Writing Stellar Scenes: Part 9—Scene Purpose

Think of your narrative like a road. There are times when it’s appropriate to detour, but if you’re using gas (er—words) make sure you’re still heading in the right direction!

Welcome to part nine 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 seven: character, setting, character goals, the event/situation, the action, emotional reactions, and scene resolutions. 

For a quick review, here are all eight elements of a scene and the guiding questions that go with each: 

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?

Today is all about the final element #8—the scene’s purpose! Let’s go!

As you revise, make sure that each scene is taking you further along the path to your narrative destination—not pulling you off track into the land of low tension or confused focuses.

Essential Scene Element #8: Purpose

Every scene in your story should serve a purpose. But what purpose does a scene serve in the first place? I wish I could give you a simple answer, but as with most things in the writing world, there’s more than one option! 

Your scene can: introduce the world, introduce the main character, introduce a secondary character or multiple characters, showcase a character’s internal arc, develop a relationship between characters, develop the main conflict of the narrative, develop a subplot, bring a subplot and the main plot together—and so much more!

Seriously, that list could go on and on.

To make things even more complicated, a scene can do more than one thing at a time. In fact, your scenes should do multiple things at once. 

In this post, I’m not going to focus on figuring out which scenes your story needs. That would involve a whole long conversation about plotting and would be a little bit too much for one blog post. 

Instead, I’m going to talk about ways you can figure out if a scene you’ve already written is actually serving your story.

If you’re a pantser—this post is for you! These techniques will help you sort through the chaos of your first (or second) draft and determine which scenes need to be cut or significantly reworked.

If you’re a plotter, don’t worry, you can use these tips to assess the scenes listed in your outline before you start writing. Just know that you might need to repeat the process after you’ve written the first draft. 

Here are four steps you can use to assess your scenes. But first, a warning, this post will not give you hard and fast rules on which scenes absolutely have to be cut! There are no hard and fast rules here. Instead, I’m going to give you things to think about. Tools you can use to frame your thinking as you go into the scene evaluation process.

Deciding what to keep, what to cut, and what to significantly rework is your job as the writer (but I’m happy to make suggestions if you hire me as your editor 😊). This post isn’t going to tell you to get rid of your absolute favorite scene either—it’s okay to leave in a scene just because it makes you—and your target readers—really, really happy! Just make sure you balance that happiness with needs of your story as a whole.

Step #1: Honestly assess what the scene is doing (or not doing).

The first step in determining whether or not your scene is serving the appropriate purpose is to first figure out what that scene is doing in your manuscript. Before you can decide whether to keep or delete a scene, you need to read it. Identify what the characters do and say. Figure out what the characters accomplish or what new obstacles appear in their way.

Then, look at the scene on a deeper level. What are we learning about the characters? What is revealed about the world? Does the scene deepen the conflict? Send the conflict in a complicated new direction? Is it doing both? Neither? All of the above?

The goal here is to be as objective as possible about what’s on the page. That bit is crucial. It’s one thing to know what you were hoping to get across. You may also know that this scene is planting a seed that will pay off in approximately 100 pages later. But for the purposes of this analysis, we only care about what is literally happening in this moment.

Foreshadowing significant plot events is crucial and adding in little clues for readers to pick up on is a great way to make your novel satisfying to read. However, that early scene still needs to work on its own. After all, if a reader gets bored and DNFs your book on page 43, they’ll never find the gem you were setting up on page 273.

If your scene exists only to set up a future conflict but is boring to read on its own, think about replacing it with a more active scene that could convey the same information. 

Step #2: Determine whether the scene is accomplishing a unique purpose or is redundant with other parts of the manuscript. 

Say you completed your analysis in step three and found out that your scene is setting up the ruthless justice system in your world AND revealing your character’s status within the social hierarchy. That’s a great scene purpose.

But, what if you have three scenes in a row that all showcase the justice system and your character’s power (or lack thereof) within the world? 

Including a scene that conveys your character’s status and shows us the stakes of the world is absolutely necessary. But if you show us the same thing two or three times in close succession, readers will get bored and may drop the book before they get any further. 

In that situation, it’s probably best to keep just one of the scenes (preferably the one that does the most work in terms of world and character building simultaneously).

Don’t worry too much about cutting those other scenes—you can repurpose them! You could position those scenes later in the narrative to highlight ways that your character is gaining or losing power in the story, you could turn them into bonus content for your newsletter subscribers OR if you’re writing a series you could use a variation of the one of those deleted scenes to reestablish the rules of the world.

Step #3: Search your manuscript for plot bunnies and tension killers. 

Once you’ve eliminated or revised scenes that weren’t accomplishing a narrative goal and removed redundancies, it’s time to look at the manuscript as a whole. This time, you’re looking for scenes that aren’t pulling their weight within the narrative arc of the story. These are the scenes that do important character development or worldbuilding, but fail to escalate the stakes or develop the character’s inner journey. Scenes that are filled with conflict or the appearance of purpose, but don’t quite match the pacing or tone of the rest of the story. 

This part involves some of the most difficult decisions we make as writers. If a scene has made it to this point, there’s something in it that you see as valuable. There’s likely an emotional attachment there as well. But that doesn’t mean it actually belongs in the narrative.

Sure, the scene showcases your protagonist’s love of dogs, but does it really have anything to do with his battle to save the world from giant man-eating snails? 

Sure, sex scenes draw readers in, but only when they’re novel and feel meaningful. If you’re hitting readers with sex scene #44 in your one hundred page romance novel, those readers might be looking for a change of pace.

Seeing the narrator go flower shopping with her mother was endearing, but it might make more sense to use this scene at the beginning to set up their relationship, not at the end right before she goes to fight off the alien invasion. [Though on second thought, this version could absolutely work as a tense goodbye scene if layered with angsty emotional subtext!!]

Even fast-paced scenes get repetitive after awhile. Even a scene that’s interesting in isolation can pull readers out of a narrative if it deviates from what’s come before or interrupts what we’re expecting to come after.

Also be on the lookout for scenes that prematurely lower the stakes of your story. If you’re just past the midpoint and a major plot complication suddenly gets resolved without significant effort by your protagonist—you might be lowering the stakes right at the moment when your plot should be escalating. In general, we want tension to rise and rise and rise until things come to a head at the climax and then come to a halt at the climax. Big interruptions to that narrative escalation can weaken your story and cause readers to disengage. 

So instead of having your protagonist’s bully move to Florida just days before the much anticipated beat-down, let that fight happen OR force your protagonist to get out of it on the strength of their wits alone, or have that bully taken out by an even bigger threat that is going to come after the protagonist next. As I tell clients all the time—don’t pull your punches—if your protagonist gets themselves in a pickle, make sure they get themselves out of it too.

Step #4: Get feedback! 

This step may be the most important. It’s almost impossible to be objective about our own writing. After all, we pour our hearts and souls into our work. Even when we take emotion out of the equation, it’s often impossible to assess whether our writing is meeting our readers’ needs. Why? We hold infinite background knowledge about our stories. We know our characters as well as we know ourselves. We know our worlds inside and out. 

Our readers do not. 

They don’t know all of the little tidbits that help you connect point A to point C without point B actually showing up on the page. If we’ve left out key information, our trusted readers can let us know, before that manuscript makes it into an agent’s or readers’ hands.

We also bring a whole host of emotions to the page when we read over our writing. When we review our scenes, we can automatically view it through the lens of the emotional impact that we want to have, instead of the impact that the writing is actually having on a reader who comes to the passage cold. 

Getting feedback from critique partners, beta readers, or a professional editor is a great way to find out if your scenes are creating the emotional impact you’ve envisioned and are essential for figuring out if you are conveying all the information that readers need to know to understand your story.

Thanks for joining me in this scene writing series. We’ve now covered all eight elements of an effective scene. But don’t worry—I’m not quite done with scenes yet! For the next three weeks, I’ll cover some special types of scenes. I hope to see you there! 

In the meantime, happy writing! 

Not sure if your scenes are working for your narrative?

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