looking instruments.

Several faces turned in my direction, there were shouts and suddenly the
music stopped. The silence was almost complete.

I raised my blade to an overhand, épée en garde position, pointed across
the room toward Star. All faces were turned in my direction by then.

“I have come for my horse,” I said. ”Either you bring him to me or I come
and get him. There will be a lot more blood the second way.”

Here we finally get a full longer paragraph of pure exposition. The length of that paragraph is very important because it demonstrates a literary technique of lingering—he could have said “I was shocked to find that a tavern of leprechauns had captured my horse, and was preparing to eat it!” and communicated something similar, but Zelazny is I think purposely taking time to give a different mental image: that this is a really bizarre spectacle that took the narrator a bit of time to wrap his own head around.

Similarly there is some art to the prior paragraphs: Zelazny does not just tell you “the reason it was so hard to break open the door in the last mini-scene was that they had bolted it shut behind them;” he has the narrator pick up a piece of metal and come to that conclusion himself. He has a little bit of a plot hole in that “if the narrator worked this hard to bust a door open why do we get the following revelry and celebration at the party?” but rather than leaving it as a plot hole he hangs a lampshade on it, calls explicit attention to it, and it overall helps to make the following scene even more unsettling.

But in this case there is a bunch of action just to get to the scene-setting paragraph and immediately afterwards there is action as the party immediately stops and the narrator immediately reacts to the stopping of the party with a dramatic flourish.

Take-home principles

I think that my first take-home principle from this is that setup is more natural when interleaved into the story rather than forced into the beginning. I hope I have already talked enough about that.

My second is that speed is golden. Ira Glass puts it this way,

One thing that you should know is that all video production is trying to be crap. Like, in fact all radio production is trying to be crap. Basically it’s like the laws of entropy—you know that thing where all the energy in the universe is dissipating and all the atoms are getting lower and lower in energy?—Well basically anything that you put on tape, from the moment that you put it on tape, basically it’s trying to be really bad. It’s trying to be unstructured, it’s trying to be pointless, it’s trying to be boring, it’s trying to be digressive, much like these sentences that I’m saying right here.

And pretty much you have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way if it’s going to be any good. You have to be really a killer about getting rid of the boring parts and going right to the parts that get into your heart. You just have to be ruthless if anything is going to be good. Things that are really good are good because people are being really, really tough.

Distilling down that first description to ~50 words is hard. It’s hard because if it were me, there would be a temptation for a whole description, “There was a man staring back through the darkness. He wore ragged clothes, blue and gray, under a dark wool cloak clasped with a lion at his right shoulder. He was tough, muscular, but given that he was of Shadow I did not think he would be any match for me. I did not see any weapons but I could not rule out a dagger or two. His beard was unkempt, suggesting perhaps a homelessness or wandering. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘My name is Phineas Bundersnundle,’ he said. ‘I worked as a blacksmith in the town of Tysomere, near here, until my son Farrago passed away. Now I wander the cliffs and reconsider my life choices.’ His tone sounded earnest, sad even.”

And that’s why Zelazny is the master and I am a chump.

The man never has a name. He is neither young nor old. His clothing is not described. Why would he? He is utterly thrown away after this scene, it would be a waste to get you interested in his ultimate fate when he will not be joining you for the rest of the book. His purpose for the whole novel is to establish that the narrator, Corwin, has been prophecied since long before these recent events to come through this random part of the multiverse; it is to raise some greater cosmic questions as well as to set up the following scene by giving a conversational partner to indicate that a visible storm of Chaos has started to follow Corwin on his journey across the multiverse: but alas Corwin’s horse has gone missing.

Zelazny omits almost every detail about this man except that he is a man, and yet through their encounter I gobble up pages and pages of narrative without those details. My brain just fills it in. I do not need much detail in order to continue reading with great pleasure, my brain is happy to operate without all of this detail.

My third take-away is that longer descriptions slow the pace of the story. When Zelazny lapses into details it is because he wants me to linger on a point, to take my time, to fully experience something. In the first case it’s “OK there is a man and he is not a threat and they are talking,” in the second it’s “I busted open the door, I looked around, it was really strange, I walked down the stairs, still really strange, I got to the bottom and turned at the bottom, saw very strange sights, called out a threat,” lingering on each of these details as a Descent into the Unfamiliar. It should not surprise you that Corwin then gets drunk with the leprechauns and the horse wakes him up with a loud whinny only for him to discover that they are all descending upon him with knives in his sleep. This is not a “heaven” to be in, but a “hell”, and his unfamiliarity with the situation causes him to make unwise choices which cause trouble for him.

And then there’s the question of why the leprechaun encounter happened at all: presumably Zelazny could have cut it, but wanted it in there to serve a real, deeper point. Apparently running straight through the multiverse as fast as one can go is a very dangerous and strange/unexpected road. One discovers that one passes through parts of the multiverse through which one was prophecied to pass long ago, parts that perhaps are itching to descend upon you with knives if you do not keep your wits about you. Lingering in this place by losing your horse serves a greater purpose of raising these questions about free-will and fate and giving a sense that this is a really dangerous journey that the character is engaged in. (It also serves in a more roundabout way to introduce some more of the powers of an artifact that the main character is carrying, which we have only ever seen doing some relatively menial things to do with controlling the weather but which we know is capable of doing more.)

So there is a lingering even in the choice to keep these scenes, and that is done with some express purpose for the reader; and in some cases the descriptions of the events contain a lingering, and that is done with a slightly different express purpose. But overall the descriptions are a lot shorter than I expect them to be and there is a great trust from Zelazny-as-author that this will make the experience more nimble and entertaining for me-the-reader.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!