In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns discusses the “literary elements” he considers the building blocks of any scene. He covers the four external literary elements and the four internal literary elements, and then asks whether a ninth should be included.
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The Writing Coach Episode #164 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #164 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. I’m your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. John’s.
I have a Facebook group for writers called Always Writing. If you’re looking for a small community of creatives and writers to connect with on Facebook, head on over to Always Writing with Kevin T. Johns and join our community.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I want a little bit of help. I’ve been developing this theory, it came out of a course I put together for my First Draft program—that’s a group coaching program focused on helping folks get their first draft written while also continuing to develop their writer’s craft skill set. And in that program, I have a course called “The Card Shuffling Technique.” It started with me thinking about what are the building blocks of a scene. If an artist has paint to work with when painting an image, what is the writer’s equivalent of primary colours of paint? And what I came up with was when I call them the literary elements, but metaphorically, I think of them as kind of the bricks in the brick wall that is a scene.
What I really like to see when I’m reviewing clients’ work is a nice mixture of all of these elements. What I tend to find is that writers, especially during first drafts, will lean on their strengths. Some people are really great at environmental descriptions and so the scene will be all descriptions of the environment. Other people are great at dialogue, iso we have pure dialogue scenes with not enough physical action. Other people focus on action, and we don’t get enough internal narration. These are all just different literary elements that we can use to tell a story. And I think story works best when we’re really using a nice mixture of all of these elements.
Recently, during a coaching call with a client in First Draft—Fancy shout out to you if you’re listening to this—Fancy had some elements in her story that I’m not sure are necessarily identified or included in the elements in the course. So for this episode, I’m asking for a little help from you, dear listener. I am going to lay out what I see as the eight literary elements, and then I’ll mention to you another element that Fancy was using, and I want to hear from you. Let me know if I should be expanding my list of elements out or whether the eight I already have capture the element that Fancy was using in her story.
Okay, let’s get to the literary elements. I broke them down into four external elements and four internal elements. I think you’ll see what I’m talking about here as we dive into it.
External element number one is environmental description. This is just information about where the scene is taking place, the setting, the atmosphere, the mood of the environment that the characters are in. Far too often, I would say I look at clients’ work, and we don’t get enough of a sense of where the scene is taking place. We don’t get the mood. An abandoned church has a very different feel than an office boardroom. That feeling can be emphasized via more language, more description about that space. So in any given scene, yeah, I’d like to see some environmental description and that’s external literary element number one, because it’s external to our point of view narration.
Next up is physical actions or blocking. I take the term blocking from cinema and theater. If you’ve ever been in a play, you know your lines but you need the director there to tell you, “Stand over here, then on this line, walk over there and pick up that prop.” That’s blocking. And that’s physical action. And that is a part of storytelling. So we’ve established the environment that our characters are in, but then we need to know where the characters are located in that space in relation to each other and in relation to objects and props in the room, as well as what are characters doing with their bodies over the course of a scene. Are they running their hands through their hair? Are they smoking a cigarette? Are they taking a gun out of their pocket and firing it? Are they cleaning up trash on the side of the road? How far is the first trash picker away from the second trash picker? All of these physical elements in terms of where people are, how far apart they are from each other, how close they are from each other, and what they’re doing is literary element number two.
Literary element number three is the big one, ad that’s dialogue, Dialogue is pretty obvious: it’s what characters say to one another throughout the story. There seems to be a general acknowledgement that in most scenes in contemporary modern storytelling, 30% to 50% of any given scene is likely going to be dialogue. Obviously, you can have dialogue-heavy scenes, and you can have dialogue-light scenes, but in general, you’re probably looking at 30% to 50% of the scene being dialogue. In which case, this is probably our most featured literary element; you’re going to see more dialogue than you are going to see physical blocking, or environmental description in any given scene. And again, we’re including dialogue under the external elements because the words leave the POV character’s body and going out into the world externally.
Now, the final external literary element is point of view character sense descriptions. This is what the scene’s point of view character sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches. Over the course of a scene, almost across the board with every writer I work with myself included, we all default to sight. Sight is our number one sensory experience that we use. And so as writers, we’re always describing what things look like, but when I’m telling you I want to hear environmental description, I want to hear physical blocking, well, that doesn’t always have to be described through sight. Maybe the character hears something in the distance. Maybe the character smells something strange in the environment. Maybe that character reaches over and touches another character because they’re right beside them. And so when you’re looking at your scenes, especially in the revisions process, make sure you’re not always just describing what things look like. Get those other senses in there because as human beings, that’s how we experience life a variety of sense, not just sight.
Alright, so there are our four external elements, environmental description, physical actions, dialogue and point of view character sense descriptions. So now let’s go internal. These are the things that are not external elements of the story, but rather taking place within the point of view character or within the narration itself.
Internal element number one is internal thoughts and feelings. This is the internal experience of novels. It’s the insight that novels are able to provide into a point of view, characters, mind or soul. It’s what differentiates literature from virtually every other art form. We can get some voiceovers in cinema, we can get soliloquy in theater, but literature is really the art form that allows us to go inside a character’s body and see what it’s like to be them and experience life through them and
to hear exactly what they’re hearing or experience the feelings that they’re feeling in that moment in a very specific manner. So internal element number one is thoughts and feelings
External element number two is narrative exposition. This is the contextual information the reader needs in order to understand a story. Now, we had a discussion in First Draft this week about exposition, and I think it can be demonized, and people can think, “Oh, I need to remove all exposition from my story.” I disagree. Exposition is absolutely necessary. It’s what sets the context for any given scene or moment in the story. It’s the information the reader needs to understand what is going on in any given scene. So what we want to do with our narrative exposition is just make sure that it’s moving our plot forward, and that it’s not slowing the story down, that it’s not an info-dump, an unnecessary dumping of information all at once, that the reader doesn’t necessarily need at that moment. So long as your exposition is helping the reader understand the story and moving things forward at a good pace there’s absolutely nothing wrong with narrative exposition.
In fact, Robert McKee coined a famous phrase where he said to use “exposition as ammunition.” He said to try to make sure that the exposition you provide is shocking or exciting or moving the story forward in some way. There’s nothing wrong with saying “One week later, someone so went to the office…” If it’s important to know that it’s been a week later, it’s moving the chronology of the story forward. Nothing wrong with that. And if you can make it even more exciting, if you can turn it into a story ammunition the way Robert McKee recommends, all the better. Don’t be afraid of exposition, just be conscious that it needs to be as exciting as anything else in any given scene.
Our third internal literary element is big voice narration. Now this can be a little confusing, especially given how much people struggle with point of view but big voice narration is a moment where the author steps back from the close POV or even from the omniscient POV. And it becomes almost a moment where the narrator is talking directly to the reader, but they’re doing so in order to share a moral or an observation or a piece of wisdom. It’s almost the writer in the context of the story saying, “Hey, reader, I want to share some important observations about life with you: That’s the way life goes sometimes…” Sometimes something like that might be considered big voice narration, big voice narration is an element we’re not going to use very often; it’s probably going to be on a much more limited amount of usage, as opposed to dialogue, which we’re going to see a lot.
Now the fourth internal literary element, it’s a kind of a grouping of things here. And this is recipes, rules, instructions, lists, rituals. And this is anytime there are stories giving specific instructional information that works within the context of the narrative. And so if you are writing a fantasy story, perhaps with witches or wizards, you’re almost certainly going to have magical rituals of some kind, which often involve certain recipes or certain lists of ingredients, right? What are you putting into the cauldron? What are the certain rules by which the magic of a story works, or the technology of a story works in a science fiction story?
This can be an interesting way actually to convey some expository information. Chuck Palahniuk in his great book on craft, Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different, talks about this and he talks about how in writing Fight Club, he knew he needed to get across to the reader what Fight Club was how Fight Club worked, and he wanted to do it in an interesting and exciting manner. And what he did was he came up with a list of rules, the famous list of rules of Fight Club, where rule number one is you don’t talk about fight club, and rule number two is you don’t talk about fight club. And that’s kind of a classic line from the book. And so in turning some exposition into a set of rules, there’s an example of Chuck Palahniuk using the Robert McKee technique of turning exposition into ammunition and it becoming actually a famous quote from that book and ultimately from that movie.
Alright, so let’s review all eight of our literary elements. The four external elements are environmental description, physical actions and blocking, dialogue, and point of view character sense descriptions.
The internal literary elements are internal thoughts and feelings, narrative exposition, big voice narration, and rules, recipes, instructions, lists and rituals.
Now that’s how I teach the course in First Draft, but as I said, recently, we were working with Fancy and in Fancy’s novel, she has epistolary elements. Now you probably know epistolary elements are moments where stories are told via letters. And there’s a long, long history of it. The most famous book, probably, at least in my world, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
And so, since I was thinking about epistolary novels, novels that include letters, I started asking myself, do I need to add a ninth element to the card shuffling technique? Are letters an entirely other way to tell a story?
I’ll let you know where I was kind of thinking about it. I mean, letters seem very much like dialogue and so I wonder if letters could be grouped in under dialogue. Also, letters often give glimpses into the letter writer’s internal thoughts and feelings, and so I’m wondering, would a letter really be its own unique literary element? Or is it something that’s kind of capturing via dialogue slash internal thoughts and feelings, and kind of merging them together and presenting them in a different format? I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
And so that’s why I’m throwing the question out to you. Send me an email or leave a message in the Always Writing with Kevin T. Johns Facebook group. Let me know your thoughts on whether epistolary elements in a book should be considered its own literary element or whether it’s covered in the eighth internal and external elements that we’ve talked about on this episode of the show.
Alright, I can’t wait to hear from you. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on that.
Thank you so much for listening. Remember to hit that subscribe button and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
