The concept of description and the structure of Mckee's view of story design

Question

Consider the following text:

Tania is in her living room, in the summer. She looks to the window and the street in front of her house, then she realized how dry and parched they are, this makes her sadness even worse. After a labor day of house work, she decides to take a nap, which turned up to a long sleep. During her sleep, she dreamed about her mother, telling the origin of silver forks of the kitchen. In her dream her mother told she that the silver forks were from her grandmother and lots of other things like fact that they were originated in Italy. Waking up, Tania looks again to the street and realized how wet they are, and how the temperature are better now. After saw the streets so clean and beautifully wet, she have never been sad again.

Well, it's clear that the event here (or more precisely, the story event) is the rain. The value (sadness, happiness) changes as we expected. This is a true story event.

Now, concerning Tania's dream, this dream would be a larger event, even a sequence or an act if you wanted. But this dream didn't change anything, and if we eventually build a scene (or a large structure, as I said, a sequence or a act) this scene would not satisfy the Mckee's point of view that "every event must to change".

But, Tania's dream gives the character's story more information and also descriptions about her world. If we eventually build a scene, then this scene would work as a "descriptional or expositional" structure. Mckee suggests this on page 36 of [1].

Is it correct to treat a scene like Tania's dream this way, i.e., constructs a new kind of structure just to do description?

[1] MCKEE.R. Story. itbooks. New York, 1997.

Answer 1

But something DID change, Tania's emotional attitude is changed in the last sentence, after the rain ends.

The length isn't what makes a scene. Like the story in general, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have those elements here. (1) You establish a setting and character problem: It's hot and dry and she's sad. (2) She cleans her house, then takes a nap. (3) She wakes up and it has rained. The outside streets are cleaned, just as her house was cleaned. The opposite conditions prevail: The outside is cooler, washed and no longer dry, and inside, she's not sad anymore.

What changes in a scene doesn't have to be a BIG change, it is usually a minor change. And some scenes are descriptions necessary to create a setting. Because the job of the writer is to assist the reader's imagination; and that includes a lot of description, of setting, actions, and feelings, and how their feelings change or new feelings arise.

There is nothing wrong with description; the only sin is boring description where nothing seems to be happening, and the reader feels like they are attending a lecture on geography or something. (also called "info dumps").

The way to avoid that sin of being boring is actually buried in what you have done: You want to filter descriptions through the eyes and emotions of your character, so the facts aren't dry but mean something to her.

For example, if my character is a lifelong soldier, she may automatically see a landscape and assess it as a battlefield, with strengths and weaknesses, defensible positions and dangerous positions. If she is a fashion designer, she can't help but notice how people dress and what that tells her about them.

What characters see is always colored by what they know of the world, their profession and other acquired knowledge, by their memories and experiences, and how they are feeling at the time and what has happened to them recently.

The advice to make something happen is good; but what happens doesn't have to be either permanent or momentous, it just needs to be a change that likely determines what happens next. In Tania's case, what she does next while happy, is likely different than what she would do next if she was still sad. So your scene creates some justification for "what happens next."