There are some writers who write stylish, poetic prose . . . aaaaaand then there are writers like me. I’m what I think of as a visual writer, that is, when the muse hits, I scramble down the movie that I see and hear in my brain. The upside of this is that writing is fun. I get to “live” the story along with the characters in the same way we live a movie.
The downside is twofold. First, it took me an embarrassing number of years to discover that I wasn’t in fact getting down as much of the sensory details as I thought. Rewriting was difficult because the sight of my words when I tried to revise brought the movie rushing back. It was pretty humiliating to discover that a reader didn’t get the movie from my skimpy, too-often banal words: my prose was not doing its job in getting that movie from my brain through the words to the reader’s brain.
Second, when I did manage to get it all down, there was all this . . . scaffolding.
You’ve probably been traveling, and seen great monuments being worked on. You blink past that rickety scaffold to the monument itself, and after a few seconds you don’t really notice the scaffold, except maybe to wish it hadn’t been there. But you go right on examining the monument. Well, when some of us write (I think mostly visual writers, but could be wrong) we are busy trying to anchor down point-of-view and the sequence of action. That’s scaffolding.
A few days ago, Steven Piziks was talking about some of this sort of stuff, here. But there’s more! Like:
I crept down the dank hall. Suddenly the cell door creaked open. I looked up and saw a hand pulling the door open to reveal that a tall man was there. “I was waiting for you,” he said. Krakatoa Gumnip! And in his hand he held a pistol.
If we take that in bits, the first sentence is okay. But do we really need that ‘suddenly’? When we’re writing, the pace of the scene is a lot slower than when a reader reads it. We know that—it takes months or years to write a book, and hours to read it—but we can forget that when we’re writing. I’ve discovered of late that about 90% of ‘suddenly’s can go, as the action coming next is ‘sudden’ for the reader unless the narrator indicates a slow or gradual change. Without that ‘suddenly’ the pacing actually seems quicker.
Next come two really boring verbs (‘looked up and saw’) for a single action—in fact, a single unnecessary action, because we already know we’re in the narrator’s point of view. The rest of that bit feels like it’s cinematic, but it’s very labored: we’re seeing a hand after we’ve learned that the door creaked open, we’re told twice that the door opens, then the door reveals a tall man.
If we remove the scaffolding, what do we get?
I crept down the dank hall. The cell door creaked, revealing a tall man. “I was waiting for you.” Krakatoa Gumnip! He held a pistol.
That doesn’t have any sensory additions, or figurative language, or style, it’s just vanilla prose. Bare bones prose. I want the bones to do their camera work before I start adding stylistic set dressing, costumes, music, and smells.
Here’s another example, one from the first draft of a book I have coming out in a year or so.
Mathan looked up, turned and stooped over the bed. He shook out the neatly folded quilt at the foot of the bed, then started to spread it over the unconscious boy. His first sight of the boy’s form and his matted hair made him pause. He turned to his wife. “He’s got a wound. His skull is cracked.”
With the scaffolding gone, it looks like this:
Mathen shook out the neatly folded quilt, then paused. “He’s got a wound.” He spread his fingers in instinctive protection, not quite touching the boy’s matted hair. “His skull is cracked.”
Phrases that often show up as scaffolding: He was the person who spoke, which could be just He spoke; She turned and left could be She left; Behind me, someone said . . . since the narrator can’t see the speaker, we can assume the speaker is out of sight, therefore, just Someone said . . . Other words or phrases to keep an eye on: immediately, It had occurred to . . ., somehow, just. ‘Just’ is so small a word, but when it begins cropping up several times a page, the cumulative effect can add to a slower pace.
Finally, here’s a great trick to find out what words one is overusing: make a Wordle of your ms. If any of the big words are scaffolding, maybe it’s time for global search-and-destroy.
Oh, the Wordle idea is a great one, thank you!
The wordle idea is great. I’m a kinethestic learner and use a lot of scaffolding; and I cannot live without. so I have to put it down in all its boringness before I can dig through to the real story.
I’m also using it on a slightly larger scale than you seem to – not just on sentence level, but to work out where everybody is in a room and what they are doing. In second draft. much of that (as well as the dialogue I need to listen to until I get to the important bits) can be struck out.
Green-Knight: there is nothing wrong with that. I think that many of us really need that scaffolding in order to keep control of the story elements. It’s just that it took me decades before I saw what it was, and learned to remove it once I didn’t need it!
I hope this post will save somebody those years.
That was marvelous practical advise. I do that exact thing and I can never figure out why I can’t make the damn thing sound smooth. Its the scaffolding!
I just ran my WIP through Wordle and discovered my most used word is “back.” I’m astonished, honestly, and I’m going to search through to see what the heck I’m doing.
At least it’s not “that” anymore.
Great article! Saundra Mitchell recently wrote about this–she refers to this as removing cruft, crutches, and repeats.
My characters tend to smile at just about every dialog tag in first drafts. Bunch of grinning idiots, they are–until I edit it out of them.
