Scene Choice —

Once I had a student writing a story set in 1887 to 1915 or so, in Manhattan and Newport, Rhode Island. The author did copious research and handled many aspects of this job exceptionally well. Her novel dealt with both fictional characters and characters from real life, including some leading American suffragists. The author was incredibly tidy writer. I’d never seen manuscript so correctly punctuated and free from usage errors.

One of the quirks of the author’s style, however, was a tendency to dramatize very incidental events and in these scenes make allusion to the bigger events in characters’ lives, like past marital engagements and losses of family fortune. The monumental events never got depicted in-scene. They were only referred to in scenes where characters walked from their home to the park or sat in a salon visiting.

I advised reassessing scene choices.

Let’s say we have a character shopping for breakfast cereal, milk, and eggs. The cooler door handle is silver, and the foam egg carton squeaks in her hand, and something about the experience causes her to relate, in narrative passing, that she’d been the lead cosmonaut on the Space Shuttle Colombia.

Okay, extreme example. But this was the nature of it. In my student’s work, there were dinner parties and clashes at Tammany Hall, and good action, but there was a tendency to take…