Posted: November 7, 2024

Offstage Action

Years ago, I read of an arrogant Ingenue who kept trying to upstage a more experienced stage actress. Finally, the actress threatened to upstage the Ingenue without even being on stage. The challenge was accepted.

The next performance included a scene where the actress was to make her exit holding a champaign flute. She attached a piece of two-sided tape to the bottom of the flute, and just before she stepped offstage, she set it on a side table, hanging off the edge.

For the rest of the scene, the audience ignored the Ingenue and kept their eyes on that flute.

Sometimes your most riveting action happens when your characters are offstage. You lead up to the key scene with enough detail that readers can see what's about to happen, then you drop back and let their minds supply the rest. Of course, any writing is an ongoing collaboration between your words and your readers' imaginations, but moving action offstage gives their imaginations free rein.

So when's the right time to let your readers take over for you? Well, sex scenes, for instance. Some writers can create sex scenes whose details are steamy, reveal a character's personality, and move the story along. But these scenes are notoriously hard to write well, if only because tastes vary -- different people find different things steamy. If you move the explicit bits into the linespaces (as Renni and I put it in Self-Editing) then your readers can bring their own tastes and imaginations to bear. The results are often more enticing than a precise blow by blow.

Take this passage, from a manuscript I worked on recently -- used with the client's permission, of course. The main character, a professional racer, has just made a deal with her chief rival before a dangerous race -- that they would both race clean, without risking one another. Then, since it's an hour before race time, she suggests that they seal the deal, physically. Here's the original version of the final paragraph of the scene:

She locked the door. His lips found the side of her neck. She flinched away again but then buried her neck back into his lips. She reached behind her to pull his face against hers with one hand, the other fumbling with his belt. His hand moved down her side, another up her shirt. She closed her eyes and sighed. She could accomplish a lot in an hour.

It's hard to tell without the context, but these details don't tell us much about the characters that we didn't already know or move the story along in other ways. So for the edited version, I recommended that the writer simply lose the physical details, leaving only:

She locked the door. She could accomplish a lot in an hour.

[End scene.]

Another place you might want to shift the action offstage is when the emotional thrust of the scene lies in the fact of what happens rather than the details of how. Consider this situation, again taken from a recent client's work with their permission. Helena, one of the principal characters, has murdered her husband. She then butchers him -- literally, turning him into steaks, roasts, and stew meat. (Yes, it is horrific, but there are some extenuating circumstances.)

The original version of the scene described the murder, her hauling the body down to the basement laundry table, and then went into considerable detail on how she parted him out, put him in the freezer, and disposed of the offal. Readers were shocked, but that shock slowly leaked away, lost in the details of cuts and marbling. The extra details, gruesome as they were, made the scene less shocking rather than more.

I recommended that the client leave out the actual butchery, simply showing Helena hauling the body into the basement, then hoisting him onto the table, with a chart of standard butchers' cuts laid out nearby. That way, readers would realize what was happening all at once, and (as with sex scenes) they could fill in details from their own imaginations instantly without having to wade through the nitty-gritty. And that shock would still be with them when Harriet moved on to the next step in the horror -- throwing a dinner party for her work colleagues at which her husband was the main course. (Again, extenuating circumstances.)

Not showing your readers some key action might seem to violate the oldest rule of storytelling -- show, don't tell. But the scenes where this approach works are the ones where the emotional thrust of what happens -- the commitment to a sexual encounter, the decision to commit a horrific mutilation -- is more important than the details of the act itself. To do it right, you have to be aware of the emotional thrust yourself. You also have to trust that your readers will grasp the meaning of the action.

But when you trust your readers, well, you know what happens next.