Episode 330 - Writing the Moments that Matter with Rene Gutteridge
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Rene Gutteridge discusses WRITING THE MOMENTS THAT MATTER, including how real-life dramatic events translate differently to film and to fiction, why interiority is the novelist’s greatest advantage over screenwriters, how to slow down a high-intensity scene so readers feel every decision, choosing the small unexpected details that make a scene feel real, why every chapter needs both a purpose and a hook, and why your job as a writer is to make your character’s life miserable until the very last page.
Rene Gutteridge has been writing professionally for over twenty years, with projects spanning fiction, non-fiction, comedy sketches, novelizations and screenwriting. She is the multi-genre author of 24 novels plus several non-fiction titles. Her indie film Skid won deadCenter’s Best Oklahoma Feature, and her novel My Life as a Doormat was adapted into the Hallmark movie Love’s Complicated. She is co-writer on the feature film Family Camp, which was a Movieguide award winner and a Dove Award nominee. She is also a Screencraft finalist in true crime. Rene is co-director of WriterCon in Oklahoma City, senior contributor at Writing Momentum and is the head writer at 231 Collective.
Episode Links
https://www.facebook.com/ReneGutteridgeAuthor
Summary & Transcript
Rene Gutteridge is a multi-genre author of 24 novels and several nonfiction titles whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, comedy sketches, novelizations, and screenwriting. Her indie film SKID won deadCenter’s Best Oklahoma Feature, her novel MY LIFE AS A DOORMAT was adapted into the Hallmark movie LOVE’S COMPLICATED, and she co-wrote the feature film FAMILY CAMP. Returning for her third appearance on the podcast, Rene was originally scheduled to discuss the choreography of a scene—but an extraordinary personal story took the conversation in a different direction, exploring how real-life dramatic moments become compelling fiction.
A STORY THAT CHANGED THE CONVERSATION
Asked to share a fact listeners might not know, Rene described the time she saved a young girl from being kidnapped. Driving to pick up her own children from school, she noticed a girl she had been keeping an eye on struggling with her bike. After passing the girl, Rene checked her rearview mirror and saw an unfamiliar car stop. Something about the interaction felt wrong. The driver popped the trunk, the girl put her bike in, and Rene made a split-second decision to turn around. She found the car on a dead-end street, blocked it with her own vehicle, got out, and confronted the driver—a woman who appeared to be on drugs. Rene loaded the girl and her bike into her car and drove her home. She never called the police, a detail she still finds baffling—and one that became a jumping-off point for a conversation about how real events translate to the page.
NOVELS VERSUS FILM: WHERE THE REAL DIFFERENCE LIES
Rene explained that as a screenwriter she would render that scene visually—the audience would watch it unfold. As a novelist, she would enter the scene through the character’s emotions and interior monologue. The critical difference is interiority: in a novel, the reader experiences the hundred thoughts racing through the character’s mind simultaneously—am I putting my children in danger, have I seen this on Dateline, am I going to look incredibly stupid when this turns out to be nothing. A film has no access to that interior layer without resorting to voiceover or exposition. Matty noted that the competing emotions—genuine fear for one’s children on one end of the spectrum, fear of embarrassment on the other—represent exactly the kind of complexity that makes a scene productive to mine for fiction.
SLOW MOTION AND THE RIGHT DETAILS
Rene emphasized that high-intensity events that unfold in minutes should be written slowly. The instinct is to match the pace of the action, but the craft lies in expanding the moment so the reader feels every decision, every hesitation. She drew a parallel to the Oklahoma City bombing, which she drove up on just minutes after it happened. Of everything she witnessed that day, the detail she remembers most vividly is the sound of glass crunching under her tires. With the kidnapping rescue, the detail that stayed with her was the eye contact she made with the driver through the car window before either of them said a word. These small, specific, unexpected details—not the big dramatic ones—are what readers remember and what make a scene feel real.
THE SAME SCENE, THREE WAYS
Rene and Matty discussed how the same event placed at different points in a novel would be written three entirely different ways. As an opening scene, it hooks the reader with mystery boxes: who is this woman, why is she following this car? In the middle of the book, it serves to escalate or resolve conflict within the existing arc. As the climax, it becomes the moment the character finally rises to do something she could not have done in chapter one. They also noted that the same event written from three different characters’ perspectives—a dad, a mom, a twenty-year-old—would unfold differently each time, because the internal experience would vary even if the external events did not. That layered interiority is something novels can do that film cannot.
