By now, if you’ve done the first module, you should have an excellent mental image of the nature and quality of what I’m calling your “test space.” Now it’s time to Populate it with the characters who will bring it to life.

My choice of preposition is deliberate here. We’re going to start with moving your characters into your test scene. While you will undoubtedly have scenes that you join with your characters already in the spaces, often enough you’ll have to find ways to indicate that they are entering the space.

Keep your mind open. Use all your senses. What you start with here probably won’t be where you end up. This is an exercise in tuning into all the movement possibilities that could start your scene. Going into the sensory aspects and figuring out your characters’ states of mind can help make sure you get the emotion on the page, that you don’t overlook some telling detail that will bring your scene to life.

Start with your protagonist

However many characters are in the scene you’re using, for this lesson, I’d like you to start by maneuvering your protagonist into it for the first time. In other words, entering the space toward the beginning of your story. In order to do so, you’ll need to know:

• Where they were immediately prior to the scene
• What are their expectations on entering the scene
• What is their mood on entering the scene
• What is their physical condition on entering the scene

You’ll also need to know these things about the space:

• What the entrance to the scene looks like (door, path, etc.)
• How easy or difficult it is to enter (locked door? steep path?)

And anything else relevant to getting your protagonist on stage, so to speak. The goal here is not so much to execute a beautiful piece of writing, as to “see” the movement and understand how the movements and the space interact.

Keep in mind that in real life as a writer, all those conditions you’re thinking about in this test case could be different too. It’s a question of being open to accepting possibilities that may be very different from the ones you initially thought of.

The exercises in the first module were focused on gaining awareness of the static spaces themselves.

Now we’re adding awareness of the details of moving characters into, out of, and through those spaces.

And here, there are fewer absolutes. What you may think is the obvious way for a character to enter a room could, as you think more and more deeply, not be the way that serves your narrative goals the best.

This is all a roundabout way of saying there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Example: Anna goes to the ball

My hypothetical protagonist for this test scene is going to her first ball.

I’ll call her Anna for these purposes. Anna has been hiding in the retiring room, where she can be quiet and private and it won’t be obvious no one has asked her to stand up with them.

She expects to be a wallflower, can foresee nothing but embarrassment and mortification in her future. She also thinks she won’t know anyone. Consequently she’s in a low mood, and possibly also keyed up and nervous.

She may, in addition, have physical sensations associated with her movement: new shoes pinching? Dress itching?

How she gets in there

The retiring room is off a saloon, where people are milling around and talking, mostly some of the chaperones. It’s not a direct route to the ballroom, she has to at least turn a corner. There’s a door on the retiring room, but the ballroom has large double doors that are open, so there’s no barrier to overcome to enter the space.

Her barrier to entering the room is an internal one.

A very rough, awful scene with way too much detail!

This bit of writing is just to make sure you’re fully seeing your protagonist as they go into the space. (The next module is where we get to the pretty words part.) Also, you may want to experiment with an alternative series of movements into the space. For my example, Anna could be coming down a grand stairway to the ballroom, for instance, which would create a very different scene. But here’s my plodding effort—just to awaken my imagination to what my protagonist sees, hears, touches, and feels as she’s entering the space:

Anna’s mouth was dry and her hands shaking. She walked to the door of the retiring room, trying not to rush or drag her feet. She reached out for the handle and lifted it, and, letting a flood of voices talking merrily in the saloon wash into the retiring room, stepped through the door and closed it behind her.

She had to weave through small groups of talking people and stop every now and then to curtsy or shake someone’s hand. She was wearing long gloves, tied on above the elbow, but her hands became more and more sweaty inside them as she made her way through the room.

At last she came in sight of the open double doors of the ballroom. The music spilled out into the saloon and became louder as she approached the door. She didn’t see how full the ballroom was until she stepped into it. A line of twenty couples wove through the figures of a country dance. Chaperones sat on chairs and settees pushed against the wall. The orchestra of two fiddles, two flutes, and a spinet was raised off the floor in the corner by a low dais.

She skirted around the dancers looking for an empty chair to sit on, her knees starting to quake.

Obviously the scene will continue from there, but we’re just getting her into the room.

Enter character 2

Assuming you’ve chosen a test scene that has at least two characters in it who interact with each other, now you’ll think about the second character (or other characters). Go through the same process as you did with the protagonist. It could be the character is already in the space the protagonist is entering, which is fine.

Continuing with my example of a ballroom scene:

My second character in the scene will be the male protagonist (since this is a romance). He is already in the ballroom, standing over to the side (not dancing).

