How It’s Made (for Writers)

This newsletter is about craft so if you aren’t into writing craft, get out while you can.  More specifically, this newsletter is about scene counting, that vice of novelists and perhaps almost nobody else.  In case you didn’t know, novelists like to count scenes because we have a fascination with how things are made, put together, constructed, assembled, etc.  When you count the scenes in a novel, what you find out, interestingly, is that it makes it easier to compare novels to each other.  Because one thing almost all novels have in common is that they’re built from scenes or modules, units, compartments, blocks, etc.  What scene counting shows you is that a 110-page novel like The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984) is not altogether completely different from a 617-page novel like The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins (1859) or a 255-page novel like Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (2022).

Don’t think such different books can be surprisingly similar?  Actually, almost all novels have three very important landmarks distributed pretty predictably along their course:  the first turning point, the second turning point, and the climax.  

The House on Mango Street is the easiest to scene-count because it’s made up of 44 vignettes and each one is essentially a scene.  The book is the story of a Latina girl whose dream is to get away from her apartment on Mango Street in urban Chicago and live in a real house somewhere else.  A first turning point in a story usually looks like a setback, so this occurs when she makes friends on Mango Street in Vignette 6.  This goes against her desire to escape.  A second turning point occurs for her in Vignette 24 when a fortune teller tells her she won’t get the house she dreams of.  Instead, she will get a “home in the heart.” 

The climax occurs in Vignette 38 when (spoiler alert) she becomes so desperate about being female on male-dominated Mango Street that she considers suicide.  Notice the distribution of the three events. 1st turning point comes in the first 1/3rd of the book.  2nd turning point comes after the book’s midpoint.  Climax comes in the last 1/6th.

The Woman in White counts out to about 154 scenes and is about an arranged marriage in which the bride, Laura, has her fortune slowly wrested from her by her husband, Percival, but the plot he has concocted is found out by her half-sister, Marian, and the man Laura really loves, Walter, and they decide to try to get her fortune back. 

The 1st turning point comes early, in Scene 12, when Laura and Walter meet and fall in love and she then confesses she is promised to another man.  It’s a setback for Laura because she is now even unhappier about her coming marriage.  The 2nd turning point comes deep in the book, at Scene 75 when Marian uncovers Percival’s plot, giving Laura an unexpected opportunity to expose him and leave her marriage.  That’s called a reversal of fortune.  All 2nd turning points are reversals of whatever was put in place by the 1st turning point.  (You can read more about this in a book called The Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray.)  Climax comes at Scene 134 when Percival goes into a chapel to destroy a wedding registry.  Compare this to The House on Mango Street.  Note the similar locations of the three key moments.

Emily St. John Mandel’s book Sea of Tranquility is also a good novel and it has two protagonists, which is a bit unusual, and it involves time travel, and it covers nearly 500 years starting in 1912 and ending in 2400 something. 

The male lead, Gaspery, lives initially in the 2401 time, but starts moving around in time and meets up with the female lead, Olive, in 2203.  Gaspery is a sort of time investigator who is allowed to go back in time to investigate a time disruption of some sort that can’t be explained and seems to involve Olive.  As you can guess, this takes a lot of pages to set up.  The book counts out to about 99 scenes, but is 255 pages, which means lots of short scenes.  So when Gaspery and Olive meet, that’s the 1st turning point, but it occurs in Scene 74.  Gaspery turns out to have an ulterior motive in going to see Olive and he breaks the time-traveler’s prime directive by giving her information about her future. 

The story then moves rapidly to 2nd turning point at Scene 86 and Climax at the book’s very end.  So here’s a novel in which the location of the three key moments is quite different, but they do occur, in order, and the secret behind the time disruption is at last revealed.  

A movie you might check out if you liked “Paris Is Burning” is the quirky “I’m An Electric Lampshade” about a staid accountant who retires and undergoes an amazing transformation into a style icon.