Rene also made a distinction between “scenes” and “passages,” suggesting that the word “scene” may have migrated into fiction from film and that thinking in terms of passages encourages writers to slow down and sink deeper into point of view rather than defaulting to visual storytelling.
EVERY CHAPTER NEEDS A PURPOSE AND A HOOK
The conversation broadened into principles that apply to any scene. Rene described asking writers a simple diagnostic question: if you removed this chapter, would your story fall apart? If the answer is no, the chapter has a problem. Every chapter needs a main event—something that serves the story’s purpose and holds the reader’s interest. Beautiful sentences and vivid description are not enough if nothing meaningful is happening.
She also stressed that how a scene ends determines whether the reader turns the page. If every thread is tied up and the character feels safe, the reader has permission to put the book down. The goal is to deny them that permission—to end on a moment that makes them think, I need to know what happens next. Rene framed this bluntly: stop being your character’s friend. The character does not get to be okay until the final chapter. Everything before that is the writer’s job to make their life difficult, interesting, and impossible to look away from.
Matty added a complementary scenario from her own life—finding a stranger’s driver’s license in a parking lot and driving it to the address on the card—and the two spent time spinning out the ways that simple event could become the seed of a thriller, a character study, or a relationship story, depending on where you cut the scene and what you choose to reveal.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Rene Gutteridge. Hey, Rene, how are you doing? and this is the point at which normally I would introduce Rene, but Rene, this is her third appearance on the podcast. She has been on earlier talking about navigating the worlds of fiction and film and what authors
And so my new policy is when that’s the case, when I have a returning guest, they get to share a fact about themselves that the listeners
[00:00:28] Rene: This is so fun. so, you know, I. I have just very few to choose from. I don’t lead in a terribly exciting life, but I will share one thing about myself that I think is one of the most courageous things I ever did. so I one time saved a little girl from being kidnapped, and that’s a fact about myself.
[00:00:56] Matty: Good heavens. Well, of course we have to hear a little bit of detail, behind that. In fact, this could be a great, entree to our conversation. We’re is going to about be about the choreography of a scene, so please
[00:01:06] Rene: Let me, let me paint the scene. So I, I had, I, my children were young and I would go pick them up from school and, I had always kept my eye on this one little girl that walked home from school. she just, she seemed, seemed to struggle here and there and, I, I just, you know, as a mom you just kind of keep your eye on the neighborhood kids, and so I was driving, I, I probably should have.
Exercised and walked to get my kids. It was only three blocks, but I drove to get my kids and we were in our car and I drove past her and she was struggling. She had kind of fallen over on her bike, so I just kind of looked at her and made sure she wasn’t hurt. Kind of slowed down. She was okay. So I kept going and when I got to the first stop sign, I looked in the rear view mirror just to kind of make sure she was okay and a car had stopped and, didn’t recognize the car at all.
And I knew a lot of the cars around there. I had never seen anybody pick her up from school. So I sat there and watched what was happening, and I could tell by the way she was talking to the driver, something was off and the, the driver popped the trunk. she put her bike in and I thought, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I’m sitting there, you know, there’s a, there’s a moment where you think, am I crazy? Like, am I, am I getting ready to embarrass myself? Is this the mother? So I’m sitting there just thinking through what I should do, and I finally thought, no, I just can’t let, there’s something not right, sitting in my heart and spirit and alarm bells are
So I turned around, turned the car around, and by that time the car was gone. But when I got to the next stop sign, I saw it again, the car had turned down, a dead end because they weren’t familiar with the neighborhood. So, and my kids are like eight and five, and they’re like, mom, what are you doing? You know?
And. I blocked the car, from coming out with my car. And I got out and I walked up to the car and she was in the front seat with this lady and I said, do you know this woman? And she said, just, you know, shook her head very timidly. And I said, all right. I want you to get out and. I told the lady, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I should have just
But I said, pop the trunk. We’re getting the bike. I got the bike. this lady looked very much like she was on drugs and I loaded her bike and
[00:03:52] Matty: Wow, that’s incredible.
