January 16, 2025
By Nancy McCabe, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty
All instructors have our broken-record comments, the ones we find ourselves repeating constantly. One of mine is, “How could this piece be presented more scenically?”
In her book Showing and Telling, Laurie Alberts defines a scene as “episodes that occur within a specific time and place, just like in films, and they give the readers a sense of events transpiring in real time. At their best, scenes allow us to enter the action, feel the emotions of the characters, empathize, even to achieve catharsis.” Alberts makes a strong case for scene. She urges us to remember that we read stories because we want to be transported out of our own skins into the lives of others, and scenes, which create the illusion of real time passing, are one of the key routes for doing just that.
Often when I’m working on early drafts, I summarize a lot. I know that while revising—my favorite part of the writing process—I’ll flesh out the scenes. Even while preparing the final draft of my memoir-in-essays Can This Marriage Be Saved?, I spent months restructuring entire essays and rewriting and rearranging lines and paragraphs. But somehow—maybe because it was toward the end of the book and I was getting tired—I overlooked one crucial passage—one of the book’s most climactic moments. Here's the passage as it was written only a few days before sending the final draft to my editor:
Tracking down Cole isn’t so hard. I call his brother in Chicago, who gives me his number. Cole manages a bookstore in New York City.
He is taken aback to hear from me, and we struggle through an awkward conversation. We are about to hang up, and suddenly I feel desperate. I still don’t understand. Nothing he’s said has explained why he disappeared so abruptly.
So I ask him if he has a girlfriend. And then he tells me what he never knew how to tell me before: “I’m gay,” he says.
Surprisingly, this does not come as a surprise. I hear myself say, “Oh, I always wondered,” even though I don’t ever remember wondering. Still, maybe I always knew it on a subconscious level. We talk a little longer about his religious beliefs and how he reconciles them with being gay. He tells me about his partner. When we hang up, I feel completely transformed.
Yikes. This is trying to be a scene, but it’s underdeveloped and ineffective, with summarized dialogue, something I fortunately realized at the eleventh hour. I was rushing an important, transformative moment. There’s little insight here, and no sense of character, and it’s not a good excuse that the rest of the book had offered plenty of context and characterization, because I don’t allow the reader to participate in this crucial moment.
I’d probably initially underwritten the scene because the real-life dialogue was relatively mundane; for the most part, we weren’t saying anything that interesting or revealing information that the reader didn’t already know. But while writing I was too focused on that problem rather than the tension between what was said and unsaid as well as between my past and my present. Luckily, I rethought my approach. Here’s the (considerably longer) revision.
Tracking down Cole isn’t so hard. I call his brother in Chicago. “Oh, are you one of his friends from Kansas City?” his brother asks. A kitten leaps into my lap, one of a pair of kittens Marc brought home a few weeks ago. It kneads its claws against my jeans. I gently push it away.
“From Kansas,” I say, and wonder later if he’d have given me Cole’s number if I’d said I was a childhood friend from Wichita. If Cole maybe didn’t really want to hear from people from a painful part of his life from which he’d struggled to break free.
“He’s in New York City,” his brother says. “He manages a bookstore. Hang on.” And then, just like that, he returns and gives me Cole’s phone number.
Outside, it’s dark, the early dark of November, a sign that winter is coming. Marc is covering a city council meeting in Springdale and won’t be home for a couple of hours. The kittens chase each other across the floor. The TV that Marc had bought with all of the freelance checks he’d been stockpiling looms before me. The TV and the kittens were his affirmation of his new commitment to our marriage: he was spending money on something that both of us would enjoy and bringing home pets that would give us a common purpose.
Before I can think about it long enough to get nervous, I dial.
Cole answers on the second ring.
“Cole?” I say. “This is Nancy.”
“Oh.” He sounds taken aback. The warmth leaches from his voice, replaced by stiff politeness, as he says, “Wow.” I grip the phone so tight my hand aches.
“It’s been a long time,” I say. “So how are you?” It feels like the walls are closing in around me so that there is only me, this couch, this phone, Cole’s voice, a kitten snuggling against my leg, purring.
