Making a Scene

I often have people (friends and strangers) approach me and ask me to look over their work. The biggest issues I see in novice writers are improper scene structure and scene overkill.

Let me explain.

What I mean by scene structure isn’t what you might think. It’s not about what is IN a scene, but how you break and connect scenes together. Many novice authors will begin a scene at the beginning and end it at the end. That only makes sense, right?

But the truth is, that isn’t the best way to hook your reader. I call it the drag and drop. You want to drag them into a scene, and drop them off a cliff at the end. Here’s how:

(FYI: A chapter should contain at least one ‘scene’, sometimes two or three. Too many ‘scenes’ in a chapter will bog it down, so don’t be afraid to split those babies up. No one is going to fault you for having 40 chapters instead of 35, I promise.)

Your scene should always open with action. That doesn’t mean it has to open with somebody being shot at (though that would be pretty freaking cool), but by ‘action’ I mean some kind of movement that will interest a reader. If your character wakes up, puts on her slippers, goes and has breakfast, reads the paper, blah blah blah. Readers do not care about that crap. We want to get into the MEAT of the story as quickly as possible. So don’t bog yourself down with a bunch of scene setting, character description, or backstory right off the bat. You can weave those things in later. The reader will give you a wide window at the opening of a book in particular, where you can run with it now, and explain why we are running later. So for the love of Pete, run with it.

I have read books where I don’t know what the MC looks like for 3 chapters. That’s fine. You don’t have to give me a full life story in the first page, or the first chapter. Sprinkle it in like salt into a stew. A little here, stir. A little more, stir. Until you get it just right by the end. If you just dump all the salt in at once, you can end up with a stew no one can stomach.

A book is no different.

There are three things I look for in the opening of a scene (ESPECIALLY the first scene).

1) A reason to care. Give me a reason to keep reading. Either make me really like the MC right away or throw me into a mystery I want to solve, or show me a world that fascinates me. Is your MC running from someone? Who? Why? Will he make it? I want to know. (Don’t tell me right away, let me wonder for a while and build that suspense.)

2) Movement. Get the plot moving right away. If I get bored in the first ten pages, I may put it down and never pick it up again. If the opening of a scene bores me, I will close the book and go to sleep. You run the same risk either way. Don’t give your reader and excuse to put the book down. EVERY scene should be driving the plot forward. If it’s not, get rid of it.

3) Direction. Show me where the scene is heading. Now that can be a red herring and you may take me off in a totally unexpected direction two paragraphs later. That’s cool. But if you open with something that points to the fact that your neighbor is a werewolf, I will follow you down that path until you either confirm it or change it. But give me a direction to be looking.

Ending a scene or chapter is just as tricky. As a writer, your natural inclination is to end a chapter when the scene is over, right? Wrong.

I know, mind=blown, right?

If your scene ends with your character crawling into bed after the epic fight and falling asleep, guess what the reader does? Yep. They close the book and go to sleep too. But, if you end the chapter at the climax of the fight, or even later, when your hero is tucked into bed only to be awakened by someone standing over him, END IT THERE. Make the reader NEED to find out what happens next. basically, if you are going to drop your character off a cliff, end with him going over, not landing at the bottom. Put that in beginning of the NEXT scene or chapter. Now you’ve done two things, you’ve ended the scene on a cliffhanger, and started the next scene with action. See how well that works? Now, even if your character lands on a big soft mattress and walks away to begin another adventure, you have the reader hooked. They will keep reading until the next big cliff drop. That’s how you get those great “I couldn’t put this book down!” reviews.

Now Scene Overkill is an entirely different beast. Scene overkill happens when you have a scene where not much happens and it slows down the pace, giving me a great place to stop reading. To avoid this, look at your scene closely. Does something important happen? Do we get any vital information about the plot or the character? No? Then cut it out. You don’t need it.

Is there a really funny joke you want to tell or a memory the reader should see? Great. Put it in somewhere else. Each scene should have either something vital to the story or a climax of some kind. If you are writing a YA novel, don’t make me read through school days where nothing interesting happens. You can tell me that a few days pass and THEN when he goes to school, it’s full of zombies. That’s cool.

Also, be very careful with using too much info dumping. Yes, sometimes there is information you need to have made known to the reader. THE BEST way to do that is usually have a secondary character bring it up in some way. But if you break in the action of the story to give me a three paragraph flashback to a character’s dead sibling, I get bored. Much better to introduce that in another way. Have a friend ask about a family photo or have your MC cuddle a bunny that still smells like them. Give me a quick explanation and trust me enough to be able to figure the rest out. This is part of that SHOW DON’T TELL rule that we writers are always talking about. Yes, you can SHOW us backstory. But don’t make that backstory a scene unto itself. It’s just boring.

 

So that’s my helpful rant for the day. I wish someone had told me this crap when I started writing, because looking back at my early books,, I really could have used some tough love, you know? But we write and we grow and we keep writing and keep growing.

Until next time, happy reading!