Neat idea about seeing what your scenes are doing

Here’s a blog post from Patricia Wrede: The Big Three again

As I learned it, the idea goes something like this: In any book or story, there are three main things a scene can do. 1) It can advance the plot. 2) It can deepen the characterization. 3) It can fill in setting and backstory. A scene that does none of these things does not belong in the book.

… It took me a while to figure out how to tell what a given scene was doing. Once I did, I felt extremely silly, because it is ridiculously simple. You take the scene out, and see what necessary and important links in the story are suddenly missing.

I instantly said, THAT’S BRILLIANT!

How did I never think of that?

I learned this on a cellular level when I was editing my third novel, Talking to Dragons. An editor was interested, but wanted me to cut almost 20,000 words to get it within the then-upper-limit for word count on that type of kid’s book. I started by looking for scenes I could cut, as that seemed like the quickest and easiest way to shrink it by 20,000 words.

I quickly discovered that every time I cut an entire scene, something didn’t make sense. Without this one, the friendship between the two central characters was sudden and inexplicable. Without that one, the little dragon had no reason for avoiding wizards. …

I think this is a really great idea for seeing what a scene is doing AND seeing whether the scene should be there. I think so even though I’m not a purist and I might very well leave a scene in the novel just because it’s neat and doesn’t get in the way. Though as far as that goes, in general “it’s neat” means it’s deepening characterization or developing a relationship. Something, anyway. Nevertheless, yes, I really like this idea of pulling out a scene, or pretending it’s not there, and seeing what else later on suddenly isn’t justified or doesn’t work.

In fact, “justification” is important and sometimes hard to see, I think. I mean situations where a scene, maybe just a little tidbit in a scene, is crucial to set up something later, but the reader naturally can’t tell about that and may point to this scene and say, “I skimmed this, I wasn’t that interested here, this doesn’t seem important.” You can’t cut that scene. The setup, invisible to the reader at that point in the story, is crucial. Therefore, all those critiques actually mean “trim harder to avoid readers getting bored here, but keep enough so that the justification is still there, setting up this important later thing.”

I like this too:

Since then, I’ve seen various hierarchies that try to link these three basic story elements with things like theme, or atmosphere, or structure. To me, those aren’t very helpful. Structure is about how a story is told. Theme is about what the story tries to say, sort of like the morals of Aesop’s fables. Atmosphere is an emergent property of style. None of them are as fundamental to the story itself as the Big Three—plot, characterization, setting-and-backstory.

To me, atmosphere (tone), is really fundamental. So is theme. But I see what Wrede is saying here, though. Atmosphere and theme = will you LIKE the story. The Big Three = does the story WORK, which is not the same thing.

Neat post! I think I’ll try that — I mean thinking about what suddenly fails if a specific scene is removed. I think that could be interesting even if I mostly do everything by feel.

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