LATRAME

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#writingadvice21 scenes

LATRAME

Authors. Readers. Characters.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5d ago

You've never reread the same book twice. It's impossible, even if the words haven't shifted by a comma.

Because between the two readings, you're the one who changed. At twenty, that character seemed wise to you ; at forty, you see his cowardice. The sentence you'd underlined says nothing to you now, and another, which you'd walked past without seeing, stops you cold.

There's also the rereading that knows the ending. A good novel's second pass is a different pleasure : you're no longer racing toward the resolution, you're watching the author lay his traps. All those clues he'd planted, invisible the first time, now shine like markers.

For an author, this changes something concrete : you don't write for a single reading. The best texts keep something in reserve for the second, a sentence that only yields its double meaning to those who come back.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

6d ago

A name. An image. A few lines. Maybe a date, a place, a sentence he might have said.

It isn't a story yet. It's a threshold.

This kind of page does exactly what a book cover does, a back-cover blurb, an epigraph : it prepares the reader without telling anything. It sets a tone, a promise, an expectation. It's called paratext, everything that surrounds the text and shapes how we'll read it, before we've read a single word of the story itself.

And paratext isn't an accessory. The same paragraph reads differently depending on whether the word "novel" or the word "testimony" comes before it. A banal argument scene becomes heartbreaking if the previous page told you one of the two will die tomorrow.

So a character sheet, however tiny, is already working. It decides the air the reader breathes on the way in. Treat it like a beginning, because that's what it is.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Three lines. That's often all you get to say who you are.

Most people waste them reciting a résumé : born in, graduated from, lives in, has published. It's accurate and it's dead. Nobody ever wanted to read someone because of their birthplace.

An author bio isn't a civil record, it's an opening line of fiction, except the character is you. It's allowed a voice, an angle, a touch of humor, one precise detail that sticks. "Writes mostly at night, distrusts people who don't like dogs" says more, and makes you want to read more, than three degrees.

It also sets a promise of tone. If your bio is funny, people open your text expecting to smile. Be careful what you promise there : it's the first sample of your writing anyone reads, before even the first line.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

We learn figures of speech the way we learn a list of dead vocabulary. Metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron. Ticked, recited, forgotten.

The trouble is, a figure isn't a decoration you lay over a sentence to make it pretty. It's a shortcut for thought.

"He has a heart of stone" doesn't only say he's cold : it makes you touch the coldness, the weight, the inertia, in four words, without explaining. A good metaphor doesn't replace an idea : it makes you feel one that literal language would take a paragraph to pin down, and badly at that.

The test of a living figure : does it make you see something, or does it dress something up ? "Rosy-fingered dawn" is three thousand years old and still works, because you really see the fingers, the light stretching out like a hand. "A radiant sun" makes you see nothing at all. Same length, two worlds.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Two clocks run in every story, and they're never in sync.

There's story time : ten years, one night, three generations. And there's narrative time : the number of pages you, the author, decide to spend on it.

A text's whole breathing lives in the gap between the two. "Twenty years passed", five words for two decades. Then three full pages to describe the four seconds his hand hesitates above the phone.

The reader doesn't notice it consciously, but the body feels it : when you slow down, they hold their breath ; when you speed up, they understand those years didn't count. You don't narrate time. You decide which of its seconds deserve to weigh a page, and which evaporate into a comma.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

6w ago

No.

There are whole weeks when the right move is not to write. To reread. To let a character stay quiet while you think about something else. Consistency is one tool among others, not proof that you're serious.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

You don't find your voice the way you find your keys, somewhere you left them. You write it, text after text. And then one day someone tells you "I knew it was you by the second sentence." And you don't even know what they recognized.

Do you ? Do you know what people recognize in your sentences ?

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

It's the smallest text you'll ever write. It's also the most read : thousands of people will read the title for every ten who open the book.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" promises a duration and a wound. "The Stranger" has already pushed you to arm's length, two pages before you start. A good title doesn't summarize the book. It starts doing it without permission.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

"Mother died today." Three words, and you're no longer in your living room.

The first sentence isn't a beginning, it's a door. On the other side, the reader breathes the air of your world for the first time, and decides very quickly whether to stay.

Yours, in the text you're writing now : is it an open door, or a wall with a handle ?

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

You were taught to hunt down repetition. Find a synonym, vary, elegance.

Except. "I waited. I waited some more. I waited long after waiting had stopped meaning anything." Replace a single one of those "waited" with "lingered" and the whole thing collapses. Repetition isn't always a mistake : sometimes it's a hammer, and it hits the same spot on purpose.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Flaubert had a room for shouting. He called it his gueuloir : he would yell his sentences out loud, alone, for hours. Any sentence that failed the shouting test got rewritten.

