Writing Stellar Scenes - Part 1: The Basics
Last week I talked about writing in scenes and how it can help us master that pesky “show, don’t tell” rule. Hopefully you’re on board with the basic concept.
To recap: scenes are self-contained narrative units. Each one should focus on a single event or situation. A scene has a beginning, middle, and end. Most importantly, scenes should only include the description, backstory, and internal thoughts that are essential to understanding a character’s experiences in real time. {Confused? That’s okay! Go back and read my intro to scene writing here].
It sounds easy enough.
So why do so many writers still struggle to create compelling, engaging scenes?
There’s still a lot of confusion about what goes into a scene. Today, I’m going to take you through the basic elements of a scene and address some myths that can hold writers back.
Two quick notes before we dive in:
First, there are many approaches to scene building. In this series, I’m going to describe the way that I think about scenes. If this process works for you, great! If not, then don’t worry about it—every writer is different, and my style might not work with yours.
Second, I’m going to talk a lot about scene planning. But, as I’ve talked about before—I’m a pantser. I don’t use these steps to plan scenes in advance (at least not in a formal outline), but I do use them when I plan revisions. You can apply these methods to planning scenes before you write or to critique scenes you’ve already drafted. I’ll try to give tips for both approaches, but you should always feel empowered to further modify or adapt these strategies to your personal writing process.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s get going with the eight essential elements of a scene!
Eight Essential Elements
There are eight critical elements to writing an effective scene. I like to present them as questions that you’ll answer as you plan, draft, or revise a scene. Here they are: 1. Character – who will be there?
2. Setting – where are they?
3. Goal – what do the characters want to accomplish?
4. Event or Situation – what is happening?
5. Action – What will each character do or say?
6. Emotion (Reaction) – How will each character react to what is done/said? Why?
7. (Incomplete) Resolution – How will the event/situation end? What will make readers want to keep reading onward?
8. Purpose – How does this scene move the story forward, develop characters, and/or add to the conflict?
Over the next eight-ish weeks, I’m going to discuss each of these elements in it’s own separate blog post. But before we get there, I want to talk about some of the myths that can hold people back when it comes to scenes.
Myth #1: A new scene starts when you change location or when the # of people in the scene changes.
This myth honestly pisses me off. Why? It tripped me up for years. Literally, years!
On the one hand, I was taught that a new scene started when characters or whenever someone new showed up to the party. On the other hand, I was being taught that scenes needed to do sooo many things. I cannot even begin to explain how much time I spent twisting myself into knots trying to make teeny-tiny scenes do a million things.
Then, I took a scene writing class with C.S. Lakin (check out here stuff here) and learned that scenes in novels aren’t bound by silly, arbitrary rules like changing locations. You know what kinds of scenes are—scenes in films. If you’re a screenwriter, you have to worry about things like the number of actors in a scene and the number of locations you’re filming in.
As a novelist, those boundaries simply don’t exist. They’re meaningless.
So, if you’re one of those people freaking out about creating a complete scene before another character walks through the door, take a deep breath, relax, and let go.
I define the boundaries of a scene by one thing and one thing only: has the event or situation that initiated the scene ended or been interrupted?
If the answer is yes, your scene is over. Not quite done? The scene is still going.
Myth #2: Scenes need to be a certain number of words or all scenes in a novel need to be the same length.
Honestly, I’m not sure where this myth comes from. I’ve never been a numbers gal (just ask my math teachers) but I know that some people find comfort in having benchmarks to aim for. Sometimes, well meaning advice givers fulfill that need by giving strict benchmarks for scene lengths. Some go so far as to say that scene lengths need to be consistent across a book.
The truth? It’s more complicated.
Yes, scenes can get be too long. Yes, they can also be too short.
But there’s no hard and fast rule. There’s definitely no rule that applies across all genres or situations.
There are two pieces of advice to hold on to here:
Always, always, always focus on quality first. Before you start worrying about an arbitrary word count, make sure you have a complete scene that works. Then, you can worry about cutting it down or expanding it to size.
Know your genre and your reader expectations. Find the norms in your genre and work from there. If readers are looking for short, fast-paced scenes, then nudge your writing in that direction. If readers are looking for deep, introspective scenes throughout the novel, then, yes, give the people what they want! If you read in and love your genre, this shouldn’t be too difficult. If you’re not reading widely in your genre, you have some homework to do!
Regarding consistency across a novel. That’s not a thing either. Scene lengths will vary throughout your novel. There’s nothing wrong with that and it may even be a feature of story structure and tension. I don’t have any hard data on this, but a writing pal recently mentioned that scenes tend to get shorter as we get closer to the climax.
I’d never noticed that before, but once she mentioned it, I started noticing that trend in books I read for fun and for work. Again, I haven’t made a formal study, but it is clear that scene lengths vary in successful, engaging, published books. That’s all the evidence I need to keep myself from getting hung up on scene lengths.
