Saving a Dying scene

Inspirational writing advice: If you have a lagging scene, amp it up by imagining what could make the character's situation even worse--then do that!

For a year, maybe even more, I've struggled with writing this scene that I knew was very pivotal in my novel: a Christmas day family meal. Something was missing--it was really bugging me. I've rewritten it a few times, even shared it with others. I couldnt' identify what was wrong or how to fix it--until the other night.

The original purpose of the scene was to place all these people in close quarters at a dining table to ratchet up the stresses and strains between the people present--husband and wife strained to the breaking point with anger toward each other, a husband's burden to confess to his wife an affair, piqued painfully by the presence of her pregnant best friend who shares his indiscretion, and a mostly uninvited guest with possible romantic innuendo with one of the said wives. plus usual parent-adult child stuff. What I'd written didn't deal with any resolutions to any of those big conflicts--just small conversational arguments that can break out among people with very different beliefs and ideas. I liked the tension between the surface arguments--what was said out loud--and the under-the-surface conflicts and what people were thinking, but not saying.

In July I blogged about this problem in How to Write the Holiday Meal? and told myself, after exploring through writing the blog:
Should there be some high drama, or just the rumblings of all these little conflicts? Hmmm...that's a question I've never entertained before. Does someone snap? And if so, who? Ash could--he's under stress, even though he's normally so mellow. That'd be a surprise. Ginny could, easily, but I'm not really sure what that would accomplish in my story.


I revised heavily before Christmas, but I'd never really advanced anything for Ash, Mr. mellow, to snap about.

Then, the other night, I was just thinking--not trying to solve this problem, just thinking. I was thinking about another chapter, one that happens later, about when Ash's mother comes to see his new house--it's a pivotal point in the plot--the revelation of a secret neither Ash or his mother know is a secret, but that Ash's dad has been keeping. Suddenly, curled in the darkness of my bed, I thought,"What if Ash's mother came to that holiday meal and all the conflict of that later scene is added to what's already going on in the holiday meal scene?" My eyes flew open and I didn'tfall asleep for a while, my mind whirring with the possibilities.

I've mostly written it now. I had to change the timing a bit to accommodate other practical plot points--the holiday meal now occurs on New Year's Day, and I cut a couple characters entirely to add in Ash's mother and her boyfriend. As I began writing it, I began to see I would be writing the scene from more than one point of view. My original was from only Ginny's point of view (Ginny is Ash's wife) My new version starts with GInny's view, then switched to Ash's, then to his mother's. I realized it had to be in that order, from the least aware, to the most aware, so the reader can see how each person sees the situation very differnetly. If I started with Maizy, Ash's mother's point of view, it'd ruin our experience of Ginny's and Ash's POV because the secret would be out.

 As I unpacked all that each was thinking, I think I found narrative gold. There's so much dramatic tension now because while Maizy is silently living her turmoil of the secret her ex husband kept from her, Ash her son, completely oblivious to any of that, takes his mother's odd behavior as her disapproval directed at him--which then leads him to jump to the conclusion that his Dad told his mom what he shared in confidence--that he'd had an affair and had to tell is wife. I found my way to shake Mr. mellow. I get him to snap!

I recall reading some advice somewhere that a great way to amp up a scene is to just add more to it--think what more bad could happen and then make it happen. I also recall a writer saying to me once that the climax of a novel could happen for all story lines in a simultaneous moment. I never really saw how that could be true, at least in my novel. Now this scene may not be the novel's climax, but it sure is a high stress point, and I somehow stumbled on how to overlap two story line's crisis points and have them be set off simultaneously. It's very energizing!

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