[00:03:55] Rene: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Matty: out anything more about the woman who had picked
[00:03:59] Rene: You know what’s so crazy, and this is something we can draw upon when we write, and I’ve been through, you know, I guess I was through, I went through the Oklahoma City bombing. So I’ve been through a, you know, two or three traumatic events in my life, and I, in fact, I wrote a blog one time about how to write trauma in a book
Like you think it, it should, and. I was in a little bit of shock, I think, and I delivered the girl to her home. and I yelled at the father. I don’t know why, I guess my adrenaline was, you know, I was like, your little girl almost got knocked. Oh my gosh. You know? And, and I went
I, you know, I just, I thought, this little girl almost got kidnapped and I just went home and just. Thank God that she didn’t, and that was the end of it. It, it’s crazy. To this day, I can’t believe I did not call the police, but to me I thought, well, the, it’s the end, you
[00:05:07] Matty: well first of all, good for you because I think in a lot of circumstances people would just think like, oh, that’s interesting. You know, she’s getting picked up today where she normally
[00:05:18] Matty: That there are lots of lessons we can learn, and especially related to the topic, which is the choreography of a scene.
And I have the feeling every time we talk, we always get partway through our conversation and say, oh, that, that like side topic would be really interesting to talk about. Then we have another episode to talk about it, and I’m pretty sure that’s how this one came about. but because our earlier conversations were sort of focused on, the worlds of fiction and film and what authors should not learn from movies, and so this idea
You know, I anticipate we’re going to be talking about the ways that, people should and should not think of choreography of the way book writers should or should not think about choreography in the sense of movie choreography. but I think that this is such a perfect, example because the way that scene would be rendered in a movie. The way it would be rendered in a book. There would be lots of overlap, and then I think there would be differences as well. when you think about that in your own experience in both, in both books and in film, like what is, what is your thought as a writer, as a screenwriter, as a, a director of
[00:06:23] Rene: Well. One thing. I think again, you know, the perspective of being a screenwriter and a novelist is interesting because I would approach that scene very differently, like the, the kidnapping, almost kidnapping scene, for instance, very differently as a screenwriter versus, a novelist, a screenwriter. I would visually tell
I would emotionally set up the scene and enter it through the character’s eyes. And what I would want to know as a reader is, you know, what has triggered this woman, maybe for the first time in her life? Courageously acting in some way, right? Like, I mean, what, what that day made me turn that car around and how does that make sense in
and so you in, in a movie, I would just very much tell it cinematically, visually. You can see it in a movie, right? Like you can, as I am. Telling the story. Probably everybody is seeing it visually as if it’s unfolding in a movie, but readers experience, seen very differently. And unfortunately film has bled so much into our, Novel, novel writing techniques that I think a lot of writers would simply tell that story visually and wouldn’t dive into the experience of the character a.
[00:08:08] Matty: Well, one of the things you said really struck me, which was you could tell something was off, you knew. Thing was off. And I think that that kind of interiority is probably easier to pro provide in a subtle way, as opposed to in a movie, you either just figure that it’s apparent why. Why they’re following the car that has
Or you might get a kind of a character like, Hmm, I wonder what’s happening, kind of exper expression.
[00:08:40] Matty: but talk a little bit about how you would render that you knew something was off in a novel that would be different than
[00:08:50] Rene: Yeah, so there’s, there’s really. No way to render that on the screen. You have no ability for interior thoughts. So on the screen, in order for that scene to work, you would have had to set up the whole movie up to this point. Right? And it would come to this moment. Will she or won’t she find the courage to go save a child?
Right. And so the, the decision the character makes, will either make sense or the audience will roll their eyes and go, well, that, that’s stupid. You know, why, why would that character do that? And we’ve all done it in movies, right? And we’ve seen the, we’ve seen the scene where we’re just like, that’s is, is not making any sense at all.
So, but in a novel, what you want to do is, Give the reader an experience. And so that experience comes from that interior monologue and. What I was thinking in the moment, which was a lot of things, everything from is this safe for my children to, I’ve seen this on Dateline all flashing through my head, you know, a hundred thoughts
On at once. That is the kind of experience, I mean, when a reader is reading a novel, they want to experience what it would be like to see a child actively being kidnapped and what they would do. That’s the experience they want. You know, what would I do if I were in those shoes? And so that’s all done through interior thoughts, interior monologue, plus we draw other things in.
In the moment we are, we do have to tell it visually, but we tell it visually through the eyes of a mother with two small kids in the back of her van and you know, and I mean there was a very much a sense for me of I am putting my kids in danger. To go save another kid. I, I actively knew that, they knew it.
