#scene building

I have three axes that I keep in mind when writing-- world, character, and plot.

Plot is in reference to the current character goal. Even if the characters are not advancing the main plot, every scene should be moving toward an immediate goal which the characters are working toward.

Character is the characters themselves. While most of your scenes are, presumably, going to contain a character, what character mans in this context is advancing our understanding of them, or their relationship with other characters.

World can mean our understanding of the world, or even a physical location. A scene may not be building up on the worldbuilding in an overt way, but remembering that characters can move between locations -- even as simple as rooms in a house -- can keep a scene from feeling stagnant.

When I sit down to write a scene, I ask myself-- is this advancing any of the three vectors?

If the answer is no, then the scene either needs severe reworking, or needs to be cut entirely.

The length of the scene (or chapter) determines how many of them I'm shooting for. Broadly speaking, I try to have every chapter advance two of three in earnest. Sometimes I may only want to focus on one, if it's a major piece of information or character beat; sometimes I may want all three, although this can result in a dilution of focus, so trying to advance all three substantially is usually something reserved for very heavy or dense chapters.

When it comes to a scene-by-scene level, I must be advancing at least one of these vectors, and that is non-negotiable. Something must be different about our understanding of the story by the end of a scene.

This includes scenes where a conflict is introduced and then immediately resolved by the end of the scene. I see this fairly commonly in a lot of fanfiction or serialized work, where two characters will have some kind of argument or misunderstanding, then come to an emotional catharsis, then return to pretty much the same relational state they had before the argument. It might be a really impactful, meaningful scene, but if the chapter before it and the chapter after it are completely unchanged emotionally by this scene, then you probably didn't need to include it.

('But what if it comes back later, just not in the next chapter?' Then the scene HAS served a purpose because something in the world or the characters HAS changed, even if we don't recognize the implications of that for a while.)

My mind keeps wanting to go to a particular scene in Eragon, where the winds are so severe that Saphira has difficulty closing her wings so Eragon helps her hold them closed. This scene does nothing to advance the plot. It tells us nothing about the characters. It says nothing about the world. This isn't setting up a moment later when Eragon needs to help Saphira stabilize in a heavy wind. It happens, we move on, and all that's been accomplished is a waste of the reader's time.

I think also, to take a more common punching bag, about Twilight, and it's many scenes of Bella obseving Edward, and Edward being mysterious and then Bella observed Edward, and Edward is mysterious, and then Bella observes Edward, and Edward is mysterious, and then eventually they go into the woods to talk, and then they go into the wood to talk, and then they go to a restaurant to talk. Their relationship isn't advancing, our understanding of them as people isn't advancing, our understanding of the laws of the world isn't advancing. We're just running in circles around the same scene, over and over again, waiting for the evil vampires to show up because then we would at least have forward momentum.

I emphasize that 'forward momentum' does not need to be in strict plot advancement. While it generally helps -- at the very least to advance a character's immediate goals -- it's certainly not necessary to feel a sense of narrative momentum. If the audience has learned something about the characters and how they behave, if they have confronted a personal conflict, if they have advanced or deteriorated a relationship with another character, this can all be narrative advancement.

Muted. That was the mood that fit the quiet winter morning that Yui awakened to. With her warm fleece blanket around her shoulders to shelter her from the cold that had settled into her poorly insulated dorm room, Yui padded sleepily up to the window. Surely enough, there was a blanket of snow brightening the landscape that had become dull in its familiarity. This was exactly the fresh perspective she had been craving. 

She doubled her armor against the chill with a thick, soft sweater and lined leggings and prepared herself a hot mug of strong, sweet tea before sitting at her desk, a perfect perch to behold the winter wonderland spread before her.

She let out a tranquil sigh as she reached for her sketchbook and put to paper all that she saw, from the swirling snow drifts sculpted in layers by biting winds, to the powdered sugar sweetening everything it settled on. She would add a modest sprinkling of glitter later to accentuate the way the pure white sparkled in the weak sunlight, but for now, she kept her shading light to capture the nearly otherworldly softness of the scene.

Next, she grabbed her watercolors and added cool pastel hues to the frost that spun crystalline patterns on the corners of her windows. 

As the day wore on, the world started to wake, bringing her even more inspiration. She colored the life her fellow students brought to the starkness of the landscape around them with their bright coats and hats as they braved the frigid temperatures to continue about their busy lives. 

And when it grew silent once again, she drew the pollution of the snow, now tinted with touches of dirty brown and littered with slushy footprints. After all, nothing pure ever went untainted, did it? And that reality deserved to be represented just as much as the wintery fantasy beforehand.

- animal bones

- unperturbed silence

- trees bending under the weight of their own fruit

- scraped knees

- sunflowers that don't follow the sun

- the intact underside of sun-bleached objects

- clocks that go off with no one to hear them

- rooms lined with mold

- shirts covered in lint

- children's laughter

- praying only when tragedy strikes

An example one of these could perhaps be a large asteroid that passes over the planet every few years which causes the sky to light up in brilliant and strange colours and bringing with it astral shards made of rock and rare metals which strike into the earth bringing potential fortune to those who manage to find them.

You could also then build upon ideas like this with festivals and celebrations based around the occurrence of the phenomena with folklore and traditions and stories about it and what it has been interpreted to mean.

Additionally you could also create worry and intrigue if the phenomena that was supposed to occur doesn't.

Industry.