Scenes, advice, and complexity

“Every scene must cause or lead into the next scene.”

I ran across this particular bit of writing advice recently; it was followed by a couple of tips such as “cut any scene that isn’t caused by the scene immediately before it.”

Wow, that means Ian M. Banks should have cut every other chapter out of Use of Weapons. Which, unsurprisingly, means losing half the story.

Nonlinear fiction is kind of an obvious exception (although the perpetrator of this particular bit of writing advice didn’t allow f...