In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 260.
“I hate writing scenes,” I announced at a recent event for my new novel, Clutch. The room gasped, then giggled nervously. How could a writer say that? Do that? Had she written a whole book without scenes?
I backpedaled, assuring my future readers there were plenty of scenes in my new book, though they had felt difficult to write. Scenes were generally okay, but I found more joy and resonance with analysis (slow time) and acceleration (fast time). I have reasons for my preferences, and when arguing against scene I often think back to the wonderful opening story, “My Bonny,” in Jo Lloyd’s story collection, Something Wonderful (Tin House, 2021). It covers several generations of a struggling family in the space of nineteen pages; scene is used sparingly. I had to admit encountering another compelling way to the finish line when I read Elizabeth McCracken’s brilliant “Seven Stories About Tammy,” which spans a lifetime through a series of powerful vignettes. I was looking at these kinds of stories, and thinking of other novel interpretations of time, when I began to write Clutch: How might I get readers through months, years, sometimes a decade or two of information about a character? (This same question could apply to any piece of fiction in which the characters have a lot of backstory.) Multiply that concern by five women’s timelines—if I wrote that many scenes, it would be one long book! As I tried to articulate all this at my event, I moved my hands like they were holding an invisible accordion, gesturing toward stretching out and smooshing in, and smiled beseechingly.
After the event I kicked myself over my confessional, knee-jerk answer. I had a rant-lecture cued up about the limits of realism, the artifice of scene, how autofictionalists had solved it by throwing plot out the window to focus on voice and interpretation—scene as springboard to some larger existential quest. Good for them! But in Clutch I was trying to solve for that artificial feeling of scenes by manipulating the time signature of storytelling. It felt like a concerted acceleration, like pressing a “fast forward” button on the narrative tape deck and seeing what would happen.
When I got home, I realized there was another way to answer this question about scene. I’d recently heard poet Dante Micheaux lecture on poetic time, and he explained how there was conventional chronos, or chronological time, and then there was kairos, a string of more consequential moments, and that poets dealt in the latter. I do too, I realized, listening to him speak. Because while prose is generally more interested in chronology, if you found a narrator (in Clutch’s case, a fairly empathetic, somewhat omniscient one) that felt comfortable hopping between a string of kairos-ish events, you could scoot around the timeline with a lot more ease and interest than “scene, scene, scene.” It made for higher-yield reading, a different density than a conventional page-turner.
The next day, I came up with another answer to that scene question: A friend who studied with Marilynne Robinson told me one of her pieces of writing advice was that a scene needs to be doing seven things at once for it to stay in one of her manuscripts. This sounds slightly insane but is a close cousin to my rule for dialogue, how it has to do triple duty: In any exchange, we have to (1) learn something about the speaker, (2) learn something about their relationship with the listener, and (3) move the story forward. When you look at that, Robinson’s advice, and Micheaux’s commitment to kairos, suddenly every page, even the quotidian passages, can become consequential, maybe even revelatory. And maybe that’s the thing about scenes: Even if they read as plausibly realistic, they are doing so much more than that when most effective. So that’s what I should’ve said: I don’t hate scenes, but I find them so hard to accomplish, to carry the significance I seek on every page. I hope, after thinking through the possibilities of scene with me here, you can also come to see every scene as the best kind of difficult.
Emily Nemens is the author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026). Her debut novel, The Cactus League (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Literary Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, the Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Nemens spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading the Paris Review and serving as coeditor and prose editor of the Southern Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College and lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.
image credit: Robert Cavlovic