The pretty word flatters on the page and dies out loud. The right word survives both.

Try it, nobody's watching. Read your last paragraph out loud and listen for where your own voice stumbles : that's the spot.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Punctuation is the stage direction of the sentence. The period says : lower your voice. The comma says : breathe, but stay on stage. The ellipsis says : look away while you finish your line...

And the semicolon, the least loved of all, says something nothing else can say : these two sentences are independent ; they still refuse to be separated.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Three paragraphs of impeccable, formal, almost ceremonial prose. And then, right in the middle, a word from the street.

The effect is physical. Not because the word is vulgar : because it comes from outside, like someone walking into a silent room without knocking. A register only has power if you know how far you're dropping it from.

Popular science

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

There is an art to not telling.

She closed the apartment door, dropped the key in the mailbox.

Three years later, she came back for the box that was still in the cellar.

Everything that matters just happened between those two sentences, and you read it, even though it was never written. That's the ellipsis : the story keeps going while the text stays quiet.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

The narrator is lying to you. Not the author : the narrator. He polishes his role, forgets whatever suits him, swears he was calm that night.

And the strangest part is you love it. Because by the third inconsistency, you're no longer reading a story : you're running an interrogation.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

The same door opens three times.

"I opened the door. My hand was shaking, I think." — The reader is locked inside. They know only what the character knows ; they doubt when the character doubts.

"She opened the door. Her hand was shaking." — The reader sees the shaking, but from outside. Watching someone who can't see themselves shake.

"Across the hall, someone opened a door." — The reader no longer even knows who's shaking. Just a silhouette, and maybe that's exactly what's needed, for now.

One door, three cameras. And it resets with every scene : nothing forces chapter twelve's camera to be chapter one's.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

Telling : he was lying.

Showing : he answered a little too fast. Then he repeated the question, as if buying time for the next answer.

The word "lying" appears nowhere, and yet the reader knows before the character across the table does. That's the whole exercise : remove the label, keep the gesture, and let the reader reach the conclusion half a second before you hand it to them. That half second is the pleasure of reading.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

A long sentence moves forward, piles up, refuses to stop, stacking commas the way you stack the thoughts of a sleepless night, until it finally falls.

A short sentence hits. Then stops.

A chase written in long sentences runs out of breath before the reader does. A grief scene chopped into short ones reads like a telegram. But flip it at the right moment : one endless sentence in the middle of a chase, and time hangs : the character sees everything, too much, at once. A three-word sentence in the middle of a grief that kept stretching, and that's the sob finally coming out.

An exercise, if you want one : reread the last page you wrote looking only at sentence length. Not the words. Just the lengths. We're curious what you'll find.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

6w ago

Two characters answering each other word for word, like two well-mannered fencers. Polite, symmetrical, dead.

Real dialogue stumbles. Someone answers the previous question. Someone isn't listening.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

You know the ending from page one. He's going to die. It's there in black and white, line one.

And yet you read the three hundred pages that follow. Why ?

Because a story doesn't hold only on its "what next ?". It also holds on "but how ?", "but why ?", "at what moment did it tip over ?". Starting from the end isn't giving up suspense. It's changing its nature : you're no longer watching for the event, you're watching its mechanism.

Some of the greatest stories are built this way. You're shown the body, then time runs backward. The tension doesn't come from what will happen, you know that, but from the weight piling up on every page, because every smile, every promise, you already know what they lead to.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

Focalization is the answer to a very simple question : through whose eyes ?

Take a plain scene. A man walks into a café, sits, orders. A woman, two tables away, watches him.

Tell it from him : he has no idea he's being watched. He's thinking about his meeting, about what he'll say, about the rain that ruined his shoes. The woman is just a shape at the edge of the frame, if he notices her at all.

Tell the same scene from her : suddenly everything he does becomes a sign. He glances at the door twice, so he's waiting for someone. He kept his coat on, so he doesn't plan to stay. She reads a whole story into gestures he thought were meaningless.

Same café, same minute, two stories that don't resemble each other. And you changed none of the facts : you only moved the camera behind different eyes.

The classic trap is thinking you choose a focalization once and for all. In reality, every scene asks again : whose gaze is this ? Sometimes the strongest answer isn't the main character. A murder is more terrifying seen through the witness who doesn't understand what he's looking at than through the killer who already knows everything.

A small test, next time a scene resists you : ask who's telling it. Then try handing it to someone else in the room. Often the scene that was stuck didn't have a writing problem, just a point-of-view problem.

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