Tuesday Tidbit: Have you dismantled your scaffolding?

After reading Thursday's post,

Readers don't want us to dillydally around,

did you identify any scaffolding in your memoir's opening?

If so, did you dismantle it?

Coaching Writers by Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry

Readers don’t want us to dillydally around

We mustn't waste our readers' time. We need to grab their attention from the outset, from the first sentence and the first paragraphs of our memoirs.

How do we do that? By deliberately crafting an opening to draw them in.

We need to make our readers curious. To hook them. To keep them reading.

But most writers don't know how to craft an effective opening. In fact, many of us don't even know what, specifically, we want to communicate.

So we scatter a few words and sentences across our computer screen and then we add or delete or move a few words—until we realize we're just flailing around. And we thank God nobody is reading over our shoulder because first attempts can be really embarrassing.

But don't worry. Believe it or not, we are making progress. We are experimenting and, in the process, we're constructing scaffolding which will help us build a sturdy opening. Really.

Our scaffolding gets us going, provides momentum, and helps us zero in on the story we want to write.

"As the tennis player rallies before the game begins,

so must the writer.

And as the tennis player

is not concerned with where those first balls are going,

neither must the writer be concerned

with the first paragraph or two.

All you're doing is warming up."

Leonard S. Bernstein

Decades ago, I learned about scaffolding from Donald Murray, and later from Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry, authors of Coaching Writers: Editors and Writers Working Together. They say, 

". . . Sometimes the writer must write her way into the story, creating sentences that can't appear in the final version but do get the writer to where she wants to go. So the writer erects a scaffold to build the story, but dismantles it to let the story show through."

So then, scaffolding is temporary, a structure that supports the construction of what will eventually stand alone.

Bill Roorbach describes scaffolding this way:

"Good stories . . . leap right to their subjects, perhaps not in draft one, or draft six, but at some point, the introductory apparatus is cut, seen for what it is: scaffolding. You put up the elaborate and complicated and even beautiful scaffolding and build the cathedral. When the cathedral is complete, well, you take the scaffolding down." (Writing Life Stories)

So begin writing, knowing that later you might delete some or all of those initial attempts. (And nowadays, deleting and rearranging and rewriting are so much easier than they used to be—back when we used typewriters, sometimes manual typewriters, and later electric. If you've never typed compositions or articles or books on a typewriter, you have no idea how computers have revolutionized writers' lives!)

Readers will like us and our memoirs better 

if we remove the scaffolding.

Why?

Because they don't want us to dillydally around. They want us to get right to the point.

When we do, our stories have punch, focus, and power.

Look over your memoir's opening. Read it aloud.

And answer these questions:

What is my memoir's main point—the story's purpose? Its signficance?

Do my first few paragraphs focus on or aim toward that main point?

Do my readers need to know this information? Or is it scaffolding—did I write it only to find my way into my story?

Dismantle your scaffolding. Let your story stand strong.

Tips for writing a top-notch opening

Your opening is the most important part to write well—whether you’re penning a book, a vignette, an article, a blog post, or an opening paragraph for the Women’s Memoirs contest. (Did you miss Tuesday’s post? If so, click here. And remember, the contest is open to men, too.)

At the same time, the opening is probably the most difficult part to write well.

Your beginning can make or break your story: An effective opening can entice a person to keep reading—but a weak opening can make a person close the book and walk away.

Before you start working hard to perfect your opening,

chew on this question:

Is your opening the correct opening?

Most of us write our way into stories. We start writing anywhere we can, and that’s fine.  We get down as much as we can, knowing that later we’ll go back and reorganize, edit, rewrite, and polish.

Warming up. Yes, that’s what we’re doing with our first drafts, maybe even with our second and third drafts, too.

Most of us warm up by circling around the heart of our stories. Warming up helps shape our ideas, discover where our story is taking us, and pin down what’s important.

I’m talking about the scaffolding we set up to build our stories.

I first learned about scaffolding years ago from Donald Murray, and later from Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry.  They say:

Chip Scanlan tells how scaffolding in writing resembles scaffolding in construction:

“Scaffolding is the ‘temporary framework of platforms and poles constructed to provide accommodation for workmen and their materials during the erection, repairing, or decoration of a building,’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term.

“In the writing trade,” Scanlan says, “the poles and planks of scaffolding are words, phrases, and sentences that help the writer build.” (Click here to read the rest of his post, Dismantling Your Story’s Scaffolding.)

Whether you’re building a castle or a memoir, the scaffolding must come down.

Look over your WIPs (works in progress) and identify the scaffolding. Those are the sentences that “can’t appear in the final version” (Clark and Fry).

Is it possible that your original opening paragraph is scaffolding?

If so, remove it.

Then, examine your story to determine the best opening. Often the opening—or the idea for your opening—is buried deep within the story.

In most of my writing, I seldom craft the best opening until I’m well into the revision phase.

How about you?

Your assignment this week is to recognize and dismantle your scaffolding. Then begin planning to create the best opening for your piece.

We have lots more to consider

about crafting an outstanding opening.