We struggle through an awkward conversation. He tells me about his job at a Waldenbooks in Staten Island and I update him about my year in Pratt and two years in Arkansas. I ask about his brothers and sister. He asks about my family. We’re very polite.
I finally say, “You just kind of disappeared.”
“I know, I lost touch with everyone,” he answers, sounding regretful but offering no explanation. “I should keep in better touch.”
I can hear the neighbors’ voices through the wall. Headlights from a car flood my front window. Kittens sleep. The world goes on around me, but nothing makes sense. I may never get this. May never understand why Cole disappeared so abruptly.
But I don’t know how to ask, so instead I write down his address and give him mine. “Let’s keep in touch,” I say, but I don’t believe that we really will.
“Okay, well, thanks for calling,” he says. In a couple of seconds, we’re going to say our goodbyes and hang up and I’ll never know. I need to know. And so I say, with awkward suddenness, “Any women?”
I will cringe later at my choice of words. Not, “Do you have a girlfriend,” or “Are you married?” but “Any women?” Like something in me knows, has always known, the truth, even if I’ve never admitted it to myself.
“What?” his voice comes back loud and clear, as if the mouthpiece had been slipping and now he has hitched it up again.
“Any women?” I repeat, and now my face is burning with embarrassment, wishing I’d found a better way to ask about his love life.
There’s a long silence, or so it seems. And then he takes a deep breath. “Nancy,” he says. “I’m gay.”
“Oh, I always wondered,” I manage to reply somehow without missing a beat, because in an instant it is all so obvious, though I don’t remember ever wondering, though I’m surprised at how unsurprised I am. How is it possible that I have never consciously wondered this? How is it possible to completely shut out such a possibility for so many years? How can the human mind conceal such obvious truths from itself, suppress so completely what it doesn’t want to absorb? I vaguely recall the note Cole gave me after we broke up, telling me he sometimes doubted his sexuality. I was too naïve or too in denial to understand it, which at this moment seems impossibly ludicrous.
Suddenly, Cole starts to talk, his voice so much more relaxed that I realize just how tight it was throughout the earlier part of our conversation, as tight as my fist that clutched the phone and now loosens, still aching. “I met my partner, Jack, in Kansas City, and we moved here together,” he says. “We’ve been together a few years.”
“I remember that you wanted to be a priest,” I say. Sweat is no longer gluing my palm to the phone receiver. I have never felt so relieved, so transformed: in a split second, in two words from Cole, it was like my life suddenly made sense. Like the land masses have locked back together, the ocean once again all one body, the Earth all one continent, just as God had spoken it into being, the whole world so busy reconfiguring itself around me that I can barely muster the energy to finish this conversation.
“Yeah, I guess that was a sign. I really didn’t want to be gay.” He sounds apologetic. “I haven’t totally given up my religious beliefs. I still go to church some. The Episcopal church is relatively accepting of gays.”
“That’s good,” I say, or something equally inane, and we wind down again, making promises to keep in touch that sound more sincere than our earlier ones.
After we hang up, I sit completely still for an hour as if all of my spaces and gaps, crevices and fissures, breaches and rifts, are vanishing, briefly turning my life into one smooth surface. All the things I’ve always thought were my fault maybe weren’t my fault at all.
Setting detail, action, dialogue, and thoughts don’t have to work in isolation to reveal character; the best fully developed scenes find seamless ways to integrate a variety of kinds of information. In this revision, I aimed to blend details from my life in that moment: setting detail like the kittens that serve as a symbol of my husband’s last-ditch effort to save our marriage and underscore what I stand to lose, my husband’s whereabouts, my continuing uncertainty about my current life, the awkwardness of the conversation with my former boyfriend, the interiority that reveals my frustration and embarrassment, and the sense of transformation I felt as a result of the phone call to my former boyfriend.
While there’s a place for summary in our stories, this was not the right place in mine. I urge you to also cull through your drafts, looking for moments that need to be dramatized more completely for maximum impact on the reader. The process of dramatization itself can feel transformative for us as writers as well, forcing us back into particular moments and discovering the connections between events and ideas, leading to more profound insights.
Nancy McCabe’s most recent books are the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium; the YA novel Vaulting through Time; and the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved?