MAKE A SCENE!

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream." Jorge Luis Borges

www.joanneweck.com

If writing is a guided dream, then as a writer I need to make that dream vivid (but more comprehensible than the average dream). Thus the "guided."

Dreams often follow no logical sequence, but a fiction writer's work is to create a dream that draws the reader in and keeps him involved as it progresses through conflicts to climax to conclusion.

How does a writer guide a reader through that dream? By creating one scene leading into another, each one connected and vital to the overall plot.

As a screenwriter you must think visually and concisely, but you have only sound and visual images to work with.  In writing fiction you also have the opportunity to appeal to the other senses as well.

Not only must you make the reader see each scene you set, you can draw him in more completely by adding the sense of taste, of smell, of touch.

This is true for any writing, fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry, but it is especially important if you are creating a world of science fiction or fantasy that has never existed in our "real" world. Concrete images and details of the senses can lure the reader into life in another dimension or onto another planet.

In my short story "Flight of the Fairies" (first prize winner in a Fantasy Gazetteer contest) I tried to create a very vivid picture of ordinary life to which I added an element of fantasy in the concluding scene. By basing the story in a realistic setting I created a believable familiar world so that as the story shifted into fantasy the reader followed. WRITE ON!