Make a Scene

By Judy Goldman

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After my second book of poetry was published, I knew I wanted to write prose. But I didn’t have the vaguest idea how to do it. I was appearing on a panel with Clyde Edgerton, a well-published N.C. author, and just before we went onstage, I said to him, “Quick! We have a few minutes. Tell me how to write prose!”

“Come up with ten good scenes,” he said, without blinking an eye at my greenness or my timing. “Connect ’em, and you have a book.” I didn’t think to ask, “What’s a scene?”

Twenty-eight years later, I know. A scene in a book is like a scene in a play; your reader sees it all, every concrete detail. I can spend months working on a scene because it’s so easy to leave it half-done.

To demonstrate, let me share a scene from my new book, The Rest of Our Lives (available May 6, 2025), a memoir that compares old age with all those other stages we pass through. This scene is from my first semester teaching at Roosevelt High, the first all-white high school in Georgia to integrate.

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Beginning of homeroom, November 1963, I heard noises in the cloakroom. The usual noises, yes — students hanging up their jackets, talking, laughing. Maybe some noises I didn’t usually hear. Scuffling?

I started toward the sounds, got as far as the doorway to the cloakroom.

Stop. Focus.

Two husky boys — one white, one Black — appeared to be wrestling in that narrow space, locked tight, knocking each other over — wait! they weren’t playing! It was a fight! The freight of their bodies, a hand reaching for a neck, a hand reaching for a pant leg, the two of them rolling around, bodies thunking, blundering, one boy on top, the other on top. I saw punching, but I couldn’t tell who was doing the punching and who was being punched. They were just struggling against each other, some crazy momentum dragging the two of them across the linoleum floor.

Do I just jump in? How to do that?

I planted my feet and reached way over, my arms wedged together from my elbows to my fingertips like a pole or a rod, pushing in. But I could not begin to get my skinny arms between them. Not enough strength. Those boys were so big and so pinned together. Then I shoved myself right in the middle of them, the three of us now a clenched mass. Like I’d joined the fight. Like we were stuck together. But I just kept shoving, shoving, until, finally, I forced them apart, one hand holding off the white boy, one holding off the Black boy, their T-shirts wadded up in my fingers.

Now all three of us were upright, nobody making a move.

I looked down. Blood all over my loafers and socks. Blood?

I looked up. Blood. Both boys. Bloody.

The Black boy’s cheek was split open, a jagged line from beneath his eye to the corner of his downturned mouth, skin zipped open. Just open! And the blood! The blood!

He wasn’t crying. Maybe I heard him take a single scratchy breath. Maybe I didn’t hear anything. His expression was — empty.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the white boy’s bare arm. His wrist. His hand. His bloody hand. The knife he was holding.