They were old enough to know mom’s doing something real weird right now. And, they were old enough to, to kind of protest it. Like, you know, and I remember there, you know, it’s very patchy, kind of what I remember, which is true for sort of traumatic and stressful moments. I
I didn’t want to scare them, but I wanted them to understand, the seriousness of the moment, you know, to also, if they needed to do something about it themselves. For instance, duck, if this woman pulled a gun or something like that, you know, and, and it did. I remember it caused a, a silence to fall over.
The, the car,
[00:11:42] Matty: Well, it’s interesting also from the point of view of revealing, you know, thinking about this playing out in a fictional work, that having your children in the car is. It’s handy from the, from the point of view of the writer because you can watch them reacting to the situation. You could have the opportunity of you as the mom explaining to them, you know, verbalizing something, that if you had been in the car by yourself, you would not have had an
[00:12:04] Rene: You would’ve never, no, you might, might be talking to yourself. but it, it’s always handy to have that sidekick
[00:12:12] Matty: Yeah. And I, the other thing I was thinking is the idea of, well, two things that struck me, lots of things struck me, but two of them are, that idea that at the same time you’re worried that you’re putting your children in danger, which is like one end of the, oh my god, spectrum. At the other end of the, oh my God, spectrum is, am I going to look incredibly stupid when this is
[00:12:33] Rene: Totally.
[00:12:34] Matty: And that’s a very interesting and, and productive to plum sort of combination of, of emotions for a fictional
[00:12:44] Rene: That’s the exact right language, productive to plum. I mean, it’s, it’s exactly the kind of complexity. That makes a great scene. you know, it’s, you want the, the dynamics what you don’t want, and it’s certainly a possibility. You could, you could choose this way to write the scene as a woman drives by, sees a kid looks weird, gathers herself.
Decides to turn around with all the courage that she’s always had in every moment, and she runs and saves this kid. It’s like, well, that’s a choice, but an experience with the character is exactly what you are saying. I mean, just as strong of a feeling of am I putting myself and my kids in danger was. Am I going to look incredibly stupid when this is the ant, you know, or something.
so, and you know, this was back in the early. Oh, two thousands when this happened. you know, now child kidnappings are even more prevalent, or at least they’re more known and talked about. so even in that culture, you would need to, very, very much write this into that you, you know, culture and decade of,
how these kinds of things were perceived. and you know, that in that era, even though we knew about child kidnappings, Nobody was saying, Hey, go stop this. If you see it, or if you see something, say something that wasn’t really, going around in the culture, nowadays, it’s like, yes, please embarrass yourself.
Like, you know, go for it. So yeah, there were, there was all sides of the spectrum on this and, I just think that you’ve got to tackle all those, this would be. A very slow motion scene. I think writers might tend to write this scene very fast because it’s an, it happened fast. I mean, you know, if you’re talking minutes and how long I passed her,
Thought about it. Turned around. I mean, we’re talking. A matter of five minutes or less. but the way that you should roll this out when you’re writing it is much slower and the details matter and, and, that always makes a great scene, but it has to be the right details.
[00:15:32] Matty: Well, the, the other thing I was thinking of one of the, episodes right before this, just a couple of episodes back, 325, Reveals as the Striptease of Fiction with, Tiffany Yates Martin. I was thinking back as you were saying this to the conversation with Tiffany and the idea that if this is like, let’s say the first scene in a novel, then.
You’re wondering, you’re both wondering if, if the child is actually, you know, the subject of a kidnapping and how it’s going to turn out, like, will she get rescued? But you’re also thinking, why is the mother behaving in this particular way? Why does she make the choice to follow the, you know, why, why doesn’t she call the police?
Why, does she think to block the street? You know, all the things that you described and either you’ve, if it’s. If it’s the first scene in the story, then you’re planting the questions. But if it’s the seventh scene in the story, maybe you have enough background to know that she’s
Or, you know, setting up that idea of how, how much weight is the, am I going to look really stupid when this is over carrying, with this person as
[00:16:48] Rene: That’s so right, and I mean, this scene in three different spots in your novel will be told three different ways. If it’s your opening scene, you are hooking your reader with a lot of questions and mystery boxes. Who is this woman? Why is she going after this other woman? This is this. This would hook me, right?
