THOUGHTS ON WRITING THOSE BIG SCENES

New Year. New Novel. First drafts can be quite a slog after three weeks of writing anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 words a day, when you know all you’re doing is putting in the essential groundwork before polishing and refining the story, before the real writing begins, before the novel really starts to take shape. But it is perhaps, day by day, the manner in which those big important scenes remain in early draft form that is the most frustrating part of the process, how a writer knows they will have to return time and again, how they will have go over individual words, sentences and paragraphs on umpteenth separate occasions until getting things just right.

      

Whenever I have to leave a big scene unfinished, no more than an outline, I think of all the great scenes from my favourite books and wonder how much rewriting went in to making them so powerful, effective, thought-provoking. For instance, I remember a brutal, harrowing scene from Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a story relayed by an old man about Japanese soldiers on a covert mission in China, how they are captured by a Mongolian detachment led by a sadistic Soviet officer. When one of the Japanese soldier’s refuses to cooperate, the officer gives orders for one of the Mongolians to skin him alive. It’s a hard read. Each incision, grimace, agonized scream relayed with such clinical clarity, it’s as if the reader is witnessing the barbaric horror first hand. A scene which stays with you long after you have finished the book.

Or the famous scene from Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum where the protagonist Oskar goes to the beach with his family. On a nearby rock, they see a man holding a thick rope out to sea, like a fishing line. Suddenly, he leaps up and begins to haul the rope in, pulling a horse’s head out of the water, full of wriggling eels trying to eat the remaining flesh on the skull from the inside out. The man starts to pull the eels out of the horse’s head from the mouth, through the nose, through the ears and stuffs them inside a sack. Horrified, Oskar’s mother (along with many a reader over the years) drops to her knees and vomits. Again: a scene that lingers long in the memory.

Or the poignant, symbolic scene from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea when the luckless old fisherman, after hours of struggle, eventually lands the giant Marlin, hauling it in and fastening it the side of his boat, only for it to be attacked by sharks. No matter how hard the old man tries to fight the sharks off, battering them with oars, they still manage to tear off the choicest parts of the Marlin. This particular scene always resonated with me, for I see it as hugely symbolic of life itself, how a person can work hard for decades, struggle, scrimp and save, and still have nothing to show for it in the end, how there will always be some merciless predatory bastards hellbent on taking everything from you, and by whatever means.

But perhaps a scene that made the biggest impression on me can be found in Jean Paul Satre’s novel The Age of Reason. While best known for his philosophical works, Satre’s Road’s to Freedom trilogy set in and around the Second World War is incredibly accomplished, compelling work of fiction. In the scene in question, disabled patients at a hospital in Paris are being evacuated from the capital by train. Two patients, both crippled, a man and a woman, end up on stretchers in the same carriage. As the train shunts off from the station, they strike up a charming conversation, build up a rapport, there is a hint of romance in the air, that perhaps they will see each other again when they arrive at their destination, that something good and beautiful might come out of the grimmest and most unlikely of situations. But when the train grinds to a halt due to a damaged section of rail, the two characters are left unattended for hours. As time passes, they become increasingly desperate to relieve themselves. Seen from the point of view of the man, the tension builds up, an excruciating internal dialogue plays out in his head, where he is willing his body not to let him down, to embarrass him. Vividly he pictures how ashamed he would be if he soiled himself in front of the young lady who has made such a pleasant impression on him, awakening things he thought long since dormant. Just as he feels he cannot control his bodily functions any longer, he hears an anguished sob. A moment later, the horrible, unmistakable stench of faeces starts to waft around the carriage. The young woman could hold out no longer. I like this scene because it encapsulates both a lofty sense of humanity, two people randomly meeting, potential romance, intimacy, with our physical limitations, the way circumstance can render us helpless as a new born baby, how the inexorable march of history, fate, can trigger a global conflict, can kill, maim and displace many millions of people, as if they are no more than pieces on a chessboard in a perpetual state of imminent checkmate.

Not to jinx things, I won’t tell you anything about the new novel that is taking shape each day, or any of the big scenes I’m so looking forward to working on in earnest in the coming weeks and months. If you can’t wait till then, why not check out my amazon page for all my published work to date:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neil-Randall/e/B00JYXI862/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1