I have a theory, Sherwood–and it’s that it’s not that you are visual (or that the other commenter is kinesthetic)–not specifically. It’s that analyzing an experience is often done through the physical senses (I saw this, I felt this); therefore, so is conveying at the most practical level. But (good) fiction writing attempts to go beyond conveying experience, by putting the reader in the same position as the pre-analysis (fictional) protagonist. So, we’re trying to impart direct experience, and we have to be so good at both creating/imagining *and* analyzing sensory data so that we can convey the internal feelings/thoughts without groping for analysis-language.
Scaffolding is just your translation mechanism, which you then have to strip away to get to the meat.
I don’t think that’s a deficiency, by any means. Sounds like a good method to me!
The scaffolding in the second sentence of your second example, with Mathen stooping over the bed and shaking out the blanket, I rather like. I missed those in the improved example. I did like “He spread his fingers in instinctive protection” in the improvement–that was cool, a good way of putting it. But that was improvement to the first iteration by way of a new addition, not by way of removing scaffolding.
I do take your point about not muddying the action with lots of stage directions, but I do like some of those stage directions, sometimes. Getting rid of **all** scaffolding strikes me as like getting rid of all adverbs, or all long sentences with dependent clauses. I do also take your point about phrases that creep up a lot. Sometimes it may be appropriate to use “He looked,” but if “he” is always looking, that’s not so good…
Phoebe: on my first drafts, the people tend to nod like dashboard dolls!
Asakiyume: You’re right . . . I might actually add in the shaking of the blanket, and I certainly will be adding sensory details, but when I do, I will want to use more vivid verbs, etc. The way I first wrote it, that graph was just a slog to get through. Stripping it down and then being aware of additions is something I’m still trying to learn.
Merrie: there are so many ways to express these things, and it gets more problematical I think because writerly brains can work so differently. I hope by talking about my experience, someone can relate to a part of it, or maybe think about a thing in a new way–even if it doesn’t actually map onto their experience.
Very good. My process would add, not to be too fast to remove the scaffolding/packing-peanuts. As long as the passage is obviously full of clutter, I know it will need attention later. If I just make it look better by getting rid of the obvious trash, that doesn’t mean it now has the right stuff instead. For me, adding the right stuff, the ‘telling details’, needs a more creative energy than the negative energy of cutting out trash.
Another workaround I use, is to flag with /// or such, little gaps that need to be filled with good specific words.
Sherwood,
for me learning about scaffolding was a key moment – suddenly I could see which bits could be cut and which bits needed to be fleshed out. And I fully agree – it’s not ‘bad’ it’s a necessary part of the process.
My personal guideline is that if I polish something for the third time and I’m *still* not happy, it probably needs to go completely. (YMMV).
Sherwood: “I hope by talking about my experience, someone can relate to a part of it, or maybe think about a thing in a new way.”
Certainly, you do that for me!
Was noodling about this more on the drive to work, and I realized I have scaffolding of a different sort–PLOT scaffolding. A lot of characters spend time thinking about next moves or pondering their motivations. Urgh!
I think of those as scene scaffoldings, but plot works too. The most common one I see in workshops are what Bickham called sequels: a character sitting alone in a room trying to figure things out. Midway in a book, after a slam bang action sequence, that could be just the ticket, but starting a book with that, or having a series of scenes like that so as to get the data across to the reader faster (or while writer and characters figure out what’s going on and what to do) can be . . . slow.
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Really good point. I often find a lot of what ‘s in the first draft is fundamentals of who is where and what they’re doing, also wha tthey feel about what’s going on. It’s only later that I become really sure of the scene and can then be more elegant about the storytelling.
As I go through my first draft, I make a hit list of words that are doing that job. I may not be ready to remove them immediately, but there’s a hit-list for search and replace when the time comes (and one of them is ‘suddenly).
I’ve always been tempted to put an entire novel through Wordle but never dared – I thought that many words might cause it to seize up and die! However, I just ventured over there and found my most repeated words were the characters’ names – which can’t be so bad.
Justin over at the Dead Robots Society podcast mentioned “Scaffolding” on their podcast and I didn’t realize it was a problem until I heard that. But it struck a cord and I followed the links here.
Great article. And I plan on using Wordle a lot in my rewrite.
I do have a question: How did you handle the second problem of “getting down as much of the sensory details” that you needed? I know I have that problem in places too.
Mike: we talked about that a bit in the following article (on the next Sunday) but basically, what does your character need to know? Sometimes that’s a better gauge than what you think the reader needs to know.
The reader isn’t as invested in the story as the writer is, especially at the beginning, so it’s probably better to forget about the reader. But if the characters need to know something, usually the reader wants to know, too.
Hi,
am so interested in scaffolding reading comprehension and writing for secondary school students but could not find imperical studies on these skills, can I get help? Thanks
Samar: that’s because there isn’t much out there for students. When I used to teach high school, I ended up having to invent a lot of my own material. There is a great deal on how to get kids to write, but almost nothing on revision.
One thing I used successfully was Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, which doesn’t use terms like “scaffolding” (most writers end up inventing their own terms) but is designed to help any writer become more conscious of process and prose.