If I open, if a book opened like this. I’m like, okay, well this seems pretty promising of what, what’s going to happen. if it’s in the middle of the book, then you would write it. It’s typically, setting something else up. It’s being used to create more conflict or solve another
And if it’s the climactic scene of the whole book, if this is the moment that she finally rises up. And finds the courage to do something she would’ve never done in chapter one, then you write it completely differently. So that’s the, that’s the magic of scenes and. You know, I, I call, I call them scenes myself.
and, and I don’t have any problem with it. I think in our modern writing, it’s a perfectly fine term, but really the proper term is passages. And I try to think through that when I’m writing novels, because it does help you separate. Yourself from writing a movie scene if you’re writing a passage versus, you know, a scene.
When we, the scene I, I, I can’t prove this, this is just conjecture, but I believe the term scene really came from the film world and we’ve adopted it into fiction. But I think before movies, we would call them passages. And, and when you think of it in terms of passages, It allows
and, and it allows you to sink deeper into that point of view, rather
[00:18:52] Matty: Yeah, I like the idea of passage because it does suggest that movement, you know, the a passage from the beginning of that event, that fictional event to the end of the fictional event. And the other thing I was thinking in terms of what is this setting up is I was picturing this scene where. You know, you, you put the, the little girl in her bike in your car, you let the kidnapping woman go, and then somebody else blocks you and says, who are you?
And why do you have this child in her bike in your car? Little girl. Do you know this woman? Oh, you don’t. I’m calling the police. And I thought that that could be like in the, in the, retail, like that could be an interesting setup for. The mom trying to convince someone that
[00:19:37] Rene: Oh yeah.
[00:19:38] Matty: did have like the child’s best interests at
[00:19:41] Rene: I do remember as I was driving off with this kid, obviously I know my intentions, but I just remember feeling so weird. I had another parent’s kid in my car, right? I mean, even though I knew. What I had done, I felt like I really need to do, explain myself, and, and you know, because you just don’t want to have some person’s child in
Explanation. and, you know, not a single car drove by during that time. it was like the whole neighborhood cleared out and it was just me and this car and, , because you would think somebody, if they saw my car, you know, kind of catawampus and then this other car and two adults out and all of this, you would probably take notice and.
There was nothing. No, it was, it was so, such a strange, the way that I remember it anyway was like the whole world went into a vacuum
[00:20:42] Matty: Yeah.
[00:20:43] Rene: it, it was, it was very strange and it, it very
[00:20:48] Rene: I can still remember that woman’s eyes, you know, and that’s the thing when we talk about picking out the correct
which is so important, what you remember from big moments. And, and each, each chapter needs to have a big moment. and you know, this would probably be it in a, in a chapter, but you, what you remember, what your character remembers is, very important in in how they tell it. And. Because they’re telling a story narratively, and we tend to want to.
Tell the big details, but it’s really the small details. Like, I’ll give you an example. When I went through the Oklahoma City bombing, I, I drove up on the bombing just a couple of minutes after it happened. I was on my way to work and missed, missed it by just minutes, thanks to my mom calling, and asking me to stop by her work.
so I drove up on the event with the first firetruck. And you know, it was, everybody knows what Oklahoma City bombing looked like. But what I remember about the event is I remember I was running around the federal building to get, try to get to the place that I worked, and I remember this crunching sound and I couldn’t figure out what was crunching.
I just thought, what is this noise? Well, later, I mean, days later, I. Remember thinking that was glass. That’s what it was. I was running on everywhere was glass. I mean, it was just a solid sheet of glass that you were stepping on, running on or whatever. It’s so funny to remember that detail of the entire event and with this woman in the car, I
I remember us making just. Eye contact before I ever went around to talk to this little girl. I stood there and she looked at me and I looked at her and we had a moment kind of like, okay, this is over. She’s clearly going with me. but it was a, I can still see those eyes through that. It was an old, dirty, beat up car, station wagon.
And, yeah, it was, it, it was a, it was a strange, it was it a station wagon? No, it wasn’t. , because she popped the trunk, but it was very long. It was one of those old, very long cars, you know, from the
[00:23:35] Matty: Well, another detail you mentioned that struck me is that, you were saying how uncomfortable you were with the idea that now you had a child that, that you didn’t know in the car and you had not been given permission to drive this child and so on, for obviously understandable reasons. And I realized that that detail is something you might not even have to present in some subtle way to a
But to me, as someone who doesn’t have children, that’s not as instantly. Understandable as a concern. Like once you said it, I was like, oh yeah, sure, it totally makes sense. But you would need to, plant that in some way for your audience if you know that some of your audience is going to get that very intuitively and some of your audience
[00:24:19] Rene: Ab Absolutely.
