The Building Blocks of Fiction: Making a Scene

(WSP 154)

The writer Jerome Stern once observed that like a child throwing a tantrum, when you want someone’s full attention you “make a scene.” Scenes are the basic building blocks of fiction and use dialogue, physical reactions, sounds, thoughts, and more to create a vivid experience for the reader. Each one involves a confrontation or turning point of some sort and so moves the story further along. In this two-day workshop, writers will learn when to use scene rather than summary (and what the difference is), where to begin and end a scene, and how to use concepts from filmmaking to create more vivid fiction. The instructor will walk students through the creation of a scene, step-by-step, in class and guide them through additional exercises to hone important elements of scene development, such as conveying emotion and crafting dynamic dialogue.

Rusty Dolleman, Former Stegner Fellow

Rusty Dolleman received an MA in English and Writing from the University of New Hampshire. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review and The Beloit Fiction Journal, among others. His short story, “September, 1981” was named in “One Hundred Other Distinguished Stories of 2007” in the 2008 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Dolleman is currently at work on a novel.