Active Scenes -- We're Livin' It (we hope)

As bluebonnets splash  across the hillsides in TEXAS rright now, LISA WINGATE'S stories floodthe Texas bookstores and home booksheves. Let me share what Lisa shared with our writing group:

Make every scene in your  story a living experience. Show Don't Tell is sometimes approached as a complicated concept, but really it is very simple. Readers want to experience the scene personally. In any great scene your reader should be feeling and experiencing the same stress, fear, emotion, and excitement your character is feeling
-- Make a notebook of good examples to get you into the flow of writing a good scene. Divide is into sections according to the type of scene--action, romance, flashback, etc. Use this to get into the flow when you're about to write or when you're stuck.
-- Let the audience live it. A scene should be a living experience. Consider the most recent brain research on fiction. When we read good material, our brains light up just as if we were going through the actual experience.
-- No over-sharing, please! Trust the readers bring in their own personal experiences. Good writing is like a symphony  Your words are the melody, but in each reader's brain, there is a little conductor ready to pull the reader's personal experiences and combine them with the story. Why is a scene about rejection in junior high school powerful? Because we all know how it feels.  The story begins with the writer and lives with the reader. Trust the conductor in the reader's brain to add new instruments to the scene. Don't over-explain. Readers are smart.
-- Create tension and conflict. How do you create tension/conflict on the page?
   1. Thoughts, feelings, and gut reactions.  Get into the head of your point of view character and ask yourself  what he or she is seeing, feeling, smelling? How will he or she react to the situation?
   2. Use the 5 senses.  Try to incorporate all of your character's senses.
   3. Live it, don't describe it. Show the audience how it feels rather than telling how it feels.
   4. Include a setting that fits the mood. Use the setting to enhance the stress, provide contemplation, or emotion. Storms=crisis, etc.
   5.  Show thoughts and feelings as a reaction to ongoing action in thestory.
   6.  Body language, body language, body language.
   7.  Show how this scene could be life or death in some way.
   8.  Sentence structure -- the rhythm of sentences affects mood and speed of reading. These things give the prose the appropriate feel for the scene.

 In the springtime when Bluebonnets swarm across the highways and byways of Texas, joined by Indian Blanket and Red Paintbrush , we're the most beautiful state that I know!