[00:24:20] Rene: And every, every character you create, this is going to be a different experience. So it would be fun to write this same e event from three different characters, points of view. A dad, a mom, a
[00:24:36] Matty: Yeah.
[00:24:37] Rene: And how this unfolds with each character. , because it is, it’s very different. And that’s the beauty of novel writing
You know, it’s a, in movies this would kind of unfold the same way. Maybe the actor would play a few things different, right? The actors has to portray the emotion of, of the moment. but visually it would all. Pretty much unfold the same way. and visually it could unfold the same way in an a scene from a novel, but internally, something different is going on with each character, you know,
[00:25:16] Matty: Yeah. Well we talked about the, you know, there, there’re the different characters points of view. There’s the, is this the first scene, the middle scene, or an end scene? it’s interesting to think about how, what does that scene look like if you were driving, if you had just been driving by in your Porsche, by yourself with your.
handbag dog, or, you know, like paint a different scenario where the person’s trying to make these, these decisions. And I think the decision process would be, quite different in all those circumstances. you know, what, if, what if you’re a retired police officer driving past the school than, than that’s putting it still a different spin on
[00:25:53] Rene: Totally. And I, I was a different person in that moment. You know, I’m a very nice, easygoing kind. I like to think person. and when I stepped outta that car, I don’t know what I became, but I just remember being something very different. Like I just walked up. I remember my voice being very low. You know, like I just put on some sort of sense of authority of like, this is done, she’s coming
I mean it, you know, I don’t talk like that,
[00:26:28] Matty: Yeah.
[00:26:30] Rene: you know, I’m kind of a passive person. So, there was something, and I think it’s the motherhood that rose up in me, you know, it was, it was like just something to protect this child. As soon as I saw that lady, I knew. I knew something was very wrong in this situation, so there wasn’t much guesswork to go along with this.
I knew that something was wrong, but, but yeah, I mean, it’s, and, and you want the run up to this, you know, like you said, you know, well, you’ve got to tell me a little more detail of the scene when, when I told you what had happened, how you run up to this scene. Is equally as
you know, what, what you’re doing with the scene and how you’re
[00:27:21] Matty: Yeah. The thing that, this is sort of the other
[00:27:28] Matty: The, the scene from my own life that this story reminded me of is, years ago. OI had stopped at a, a local convenience store place to get gas and there was a, driver’s license lying on the ground, and I picked it up and the, the address was just like a couple of blocks, maybe like half a mile from where the, the convenience store
So I thought, oh, I’ll just like drop, drop the license plate off with a person. So I drive to the house and it was, you know, like a, a suburban neighborhood, like a normal suburban neighborhood. And, So I thought, well, I’ll just put it in the mailbox. And then I thought, well, no, maybe somebody’s noticed that it’s missing and they’re,
So I went up to the house, knocked on the door. This guy answered it. it was maybe like, I don’t know, 50 or something like that. And I said, oh, are you John Smith? And he said, yes. And I said, I, you know, I found your driver’s license in the, in the, in the, parking lot. And he said, oh, that’s, That’s my, my sons.
do you want to come in? And I was like, I can’t even remember if at that moment or later I was like, this would be so easy to set up. You drop a license plate in a parking lot and you wait for some idiot to drive by and like, walk into your house. And I said, no, no. Here you go. I’m
So I did that. I handed over the license plate and I went back to my car. But I thought, you know, maybe because I write, thrillers and mystery and suspense, I, I would think through of all the ways that could go. Differently. And, obviously, you know, one could spin out a
or the person who finds the license plate assuming it’s going to go differently, when in fact it’s completely innocent. You know, there, there are lots of things you could do with that too. Just these ideas of playing through the same basic scenario in your mind. But how are all the ways you can tweak it to make it more interesting for the reader?
[00:29:15] Rene: Well, that’s a great point.
[00:29:39] Rene: And you know, one of the thing, one of the main questions I ask people when we’re talking about this topic and they’re working on chapters, is I’ll say, well, what is the point of the chapter? And. A lot of times people don’t know, you know, they’re, they’re making their way through their story, and they’re trying to get from point A to point Z and, you know, this is a stop off.
