Archive for April, 2010
Rewriting “The Piano Teacher” for stronger scenes
Yesterday I came to the end of The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee. It’s an intriguing read, and highly suspenseful—but among other things, it has reminded me of John Gardner’s injunction that actions in a scene should nearly always be described in chronological order.
This is a point of craft I regularly teach to my nonfiction writing students at NYU. Gardner’s argument is that getting the sequence right avoids jarring readers out of the dream state that makes good fiction so compelling. I make the additional argument that even with nonfiction, correct sequencing helps with clarity, allowing readers to understand what’s going on the first time through a passage.
And now I have found still a third reason: it makes the action not only clearer, but far more dramatic—especially if the scene is already a good one.
