Writing Stellar Scenes: Part 6—Action
Welcome to part six of my series on scene writing!
If you’re just joining in, here’s a quick recap of where we’ve been: I started with an introduction to the basics of scene writing. You can read that here. Now, I’m working through the eight essential elements of a scene. So far, I’ve covered four: character, setting, character goals, and the event/situation.
For a quick review, here are all eight elements of a scene:
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?
Let’s jump in. Today is all about element #5—the action of the scene!
Essential Scene Element #5: Action
Let’s go back to the definition of a scene I shared in week one:
A scene follows a character through one event or situation in real time until the event/situation ends or gets interrupted by a new event/situation.
Writing action is critical for meeting that “in real time” requirement.
In order to write action effectively, it’s important to know what to focus on and what to leave out. There are always exceptions (especially if you’re writing literary fiction), but for now, I want to focus on a couple of guiding principles that you can apply in most writing situations—especially if you are writing in my specialty area: commercial genre fiction!
Principle #1: Continuity does not mean continuous.
In other words, you do not need to narrate every single little thing your character does in a scene. Feel free to skip right over mundane, commonplace actions that your audience will be able to imagine without your input.
Common actions you can skip over: answering the phone, eating or drinking something, opening a door, etc. For example, if your protagonist hears her cellphone ring, you don’t need to show her picking it up, swiping to accept the call, and then holding it to her ear and saying hello. Instead, you can jump straight from the sound of the cellphone ringing to your protagonist saying hello to the caller on the other end of the line. No need for them to pick up the phone or swipe the screen in between.
Now, there’s an important exception to this rule. If something important happens in that moment of your character answering the phone, then by all means show it! Say your protagonist is a lovable klutz waiting for an interviewer to call back and let him know if he’s gotten his dream job or not. Then by all means, show you protagonist reaching for his phone, knocking it off the counter onto the floor and then scrambling to grab it in time to answer, just in time to hear that it’s actually a debt collector on the other end of the line.
The key difference is that the latter scenario is being used to create tension and conflict for your character. That action sequence is going to be interesting in a way that his simply answering the phone wouldn’t be.
Principle #2: Dialogue is action, but it needs to be supported by physical action as well.
If you thought that dialogue was missing from my list of eight scene elements, you thought wrong!
Conversation is a form of action, especially when we make it purposeful.
If your characters are shooting the breeze, engaging in meaningless small talk, you might as well describe paint drying.
If you focus on conversations that mean something—a conversation in which characters come in with opposing goals or one in which they are resistant to being completely honest with each other or in which they engage in witty, engaging banter—you’ll keep readers hooked for the entire scene!
But, dialogue, no matter how interesting, isn’t enough on its own.
If all you have is two characters going back and forth with no action beats or sensory description, readers will lose sight of the scene. If you’ve heard the term “talking heads syndrome,” this is what it’s referring to—the experience of reading a scene that feels like two bodiless voices talking to each other in empty space.
You can avoid that by grounding your conversation in a set physical space and giving your characters some kind of physical action to engage in while they talk. This action can be small and you can return to it in small doses over the course of the conversation, but make sure you’ve given characters something concrete to visualize as the conversation happens.
Principle #3: Scene actions should build to something meaningful.
C.S. Lakin calls this the “high moment” of the scene. I like to think of it as the climax of the scene. Just like the climax of the novel as a whole, this is the peak of conflict and tension, but unlike the climax of the novel, we don’t want to reach a complete resolution afterward (but that’s a conversation for week eight when we talk about scene element #7).
For our purposes, I want you to think about the endpoint. What are your characters moving toward (even if they don’t know what’s coming for them when the scene starts)?
For example, a scene that starts with your romantic leads meeting for dinner could slowly move toward a blow out argument or a scorching sex scene. Literally—those two scenes could start in the same exact place, but the actions that happen along the way will be completely different. In the first example, the characters might start to bicker, then try to wound with their words. There might be periods of awkward silence during the dinner, punctuated only by hostile eye contact until one of them storms out and the other follows to start the shouting match.
In contrast, in the sex scene version, the characters might start out flirting. Perhaps their dinner is also punctuated by awkward silences, but only because the characters are unsure of where they stand and are hesitant to put themselves out there first. That awkwardness might broken by a moment of vulnerability or by one character reaching across the table to take the others’ hand—it might be a small gesture, but just enough to break the ice and open the door for the intimacy to come.
Again, we can start in the same place, but each character action moves us toward a different conclusion.
Now, imagine you thought you were going to write a blow out argument but ended up with your characters in bed together. That’s totally fine! Sometimes our characters take over and move the story in a direction you didn’t anticipate. That scene might have an dynamism that your original version wouldn’t have had. But, you will need to go back and address any discrepancies (e.g. wild swings in character motivations) that popped up as you transitioned from your original idea to the new ending. That’s exactly what revision is for—to ensure that each step your characters take moves them slowly but surely to the climactic moment of the scene.
With these three principles behind you, you’ll be on your way to writing purposeful scenes that engage your readers and move your story forward one purposeful action at a time!
Thanks for joining me in another installment of this scene writing series! I hope you’ll come back next week for our discussion of scene element #6—emotions & reactions!
Until then, happy writing!
Not sure if your scenes are building to purposeful action?
Worried that you’re giving too much detail or failing to ground your dialogue in real actions?
Olivia can help!
