#scene structure

1. What is my character's scene goal?

2. What obstacle stands in their way?

NaNoWriMo Day 10: How to Write Stronger Scenes This article is part of the NaNoWriMo Mastery Series — a 30-day creative writing journey from Pages and Prose, designed to help you reach 50,000 words and craft a story that truly resonates. 🖋️ Start from the beginning → NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month: How to Write a 50,000-Word Novel in 30 Days Every great novel isn’t built from chapters…

so, a while back I wrote a post about writing badly on purpose as a motivation for myself and others to push through when we feel our writing isn't good enough.

while I still stand by what I wrote in that post, I've still been struggling with achieving and keeping forward momentum. I keep getting bored with what I'm writing, and this happens on every single scene.

eventually I figure out where the block is, fix it, and move on. but it inevitably happens again.

recently, I read a post I read about undercutting tension by @septembercfawkes.

in the post, September talks about writing tension threads through to their conclusion while balancing additional threads of tension in the background so the scene doesn't take a nose dive once that conclusion is reached.

I realized, hey! that's what's been happening to me!

so...... how do I overcome that? it's not as easy as simply Doing. I have to figure out why I keep copping out on my tension.

When it comes to individual scenes, there’s a number of routes you can take with editing. Some involve smaller changes - rewriting pieces here and there to help patch up characterization issues or awkward flow. Others involve completely rewriting the scene to account for larger changes made elsewhere in the story. 

The first steps in my method involve looking at my outline; figuring out what the scene’s coming before and after, and what it needs to accomplish. Oftentimes I’ll have written out notes regarding more scene-specific details I need to pay attention to, so I review those.

Then comes what I like to call the pre-edit. This is where I go through the scene as it appeared in my first draft and mark it up with notes to refer to when I’m editing the scene. Common notes include: 

Cut - for anything ranging from paragraphs to sentences to even an entire page

Clean up - basically if there’s paragraphs that are just hard to read, I’ll keep in mind for the rewrite that I need to make that section a little more streamlined. Sometimes it’s awkward wording or weird grammar, other times it’s meandering paragraphs or places where I just loop back around and around the same ideas multiple times.

NO - this is usually accompanied by something a bit more specific, but it’s usually if something is blatantly wrong in the context it’s being used, it’s melodramatic, or it’s out of character.

Show ___ - for anything I sort of glossed over in the first draft that needs to be dramatized. 

Keep - I usually reserve this for at most a sentence or two, but it’s for when I’ve got a visual or metaphor that I really like and think I can make work in the new version of my scene.

Voice - for places where a character speaks in a way they really shouldn’t, or if my narrative voice slipped into something weird.

Formatting - I often see places where I have weird sentences or I need to make paragraph breaks or I spelled something wrong. For the developmental edit, these aren’t of much consequence, but if I come across something, I’ll make a note of it and move on rather than blatantly ignore it (it just kinda feels weird to me). This is one of those notes where you could completely skip it for now and you’d be fine. 

While pre-editing the whole manuscript in one go (as opposed to flipping between rewriting scenes and doing pre-edits) could be faster, I find that it’s easier to do pre-edits with the context of my newly rewritten scenes. Also, breaking it into chunks means I view the scenes in a much more fluid nature. Aka, I can rearrange pieces of several individual scenes in and amongst each other far more easily. Experiment with what works best for you :)

Next step: rewrite the scene. Depending on how clean your drafts are, you may not have to do this. However, since I had a major learning curve over the course of writing my first draft, a lot of the writing comes off as amateurish enough that I’ve rewritten all (save for one) of my scenes, at least during my first pass. Rewriting means I’m a lot more inclined to really get into the character’s heads and write them more accurately, and I don’t have much of an excuse for not changing little things as I pass them. I find I can get much more substantial changes this way. Basically, for rewrites, have either a printed copy of your scene, or go split-screen and write the scene while constantly going over your pre-edit notes. 

By K. M. Weiland

Make sure your scene does what a scene is supposed to do. Scenes need to focus on moving forward the plot or characterization and have a beginning, middle and end. This article here goes into that in better detail, including a lot on good scene structure. 

Each scene should propel the reader into the next scene and compel them to keep reading. While it’s great to end on a bang! -- a secret being revealed, a door being opened -- the satisfaction comes because that bang! resolves some issue you, the creator, set up in that scene. 

As always, structure is key. Setup --> Complication --> Crisis --> Resolution is one typical structure discussed here. 

(via How to Write a Scene: Writing Scenes with Purpose and Structure | Now Novel)

Knowing how to write a scene is a crucial skill for writing a novel. Scenes are the basic building blocks of plot. Read this guide for tips on writing scenes, including how to start and end scenes, as well as scene-planning and structuring tips.

What is a scene exactly? What scenes do and why they matter

N.B. This guide goes into some detail. Prefer a concise guide to scene structure including how to begin, develop and end a scene (with examples) and checklists for making your scene structure strong? Download our free, concise eBook guide to scene-writing here.

The word ‘scene’ has multiple literary definitions. On one hand, it is ‘A place or setting regarded as having a particular character or making a particular impression.’ (OED). When we talk of a scene as a unit of story structure, a scene is ‘A sequence of continuous action in a play, film, opera, or book’ (OED). It’s also ‘A representation of an incident, or the incident itself.’ (OED)

How do these definitions combine? Scenes, individual story units smaller than chapters (but somewhat self-contained), show us sequences of actions and incidents that reveal place and time, characters’ actions, reactions or dilemmas.

So I don’t know if the term is official or anything, but basically the concept is about switching rapidly between two or more tones in your writing. For example, having one paragraph be really somber, and the next be all happy, and then the next be aggressive. 

Basically, it’s about having a really inconsistent tone within a single scene, which can overall make the writing come off as more amateurish. When you’re doing your first draft, it’s totally fine for this to happen - the goal is getting the events of your story down on paper. But when you’re editing, this is something you’re going to want to clean up. 

The first thing to consider is what you want the reader to feel at a basic level in the beginning, middle, and end of the scene. Often, the middle is going to be an emotional transition between the beginning and ending. 

The next thing to consider is consistency. When things are consistent, they come across as clearer; when things are inconsistent, they appear muddled, and none of it stands out. If you break your scene into beginning, middle, and end, what sections are inconsistent with the desired emotion?

If you’re having trouble figuring out what’s messing up the tone in a paragraph or so, consider the following:

Word choice: what connotations to words have? Do these connotations match your desired tone? Does the emotional weight attached to your words match the emotional weight of the scene?

Emphasis: what’s getting the most attention? Are there ways to use things that need to be in the scene but don’t entirely match as a means of emphasizing the parts that do match? For example, in a recent scene, my character focuses on the peacefulness of a clear night as a means of calming herself before a big fight. Originally, I had focused on how nice the stars were and all that, but in the edit, I talked about how even focusing on that wasn’t quite enough to calm her down. Then I was able to put the focus back on how tense she was and what the stakes were.

Sentence structure: are things too choppy in a scene that’s supposed to be slower? Vice versa? Lots of complicated sentences where simpler structures might work better?