And, and when I, when we start to look at us, the question I ask them is, well, if we remove this chapter, would your story fall apart? And they. Oftentimes say, well, not really. And if that’s true, if you can remove the chapter or you can remove the scene and everything keeps going, then you’ve got a problem with the scene.
So you’ve got to, you’ve got to work your scenes for purpose and for interest. You know, those are, those are your two targets. What’s the purpose of this scene in this chapter? What is it working to achieve? Because you don’t want to write just a chapter of, you know, your character going along. And I think that’s what people can’t put their writers can’t put their finger on, is they’re writing a chapter and they know it’s not working, but they don’t know why.
you know, they’ve got all the great description, they’re using the perfect words, their sentences are just flying off the page in brilliance. It, it often is because there’s not a main purpose for the scene and, and you’ve got to identify that with each chapter. Each chapter should have a main event, a main thing, and whatever that main thing is, as you were saying, it’s got to be really interesting and you
And if it’s not interesting. To piggyback on your example, if she goes to the door, hands off the license and the man says, thank you very much, how kind of you? Goodbye. Goodbye. And that’s your scene, it’s, you’ve got a problem, right? Something weird needs to happen. There’s
You know, he, he needs to look at the woman and say, is your name Peggy? No, my name’s not Peggy. Are you sure you’d look just like a little girl I knew named Peggy? Who’s kidnapped from her mother or something like that, right? Like there has to be a very big point of interest in each chapter or your, your reader’s just going to, they’re going to start
They’re going to start reading fast. The last thing you want your readers to do is read fast. , because they know they’re not going to miss anything. You want them to, to where they’re, they’re like, ah man, I don’t want to miss the, this detail. , because this detail matters and this detail
so some that is something to keep in mind is every, every scene in every
[00:32:24] Matty: Well, I was thinking that if one wanted to spin that as from the, from the, you know, the person who lost their license, it was completely innocent. But now the woman who took it to the house. Is like replaying it and decides that there’s something nefarious going on and she decides she’s going to like stake out the house or report
Then it would be interesting to think about how do you, how do you plant that seed in that scene so that when the person gets to the end of the scene or the passage, they’re not saying. Well, okay. I guess that was nice of her, but they’re saying, oh, there’s something else going on
In a way, I didn’t anticipate it getting creepy.
[00:33:08] Rene: Absolutely. Yes. And that’s, every scene needs to be that high functioning. You just can’t have chapters where the ordinary happens. Nobody wants to read about the ordinary. I go from eight to five in complete ordinary. Every single day. You know, there’s just very rarely does anything super extraordinary happen in my day.
So when I get into bed at night and get to read, which is my treat for the day. I, I just, as, as wonderful and polite as it is for you to deliver, you know, that driver’s license, that man better pull you into that house, or you better look behind him and see a woman chained or something to where you’re getting ready to, things are getting ready to
You’re getting ready to go save a woman who’s been kidnapped or whatever the, whatever the scenario is. It, it needs to, it needs to be that high functioning and not, you know, some, something to, take note of here is we’re kind of talking through suspense genre, but the same is true if you are, you know, a, a good novel.
I think just in my opinion, ebbs and flows from, action moments to reaction moments to character moments. So you’ve got the external happening and then you have the internal happening. So you may save a child, right? Or. See something nefarious at your neighbor’s house, and the next scene then can be as important without a lot of action.
The next scene is you losing sleep all night because you’re wondering. What you should do about this John Smith and this weird thing you saw behind him. And, you know, you may be talking to your husband about it, and he’s like, oh, you, you’ve watched too many datelines, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah. get your nose out of it.
And. You know, et cetera, et cetera. You go into some backstory, about her, you know, maybe something happened in her childhood, some, some crime happened. if you’re, if you’re in the romance genre, you know, it’s the action of the two meeting and there’s chemistry and then the
You know, she’s working outer feelings, which can be just as interesting. It’s just that you have to make it interesting. There, there has to be unusual moments happening, that the reader can’t predict that she is going to act or behave in a way that goes against who she is or who she thinks she is, or she’s so ingrained with.
With some sort of worldview that she just can’t, she’s just never going to talk to him again because it’s too much, it’s too involved. You know, those kinds of things. Make a page turner, which is what we want
[00:36:18] Matty: Yeah, I was thinking of the scenario where, not thinking about it in terms of scenes or passages, but just the, the chronology, you know, the. The license plate is found, the person drives to the house. She turns the license plate over to the guy. She goes back to the car, she calls up her friend and said, Hey, guess what I did?
