Make A Scene – The TADA Method by Gabriela Pereira

MAKE A SCENE By Gabriela Pereira

You’ve probably heard the writing class cliché “show, don’t tell,” but rarely does anyone explain how to do it. Telling is when you skim the surface and summarize what is happening in your story. It’s great for transitions or to convey information quickly, but it doesn’t allow the reader to sink into the scene and feel like they’re there with the characters.

Showing is what brings a scene to life. When you do it well, your reader will feel like they’re side by side with your characters, experiencing your story as it unfolds. But don’t be fooled into thinking that you should always show and never tell. If you describe each and every detail of a scene, you risk boring your readers to tears. In children’s books it’s especially important to find a balance between show and tell because you have very tight word counts and little room for error.
The reason so many people repeat that “show, don’t tell” refrain is that for most writers, the latter tends to come more naturally than the former. Let’s face it, bringing characters to life on the page is hard and it’s tempting to fall back on what feels easy.

The best way to show characters is to make a scene. I don’t mean the way a toddler throwing a tantrum might make a scene; I mean crafting a moment in your story that feels truly immersive to your readers. Here’s an exercise to show you how.

Make Your Characters Come Alive

To practice showing your characters in scenes, do this 15-minute exercise. Start by going to WriterIgniter.com and getting a writing prompt. The Writer Igniter is like a slot machine for writers, just click the “shuffle” button and you’ll get a randomized combination of a character, situation, prop, and setting.

Note: Don’t click the shuffle button over and over until you find a combination you like, that’s cheating! If the first prompt you get is terrible, you can have one do-over. After that stick with what you get.

Set a timer for ten minutes and write until your time is up. Don’t worry if you can’t incorporate the prop or setting into what you write. Focus first and foremost on the character and the situation, and if you can weave in the setting and prop, that’s a bonus. The key thing is for you to be grounded in a single time and place with that character. Focus on writing a scene.

When you look over what you wrote, think about the different ways you brought your character to life in that scene. Consider the four main ways of showing character: thoughts, action, dialogue, and appearance. I call this the TADA! method, where each letter in “TADA” stands for one of those four elements. When you use the right amount of each… TADA! You’ve shown your character.
But first, let’s look more closely at each of those four elements.

• T is for Thought: What are the characters thinking or feeling during the scene? How can you show those thoughts and emotions, rather than just saying, “he feels angry”?
• A is for Action: What are the characters doing? Consider word choice and using specific language to convey emotion or subtext. There’s a big difference between whether your character walks, stomps, or tip-toes across a room.
• D is for Dialogue: What do the characters say to each other? And are they saying what they actually mean? If they’re not, how can you show that disconnect between what they’re saying and what they’re thinking?
• A is for Appearance: What do the characters look like? When it comes to creating subtext, appearance can be a great way to help the reader infer what a character is thinking or feeling.

Create a Character Compass

I’m a visual person, so it often helps me to draw a diagram so I can really see whether I’m getting that balance between the TADA elements right. The Character Compass is a tool I’ve developed to help me visualize how I’m depicting a character in a scene.

Here’s how it works:

1. Draw a circle and bisect it twice with vertical and horizontal lines, so that it looks like crosshairs.
2. Label the axes TADA for Thought, Action, Dialogue, and Appearance respectively.
3. As you read over the scene you wrote, keep a tally of when you use each of the TADA components. I like to use different colored highlighters and mark the lines where I use each element.
4. Fill out the compass by placing a dot along each of the axes in your compass. The more times you use each component, the farther out toward the edge of the circle the dot should go. (See image.)
5. Connect the dots and shade in the shape to give yourself a visual representation of how much you used each element.

Keep in mind, the Character Compass is not intended as a prescriptive tool. You don’t need to have a perfectly balanced compass for each and every scene you write. Instead, use it as a diagnostic tool, to spot patterns in your writing. If across several scenes you see that one particular TADA element is underrepresented, this is a signal that you may want to look at that element more closely.

Reflection: Once you’ve finished this exercise, pause and reflect on your Character Compass. Is it a good representation of how you usually write, or do you think this exercise was an outlier? Is there one area of character development that you need to work on more?

The Character Compass is one of many tools and techniques I’ve developed to help writers assess their writing and improve their craft. For more juicy info, and to get a free DIY MFA starter kit, go to DIYMFA.com/join and sign up with your email. You can also learn more about the TADA! method and how to develop great characters in Chapter Nine of the DIY MFA book.
Now go write something awesome. Go… make a scene!

BIO:
Gabriela Pereira is a writer, speaker, and self-proclaimed word nerd who wants to challenge the status quo of higher education. As the founder and instigator of DIYMFA.com, her mission is to empower writers to take an entrepreneurial approach to their professional growth. Gabriela earned her MFA in creative writing from The New School and teaches at national conferences, regional workshops, and online. She is also the host of DIY MFA Radio, a popular podcast where she interviews bestselling authors, and is the author of the book DIY MFA: WRITE WITH FOCUS, READ WITH PURPOSE, BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY (Writer’s Digest Books, 2016).

Link to DIY MFA Starter Kit: https://DIYMFA.com/join
Link to DIY MFA Book: https://members.diymfa.com/product/diy-mfa-book/
Link to Writer Igniter: https://diymfa.com/writer-igniter

Thank you Gabriela for sharing your expertise and ideas with us. Her book is available on Amazon.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy