5 Easy Tips to Strengthen Your Scenes

In the English countryside they have stone walls to keep in the sheep. Some of these walls have been around for centuries, and they’re amazing architectural achievements. The flat stones are not uniform. They differ in color and shape, yet they fit together to form the whole.

(Launching Into Scenes With Action.)

The scenes of your fiction are like the stones in an English wall. You want your scenes to vary in shape and feel, but when you step back they should all fit together. You don’t want any stones sticking out at odd angles, or cracked through the center. If you make each scene stand on its own and contribute to the story in an essential way, your story will be structurally solid.

But if you have weak scenes, your story may crumble.

Let’s look at some simple techniques for revising scenes so your edifice will stand the test of time.

Not rewrite. Relive.

Have you ever imagined yourself to be the characters? Tried to feel what they’re feeling? Try it now. It’s not hard. Be an actor.

Often, after I’ve written a scene, I’ll go back and try to live the emotions. I’ll act out the parts I’ve created. Almost always what I feel “in character” will make me add to or change the scene.

You can also imagine the scene, step by step, in your mind. Let it play like a movie. But instead of watching the movie from a seat in the theater, be in the scene. The other characters can’t see you, but you can see and hear them.

Intensify the proceedings. Let things happen. Let characters improvise. If you don’t like what they come up with, rewind the scene and allow them to do something else.

Look at the beginnings of your scenes. What do you do to grab the reader at the start? Have you spent too much time with description of setting? Often the better course is to start in medias res (in the middle of things) and drop in description a little later.

Examine scene endings. What have you provided that will make the reader want to read on? Some great places to stop a scene are:

Keep improving your scenes and your novel will soon develop that can’t-put-it-down feel.

Ask yourself what the core of your scene is. What’s the purpose? Why does it exist? If the core is weak or unclear, strengthen it.

If you need to speed up a scene, dialogue is one way to do it. Short exchanges with few beats leave a lot of white space on the page and give a feeling of movement.

In the Lawrence Block story “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” a waitress tells private investigator Matt Scudder someone was looking for him, ending her descriptions by saying he looked “underslung.”

To slow the pace of a scene, you can add action beats, thoughts and description as well as elongated speeches. In the Block story, a killer confesses to Scudder. Scudder asks why he did it.

Don’t waste any good tension beats. Stretch them. Make your prose the equivalent of slow motion in a movie. Show every beat, using all the tools at your disposal: thoughts, actions, dialogue, description. Mix these up.

(When Cultures Collide: 3 Ways to Create Tension in Worldbuilding in a Novel.)

In a famous early scene in Whispers, Dean Koontz takes 17 pages to describe the attempted rape of the lead character. Read it and learn.

Identify the 10 weakest scenes in your work. You should have an idea of what these are. Use your gut instinct.

When you read through the manuscript, you sensed a certain letdown in some of the scenes, or even outright disappointment.

To help you further, look for scenes where:

Make yourself identify 10 weak scenes. Even if you think only five are really weak, rate another five. List the scenes in order of their relative weakness. The weakest scene is No. 1, the next weakest No. 2, and so on. Write these numbers on sticky notes and mark each weak scene in the manuscript. Now you’re ready to work.

STEP 1: Cut scene No. 1 from the manuscript. It’s gone. It is the weakest link. Goodbye.

STEP 2: Move to scene No. 2. Answer the Three ‘O’ Questions:

1. What’s the objective in the scene and who holds it? In other words, who is the POV character and what’s he after in the scene? If he’s not after anything, give him something to go after, or cut the scene. You must be able to state the character’s objective clearly and unambiguously. You must also make this objective clear to the reader at the beginning of the scene. The character must either state it or show it in action.

2. Next, what’s the obstacle to his known objective? Why can’t he have it? There are three primary obstacles you can use:

3. Finally, what is the outcome of the scene? A character can gain his objective or not. For the greatest tension, which do you think it should be? Not. Why? Because trouble is your game, and trouble is tension for the character, and that’s what keeps readers reading. Most of the time, let the outcome be a negative—or at least an unrealized—objective.

STEP 3: Repeat the above process for the other eight scenes on your list.

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If you want to learn how to write a story, but aren’t quite ready yet to hunker down and write 10,000 words or so a week, this is the course for you. Build Your Novel Scene by Scene will offer you the impetus, the guidance, the support, and the deadline you need to finally stop talking, start writing, and, ultimately, complete that novel you always said you wanted to write.

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