Stay in the Moment (Scene Making)

Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays, and Life Into Literature

When you are engaged in scenemaking, know it, and make a project of removing anything that interrupts the dream. Stay in the time and place of your scene. If you're edging into summary, events in general, you're usually filling in background that should have been set up earlier in the narrative (or will turn out to be unnecessary—try cutting), or you're giving away the future when you should just let the future unfold with events. If you offer a block of explanation, of judgment, of information, of opinion, you wake us from our dream. Exposition is interruptive.