Writing a good scene

Readers are reading your novel expecting to be given a mind-blowing emotional experience! Your reader wants to find themselves falling in love if you are writing a Romance book. An Army Veteran or even an armchair General needs to experience the fear, adrenaline and turmoil of combat when reading a War novel. Fantasy buffs are transported to magical and wonderful worlds.

The better you create these emotional desires, the better your writing. Your job is to create the fullest emotional experience for your readers.There are plenty of other pasterns that people use but these are proven to work by countless writers.

The scene consists of three parts. Goal, Conflict and Disaster.

GoalConflictDisaster

A Sequel has the following three-part pattern:

ReactionDilemmaDecision

A Goal is what every hero or heroine in a story needs. They are not sitting around waiting for something to happen, they have an objective and go out to get it.

Conflict is what prevents your character from reaching their goal. Without conflict, your character will effortlessly reach their goal and your reader will be bored. By making your character struggle your reader will feel as if they are invested and live out that struggle too.

Disaster is where your character fails to reach their goal, this makes it more interesting. Leave your character in a life-threatening situation or heartbroken, this will keep the readers attention to see what happens next.

That is the Scene, now we will have a look at the Sequel.

The Sequel comprises of three parts which are Reaction, Dilemma and Decision. A Sequels purpose is to follow a scene. Ending on a disaster the scene can’t be followed by another scene which starts with a goal after the character has suffered a major setback. Your character must be given time to recover.

Reaction is the time to weep, to contemplate your next move while recovering from the disaster which has happened. They need to rake stock and search for options. And guess what? There will not be any options available to the character, not any easy ones anyway!

The Dilemma is the character having no good options with their backs against the wall. This makes the reader concerned and worry over what the character will do next. They search for the least-bad option.

The Decision is making a choice of options which will allow your character to become pro-active again. Make the character’s choice risky but with a chance of succeeding. Your reader will have to turn the page because the character has a new goal now and sets off to reach it.

The scene leads to a sequel which naturally leads to another scene and so on until you reach the end of your novel giving your character victory or defeat. The alternating pattern of scene and sequel will carry you through your novel, your reader turning the pages through the night because he could not put it down!