Okay, so I only found one article that is useful for writing dancing scenes. This will be another learning experience for all of us together. Trust me, I need to get better at these scenes if I’m going to write Daughter of the Blue Dragon as a novel.
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Preparing everything to write the scene.
- The key element when it comes to writing scenes that rely on descriptions and possible conversations between characters who are dancing is research.
- You will want to look up the habits of dancers, techniques used for certain moves so that you know how to describe them correctly.
- Understand the community of the dance industry and its intricate history. I’m not saying to completely learn everything about dancing but you will need to learn about the type of dancing that you pick from.
- Watch many videos about dancing on youtube.
- Pick a type of dancing, what the dancers think of that technique, pick a song from that genre of dancing, and lastly use resources to find words specifically used to describe dancing.
- Bonus: Take a dancing class if you truly want to go with a more in-depth version of research.
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Identifying the Characters interest
- This is a very important part when making scenes that rely heavily on description or a character’s nature.
- Make a list of what the characters want but you can also make just one clear goal too.
- You want to make it clear what each character knows about each other in the scene.
- Also, go over what each character would do to get what they desire.
- How each character reacts to the reaction of the actions of each other.
- Work out what is the nature of their desires whether that be an object, money, love, power, and social or psychological conflict.
- How each character will get what they want plus the desires behind it.
- Also, go over what the character will win or lose from the scene. Yes, all of this matters when writing dance scenes or they will come off as hollow scenes with no girth to them.
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Scene Ingredients & context-setting
- The ingredients of the scene is the context of the dance, the meaning of the dance, and the mood all have a hand with how the scene is portrayed to the reader.
- Making the appropriate set, environment, time, and mood is always key.
- Use and arrange the classical unities to your benefit for the dance scene especially Aristotelian Poetics (If you know what this means then you know what to do) as needed.
- The unity of action: You should only use one crucial action for the dance to follow.
- The unity of place: The dance should stay in space only. Don’t go through different rooms with the dance.
- The unity of time: Make sure the dance takes place in continuous time-space.
- The clothes of the characters in the scene should match the wardrobe that the dance entails, the context, and the character’s intentions.
- Make a good list of items and accessories the character should use to further the flow of the scene.
- All of these ingredients that you will use to make a good dance scene.
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Acting: Action and Physical Expressions of Intentions.
- So, you know that dances are about expression, action and characters as I have said multiple times already. It brings the audiences into the scene in their own minds. Especially with the interactivity with the characters themselves in the scene and all the ingredients that help make the scene great.
- Make sure to combine your ingredients and all possible interactions you can get from the scene.
- Also, do not forget about the uses of non-verbal interactions that can be exploited in the scene. You use those interactions to double down on what is happening in a scene, you can even contradict what the characters are saying with certain actions they might use.
- Defining how you use the character’s actions such as dance to unveil, express their feelings, make a move that is seductive, be clumsy, be distance by ignoring the other character’s advances, and other such expressions like that.
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Plot your dance scene with the puzzle pieces you have come up with.
- This part is where you bring all four steps above to make the dance scene that you like.
- First, write down the inner dialogue, the vocal dialogue, or body dialogue you want the reads to get the message from.
- This is where you think about having a conversation during the dance or not using any dialogue in order to covey the scene to the readers.
- Next, you will need to figure out what moves you want your characters to make that will enhance the scene. You want to be able to covey the emotions that come from the dance scene.
- Add spice to the dance such as complicated moves, accidents, surprise move made by one of the characters to entice the other character.
- If you are writing a dance scene where the characters have an audience then use the audience to help convey more information about the dance, what they see, how they feel about the dance, the dancers in general, and if they are swayed by the dance as well.
- The last part is how you want to end the scene. You have a multitude of ways to end the scene which are, open endings, close ending, an ambiguous ending where there is no resolution to the character’s goals, or you can have them achieve their goals.
This is the article I used to make this thread.
Dance scenes really are difficult.
Needed this so much.