What makes a Scene?

In the first place, scenes happen in real time. It’s as if the reader is a fly on the wall, watching and listening as characters talk and move. We hear the characters speak in their own voices, we observe their body language, and we do it at the pace of real life, with no authorial summing-up tricks to make it go faster.

Second, scenes involve conflict. Not necessarily shove-a-gun-in-someone’s-face conflict, but at the very least a sense of the characters being at odds in some way, out of sync, one wanting something the other can’t or won’t give.

Why conflict? Because two people agreeing about absolutely everything would be amazingly boring, would fail to move the story, and we readers would wonder why that scene was in the book at all.

Unless, of course, it’s part of the setup. Oh, that’s it, we think as we read about the happy couple. They’re in total agreement now, but just wait—the big breakup is coining.

Because at bottom all stories are about change (or, in a very few cases, failure to change, which is in itself a form of change because opportunity is offered and declined, which means our protagonist doesn’t just go back to where he was at the beginning, he’s worse off because he could have changed but didn’t.) That’s the inexorable math of Story: no character can possibly come through Story unscathed. (See The Remains of the Day for wonderfully evocative proof of this fiction maxim.)

So if change is at the root of Story, how does it manifest itself in the small picture, the scene?

A Scene Driver Named Desire

Our protagonist wants something. If he’s a detective, he wants to know whodunit. If she’s a suspense heroine, she wants to go back to the peaceful life she had before some wacko started sending her dead flowers. If he’s a spy, he wants to save the free world; if she’s in a legal thriller she wants to get the Pelican Brief to the right people before the wrong people whack her.

Well, they can’t get those things, can they? Not in Arc One, that’s for sure. [image error]

So for scene purposes, they need to want something else, something lesser but still connected to the big goal, something that, ideally, pushes them harder into the plot point that climaxes whichever arc they’re in.

This is vital. Every single scene in the book must start from a position of wanting.

“I want to have a good time at this party”—but it’s going to be hard now that the host is dead on the floor. My amateur detective’s nice simple want has turned into a situation that will force her to turn detective and start asking questions.

“I want to get the people who killed my girlfriend”—and in order to do that, I’ll volunteer as a spy so I can go after Mr. Big Bad Guy, but right this minute my want is to pass all the tests so the spies will take me on as a recruit.

The small scene-level wants are like acorns from which spring giant oaks. They are the tiny pieces of colored glass that will, when put together, shine forth from the stained glass window of your plot.

Just as in the overarching plot-line, just as in the arc, the scene contains a goal, a complication, tension, and resolution. At the end of every scene in the book, bar none, the protagonist must experience some change, for better or worse.

Worse is better. Change for the better, in the first three arcs, should turn into worse as soon as possible, or should contain the seeds of later getting worse-ness. Why?

Because when things get worse, when the protagonist fails to get what he wants, he is forced to do something else. Something that propels him into more dangerous waters.

So every single scene must end with a “No, and furthermore”?

Not necessarily. Sometimes a “Yes, but” is more interesting than a straight No and sometimes a Yes brings a lot more headaches than a No would have done. It’s all a matter of pushing the protagonist out of her comfort zone and into territory where she will be tested to the max.

But none of that can happen unless she wants something at the beginning of the scene—a scene goal that the reader understands from the outset. That’s one of the beauties of the mystery form; we readily accept the detective’s need to know as a perfectly clear, perfectly reasonable scene goal, and everything follows from that.

What does the suspense hero want as a scene goal?

To understand what’s happening to him. To enlist official help in tracking down the bad guys. To have someone believe her. To get a passport or a ticket to Hong Kong or the key to the safety deposit box. To find that old photo album or grandfather’s will, anything that will help unravel the tangled secrets of the past. To get Aunt Maisie out of her Alzheimer’s fog just long enough to tell our heroine the truth about that long-ago phone call the night Daddy died.

It doesn’t matter exactly what she wants so long as the reader understands what she wants and why she wants it and it relates in some way to the novel’s big goal.

Write with joy, write with love…:)

Cristina Istrati