Be sure to come back next week!

Sprinkle gold coins in the middle

Your stories are important. But will anyone read them? All the way through? A few gold nuggets could make it happen.

Your potential readers have countless distractions and they all compete with your memoir.

Just think of it: the Internet, iPhones, movies, athletics, TV, hobbies, texting, exercising, magazines, Twitter, Facebook, friends, chores, other people’s books—and more.

Twenty-some years ago, I read one brief sentence I’ve always remembered:

“No story has a divine right to be read.”

(Peter Jacobi)

You cannot force anyone to read your stories, no matter how important they are. 

You know what it’s like to sit down with a book or magazine anticipating—even craving—a good read, only to be bored.

And you know very well that story does not have a divine right to be read. You feel no hesitation in dropping it and looking for something better to read.

You don’t want readers to do that with your stories. What can you do?

First, hook them with a killer lead.

Throughout your manuscript, make ‘em laugh, cry, and wait.

Your stories are important. To keep readers reading, pay special attention to the middle of your stories.

Keep them reading by “placing gold coins along the path.”

Don Fry coined that phrase. It goes something like this:

Picture yourself making your way down a narrow path in a thick forest. (I’m picturing one with tangled, soggy underbrush in western Washington’s rain forest.) You’ve been hiking a mile when you spot a gold coin on the ground. You snatch it up and put it in your pocket. You trek a mile deeper into the woods, find another gold coin, and slip it into your pocket. Think about it: Would you keep traipsing through the forest, hoping for another gold coin? Sure! Most of us would hike another mile for another gold coin. (from Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark)

“Think of a gold coin as any bit that rewards the reader,” says Roy Peter Clark, a master teacher of writing and one of my favorite mentors for decades.

“With no gold coins for motivation, the reader may drift out of the forest.”

Don’t let them drift out of your forest!

Don’t let their interest fade! Scatter gold coins especially in the middle of your stories!

Even the old Bard himself, Shakespeare, gave out gold coins in the middle of his plays.

Clark offers these ideas for developing “dramatic and comic high points,” gold coins to drop within your stories:

• a small scene (the setting)
• a relevant anecdote
• a startling fact
• a significant quotation

I can think of other ideas:

• a quirky anecdote
• a little-known fact
• an intriguing historical fact
• foreshadowing an important twist or turning point or crossroads in your story
• raising a question
• Can you think of others? Leave your ideas in the comments section below.

In his Writing Tools: 50 essential strategies for every writer, Clark offers practical recommendations:

• Study other people’s writing and movies for strategic placement of gold coins.
• If you’re doing research for your stories, recognize gold coins when you stumble upon them and be sure to use them in your stories.
• Examine one of your rough drafts and notice gold coins—“any story element that shines”—and mark them with a star. Note their placement. Are they in the best place?
• Study the middle of your story. Does it include significant gold coins—rewards for your readers? If not, write in some nuggets or move them from other parts of your manuscript.

Related posts:

Jesus replied with a story

Inspiration to keep you writing

Your stories are important

Leads

Leads, part 2 

Leads, part 3

Leads, part 4 

Make‘em wait

Our dysfunctional families 

The “secret sauce”

Whether you’re building a castle or a memoir, the scaffolding must come down

During these busy days of summer, some of us have changed our pace a wee bit: We’re cutting back on writing so we can hone our already-written vignettes.

Today, look over your rough drafts and identify scaffolding you used to build your vignette.

What’s scaffolding?

At Poynter’s blog, Chip Scanlan explains how scaffolding in writing resembles scaffolding in construction:

“Scaffolding is the ‘temporary framework of platforms and poles constructed to provide accommodation for workmen and their materials during the erection, repairing, or decoration of a building,’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term.

“In the writing trade,” Scanlan says, “the poles and planks of scaffolding are words, phrases, and sentences that help the writer build.”  

Writers need to start somewhere—to write something, anything—to get warmed up. That’s a writer’s scaffolding: initial attempts at writing a story.

“Scaffolding is usually what we produce when we’re trying to get our fingers and brains moving,” says Scanlan. “It’s part of the process of transforming ideas into language.”

In that way, scaffolding is a good thing. It gets us going and helps us discover what we want to say.

But once the scaffolding has served its purpose, whether we’re building a castle or a memoir, the scaffolding must come down.

Scanlan says, “The difference between the folks in hard hats and those of us who bang on computer keys it that they dismantle their scaffolding while, all too often, we leave ours standing.

“Writers—and our readers—would benefit if we took ours down, too.”

Here’s why. It can take a while for us writers to recognize the all-important focus of a piece. After writing a page or two, we usually gain clarity on where the story needs to go.

At that point, we can return to our opening sentences and paragraphs and see that we had been making our way through a maze of thoughts—background info, tangential info, irrelevant info. We had probably been skittering down rabbit trails until, a few paragraphs down, we found our way out of the maze and started down the path we really want to go down (the story’s main point, the focus).

Our goal: Get rid of the peripheral stuff and begin where the story really begins.

