I finished The Scene Book by Sandra Scofield. I thought this was a great book and here’s why.
My own story is told entirely in scene. That’s just the way I write. So I looked for a book dedicated to helping with scenes. This was the best one I found in terms of on-topic. I like to look at a book’s table of contents on Amazon but this book didn’t have one so I scrolled down the page to the reviews. The reviews gave enough information about the contents that I knew this was something I needed to read. Yeah Amazon!
A small note about cover design. If you don’t think your cover artwork is important, think again. This book’s artwork is wonderful. It tells me, right off the bat, that the information is going to seem like notes from a college class. Love it! It was also easy to find among my stacks of books because I’m not in college anymore.
The Scene Book
Scene Breakdown
The basic and advanced issues of a scene are covered in several ways, including example text from books, and the exercises at the end of each chapter are amazing. Usually the exercises are the part I skip because they seem juvenile compared to the text. In terms of writing exercises, this book is second only to Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass.
References
Each chapter has so many writers, stories, and writing teachers that I had to make a list. The references seem much more literary than my usual material so each name was new to me. If you aren’t into literary writing, don’t worry, the readings are short. Annette Sanford’s Housekeeping was my favorite. It might be a shorter version of Eleanor and Abel.
Scene Openings
Most writingbooks discuss the beginning as the first sentence. After ten or twenty books cover this, I wonder if the authors really think they have something new to add there. This book doesn’t care about the opening sentence but instead focuses on the opening of the scene. There are many examples so you can get some ideas for your own work in progress.
How about you?
What are your favorite stories for scene or favorite writing books for scene?