I’m so pleased with myself. And the friend says, are you crazy? You know, that could have been a, been a crazy person. And now the, the person who returned the license is sort of. Taken aback, but also freaked out, like retrospectively freaked out, and that sent her down some path of maybe rethinking things that came up in her past, or now she’s resentful of her friend because her friend, you know, it turns out to be a suspicious weirdo and, but it, it would be less that anyone, one stream of events is right or wrong, but where you cut it, like if
Now she’s, angry with her friend because her friend is suspicious, a suspicious weirdo. Then you have to cut the scene after her call with a friend. You can’t cut the scene with her, in an uneventful way, dropping off the license plate. And then in the next scene, have her talking with a friend. And this coming up because nobody’s ever going to get to the next scene to find out like what the big deal is with, with, that event, with the license plate.
[00:37:37] Rene: That’s completely a hundred percent true. How you end the scene is what gets your reader to the next scene. I always tell people, look. You’re not trying to be cruel, but you don’t want your reader to close that book at 10. PM and go to sleep. You want them to behave badly and decide to lose sleep because they can’t put the
That’s what you want, you, your job is not, you know, their choices. Your job is to get them into a story and they’re so enthralled with it that they can’t put the book down and. A trick of the trade is exactly what you’re talking about is where you stop and hook that reader into the next chapter, and if you tie everything up in a nice bow and they feel the character’s going to be okay, the world is okay.
Everything’s okay, I guess I’m okay. I’m going to go to bed and. They are not thinking about how that character’s doing the next day. So, you know, once a reader cracks open a book, they are with you for 90,000 words. They better buckle up because, you know, this isn’t just a, a calm walk through the forest that your own pace, I mean, you, this is,
You want them to feel like they’re on an adventure, an emotional adventure, or whatever your genre is. So. and it, it does take practice. it’s not natural for us to not tie up our things in bows and put them to bed. You know, we are one, one thing with, rider that I work with that is I continually push them on is stop being your character’s
You know, they just want their character to be okay at the end of the day. This is not what we are going for as writers. our character is not going to be okay until chapter 31 and the end. That’s when our character gets to be okay, a chapter one, and all the way through act two, we are
We, this is not, you know, stop being polite. stop making every conversation end. Well, this, your job is to just mess them up for a good 90,000 words, and then you can tie it up in a bow and the end and everybody’s okay after that. so in the middle of all that, you’re creating a lot of scenes in a lot of passages where they’re having to
[00:40:17] Matty: Yeah.
[00:40:18] Matty: Well, now we spent 35 minutes and never hit the choreography of a scene, so guess what? You’re going to need to come back
[00:40:27] Rene: Well, you know, I,
[00:40:29] Matty: of our con of our conversation today.
[00:40:31] Rene: I guess I’m wordy. I don’t know. I probably
[00:40:34] Matty: I, I love that. I mean, with that opening of fact that people didn’t know about you, it just, that was too good to
And I think that, you’ve mentioned so many ways that people can play with those kind of moments, those moments in time. Like just look around, you think of a moment in time for your own past and, and then try it with different characters. Try it with different. End points in that passage. Try it with different, you know, the person driving a different kind of car now, do you have a different effect than you did,
[00:41:05] Rene: Completely true. And you know, if she had been driving a minivan, which is what all the moms had been, were driving or you know, an SUV of some sort. I may have just driven on by, right? I mean, it was, it was the whole package I saw but also a little something
This would take a second look. And I did. so yeah, it, it’s interesting and you know, when we, we get to talking about the choreography of a scene, super important and hopefully I can give some really good tips. On where to enter a scene, where to exit a scene, how to set up a scene. And then, you know, we, I would love to talk about,grounding a scene and, and making sure that your reader is oriented into, time and place. So, yeah.
[00:41:55] Matty: It’s going to be another lovely conversation. I know, and thank you both for sharing that detail and for, humoring the direction that, that, we took with the conversation. So, I think we’ve just demonstrated it. It’s always so much fun to talk with you, Rene.
[00:42:08] Matty: thank you so much for coming on the podcast again, and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more
[00:42:14] Rene: Oh, thanks. Well, ReneGutteridge.com is the easiest place to find out what’s going on, and I’d love to hear from
[00:42:22] Matty: Great. Thank.