If you missed my earlier post on scaffolding, click on Have you removed your scaffolding? and then practice recognizing scaffolding from the real-life example below.

My dear friend and colleague, Dr. Thom Votaw, gave me permission to share this piece he asked me to edit. (He is a professor and scientist, not a writer, so he was brave to let me share this with you.) While you read this excerpt from Thom’s original, look for the scaffolding:

Initial blog for Teachers In Service, Inc.

December 20, 2010

This is the initial blog of Teachers In Service, Inc. A variety of people will be writing for this blog and there will be a variety of topics. Please interact as you see fit.

I will begin with a bit of history of Teachers In Service, Inc. Beginnings have a way of setting the scene for what will follow and the beginning of TIS sets the scene that continues to this day.

I had been on the faculty of New Mexico State University for a number of years doing a variety of things in the College of Education. In 1995 my wife and I packed our bags and moved to Idaho where she became a school administrator with a school district. I became associated with the University of Idaho and initiated a search for funding for international environmental education projects.

We had kept our property in New Mexico and our son lived there while attending college. I would periodically return to New Mexico to tend to the house and property and to see our son. In April 1997 on one of my trips from New Mexico back to Idaho I went by way of Huntington Beach, California to see Brian and Kathy Moyer, friends who had also graduated from John Brown University many years before. They were missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators. During the course of a discussion about schools and our children the topic came up about professional development with schools for children of missionaries (MKs). I mentioned that while I was at NMSU professional development was something that I had done with secular schools, along with my regular teaching of classes on campus. I commented that some day I would like to do some professional development with MK schools. My friends were not educators so they suggested I talk with Dorcas Winfry, an individual who was on Wycliffe's staff and who was knowledgeable about this sort of thing.

I returned to Huntington Beach for an appointment with Dorcas on September 30, 1997 on my next trip to New Mexico. I stayed with Brian and Kathy again. I knocked on Dorcas' office door, was invited in, and met her. There was a third person in the room who introduced himself as Bob Pittman, some kind of director of Wycliffe Bible Translators' schools around the world. I had not expected anyone except Dorcas and I had planned on discussing with her the possibility of my doing some professional development with elementary teachers in science teaching methods in MK schools. 

I asked Bob what brought him to Huntington Beach. He responded with, "You." I was surprised at his comment but responded with, "I came to see Dorcas in order to explore the possibility of joining the team of professional developers when they go to MK schools. I would work in elementary science." Bob responded with, "Thom, there is no team."

My mind flashed with the idea that there just had to be a team of professional developers. I mean, there are hundreds of MK teachers out there and thousands of children of missionaries. There just had to be a team of professional developers so I repeated my desire to be part of the team.…

If you were editing Thom’s post, what scaffolding would you recommend he remove? Where and how should his piece begin?

Now look over your vignettes for scaffolding and remove it for the benefit of your readers.

“Scaffolding is an essential part of the writing process,” says Scanlan. “But as my editor, Julie Moos, pointed out recently, ‘Just because it’s part of your writing process doesn’t mean it should be part of my reading process.’”  (from Dismantling Your Story’s Scaffolding, by Chip Scanlan)

Have you removed your scaffolding?

Most of us know the story we want to write, but we’re not sure what to say or how to say it. We don’t know where to begin, but we know we must—so we ease our way into it: We start writing.


Pros call it “scaffolding.”


I have good news and bad news about scaffolding.


The good news: It gets us going, provides momentum, and helps us zero in on the story we need to tell.

“As the tennis player rallies before the game begins,
so must the writer.
And as the tennis player
is not concerned with where those first balls are going,
neither must the writer be concerned
with the first paragraph or two.
All you’re doing is warming up.…”

Leonard S. Bernstein

The bad news about scaffolding: After it has served its purpose, we need to tear it down.


I learned of scaffolding decades ago from Donald Murray, and later from Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry, authors of Coaching Writers: Editors and Reporters Working Together. They say,


“… Sometimes the writer must write her way into a story, creating sentences that can’t appear in the final version but do get the writer where she wants to go. So the writer erects a scaffold to build the story, but dismantles it to let the story show through.”


Scaffolding is a temporary structure that supports the construction of what will eventually stand alone.


Bill Roorbach describes scaffolding this way:


“Good stories, good essays, leap right to their subjects, perhaps not in draft one, or draft six, but at some point, the introductory apparatus is cut, seen for what it is: scaffolding. You put up the elaborate and complicated and even beautiful scaffolding and build the cathedral. When the cathedral is complete, well, you take the scaffolding down.” (Writing Life Stories)


Readers like us better if we get rid of our scaffolding.


Why? Readers want us to get right to the point and when we do, our stories have more punch, more focus, more power. People are more likely to read such stories.


Take out your WIPs (works in progress, rough drafts) and read them, looking for answers to these questions:


What is my story really about? What’s the main point?

Does my opening paragraph, or my first few paragraphs, focus on (or at least significantly point to) the main point? Or did I write them only to find my way into my story?

Do my readers need to know this information, or is it extraneous?

Dismantle your scaffolding. Let your story shine through.