He’s afraid he’ll make an idiot of himself on the dance floor, and that no one will want to dance with him—especially not the female protagonist.

He’s uncertain, shy, but also keyed up and nervous.

He’s physically aware of his starched neck cloth.

How he gets in there

He’s already there.

A very rough, awful scene with way too much detail, this time from his pov!

Joshua is standing in front of one of the tall windows in the ballroom, watching the entrance, looking for Anna, who he wants to dance with. His view keeps being obscured by the movements of the country dance, couples skipping and whirling in the figures.

He’s hot in the crowded room, afraid his neck cloth and shirt-collar points will soon wilt, but eager to make an impression. The duennas on the settee next to him between the windows are critiquing the dancers and what they’re wearing, and it makes him even more nervous. They snap their fans open and shut and whisper behind them.

Suddenly he gets a clear view of the open double doors of the ballroom and sees Anna standing there. His collar feels tight, his throat is dry. He makes his way through the milling couples and chaperones, keeps losing sight of her, and generally feels as if he is making a fool of himself.

We now have our two actors on the stage in relation to each other. After this it’s time to see what happens when they come into contact with each other for the real scene, the interaction between them that will move the plot along and give us deeper insight into the characters.

At this point, your reader may have some idea, some expectation as to what will happen next. It’s up to you either to fulfill that expectation or upend it, and that will depend on where on your story arc the scene occurs. For instance:

At the beginning of the story: The two protagonists might make the beginnings of a connection with each other, say something that puts the other at ease and leaves it open for something positive to develop between them.

In the middle: There may be some sparks between them they’ve been suppressing, but the reader feels this scene might nudge them on the way. But something unexpected could happen to throw a wrench in the works (he discovers she’s been forced to become betrothed to someone else, e.g.).

Near the climax: Instead of becoming closer, they end up having a bitter argument that turns them away from each other (an “all-is-lost” moment).

Near the end: They could wander from there out to the garden and become betrothed.

How you set up the scene (get your characters into it) will help set reader expectations, to be either met or upended. For instance, Joshua’s reaction when he first spots Anna could be a whole range of emotions, depending on what has happened (or not) to that point. If you don’t paint this picture, evoke it through his manner of moving and perceiving, you risk creating an emotionally vacant scene.

For right now, overdo rather than underdo your description of the movements and what the characters are feeling.

A fun example

This long passage from Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls is a great example of how evocative entering a space can be when you see it through the protagonist’s eyes. Granted, Gilbert gives us a space tailor-made to be over the top. What is really important to notice is the literal choreography she communicates at the end. It’s worth going back to this in the Articulate module, for obvious reasons.

She pushed open the big doors that led into the playhouse itself. I’m sorry to report that Olive Thompson entered her place of work with the demeanor of one who might rather not touch anything within it, but I myself was dazzled. The interior of the theater was really something quite stunning—a huge, golden-lit, fading old jewel box of a place. I took it all in—the sagging stage, the bad sight lines, the hefty crimson curtains, the cramped orchestra pit, the overgilded ceiling, the menacingly glittery chandelier that you could not look at without thinking, “Now, what if that thing should fall down . . . ?”

It was all grandiose, it was all crumbling. The Lily reminded me of Grandmother Morris—not only because my grandmother had loved gawdy old playhouses like this, but also because my grandmother had looked like this: old, overdone, and proud, and decked to the nines in out-of-date velvet.

We stood against the back wall, although there were plenty of seats to be had. In fact, there were not many more people in the audience than onstage, it appeared. I was not the only one who noticed this fact. Olive took a quick head count, wrote the number in a small notebook which she had pulled out of her pocket, and sighed.

As for what was going on up there on the stage, it was dizzying. This, indeed, had to be the end of the show, because there was a lot happening at once. At the back of the stage there was a kick line of about a dozen dancers—girls and boys—grinning madly as they flung their limbs up toward the dusty heavens. At center stage, a good-looking young man and a spirited young woman were tap-dancing as though to save their lives, while singing at full bellow about how everything was going to be just fine from now on, my baby, because you and me are in love! On the left side of the stage was to be found a phalanx of showgirls, whose costumes and movements kept them just on the correct side of moral permissibility, but whose contribution to the story—whatever that story may have been—was unclear. Their task seemed to be to stand with their arms outstretched, slowly turning, so that you could take in the full Amazonian qualities of their figures from every angle, at your leisure. On the other side of the stage, a man dressed as a hobo was juggling bowling pins.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. City of Girls: A Novel (pp. 24-25). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.