Tag Archives: secret sauce

Technique

Secret sauce: filter words

This entry is part 15 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

When you see a building under construction, your eyes are naturally drawn not to the building, but to the latticework of metal encasing its facade. In writing, the same attention to certain words and phrases—in this case “head words”—creates the same effect.

Sometimes we use phrases like “he thought” or “she knew” to reinforce the POV character’s connection with the thoughts in narration. But instead of drawing our readers’ attention to the character’s thoughts, too many of these phrases can draw attention to that scaffolding—the words that encase the character’s thoughts. Remember the example we used early on of watching a character looking out the window versus seeing the view ourselves?

This passage from the otherwise excellent Scene & Structure by Jack Bickham exemplifies the thinking behind this problem:

Failure to use constructions that show viewpoint is quite common, and, we can be thankful easy to fix. . . .

Consider the following statements:

The cold wind blew harder.
A gunshot rang out.
It was terrifying.

These are fine observations, but in none of them do we know where the viewpoint is. Ordinarily you should recast such statements to emphasize the viewpoint, thus:


She felt the cold wind blow harder.
He heard a gunshot ring out.
It was terrifying, she thought. Or:
Terror crept through her.(89)

I can’t say whether it’s just publishing trends or the version of deep POV that’s au courant, but today, publishing trends have moved far, far away from his “fixes” (other than the last one, of course). Today, such “scaffold fixes” smack of telling instead of showing.

Showing versus telling

By emphasizing the viewpoint character in these sentences, we are doing exactly what Bickham wants us to—show the viewpoint. However, we’re telling what that character is seeing/feeling/hearing.

The question readers should be asking upon reading a sentence like Bickham’s first examples isn’t “Who’s seeing/feeling/hearing this?” It’s “What’s next?”

Naturally, these examples are pretty much begging for this kind of scaffolding—because they’re in isolation. If you start your scene with a sentence like any of these (without a clear POV, that is), then yes, readers could be confused whose POV you’re in. You must establish the viewpoint character early on—but not by telling.

The cold wind blew harder and Jack flipped up the collar of his coat. He hated the winter.
A gunshot rang out. Maria flung herself under the nearest car before the terror could even register.

If you establish the POV at the beginning of the scene, and continue to show your character’s thoughts throughout the scene, simple declarations and observations of the world around him don’t require you, the author, to tell us that the POV character is the one seeing/feeling/tasting, etc. Cutting back the unnecessary scaffolding lets the elegant architecture of the sights and senses of your story shine through.

Sometimes, however, these head words are absolutely necessary: they can add important shades of meaning. “She realized he was wrong” is different from “she knew he was wrong,” “she thought he was wrong” and “he was wrong.” Use head words when they add necessary shades of meaning, and take them out when they don’t. (One of my biggest pet peeves: “wonder.” I will almost always recommend writing “How would he survive?” instead of “She wondered how he would survive.”)

What do you think? Do you notice “scaffolding” or head words when you’re reading? Do you try to avoid them while writing? Or do you see them as a useful tool to establish viewpoint?

Photo credits: scaffolding—Paula Navarro; Colosseum—Hannah Di Yanni

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Technique

Secret sauce: emotion

This entry is part 11 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Emotion is vital to fiction. Without emotion, our books can read like bad history textbooks: a log of who did what, where, and when. Some history stories are moving enough to catch our imagination, but those are rare.

If we want our readers to care about our stories—our characters—we have to grab our readers (and our characters) by the emotions.

This is something I’ve had to work hard on in my fiction. I’ve usually run under the assumption that my readers could infer how my character felt. Until I got that dreaded feedback: “This scene drags. It’s boring.”

Boring? Boring?! I thought. Can’t you see the emotional turmoil she must be in? The moral dilemma this puts her in?

Um, no, they couldn’t—because I didn’t put it in there. For all they could tell, the character didn’t care. She was impassively watching the scene unfold, or participating without any trouble. Setting up a situation just isn’t enough: you have to show how that situation affects the character as it unfolds, or we’ll have to assume it’s not.

Compare:

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. She stared at the ground thirty feet below her. Her palms slipped a little.

She looked up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute.

But she could get out of this. She had to. She just needed to think.

No, she needed to act.

She’s in a pretty precarious situation—but do we really care about the outcome?

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. Her heart beat in her throat, but the thrill of triumph quickly faded. She dared to peek at the ground below. It should have been only thirty feet down, but her vision swirled dizzyingly. Her stomach plummeted and her clammy palms slipped a fraction of an inch.

She willed herself to look up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute. Adrenaline sang in her veins, making coherent thought impossible.

But she could get out of this. This time, she had to. Andrica forced a deep breath into her lungs. She just needed to think.

No, Aryn needed her—he needed his mother. She had to act. Now.

Now, not only do we watch what she experiences, but we know what she feels. And if the author does it right, we feel what she feels. And that‘s the way to creating powerful characters and stories.

More emotion resources

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of getting emotions right in fiction. My top eight reads on emotion in fiction, from blog posts to books:

Even more resources on emotion!

Emotion is how we get into our readers’ hearts. Emotion can take our book from “well written” to “captivating.” We read for an experience, and emotion is the best way to convey that experience. In fact, it is the experience.

What do you think? How do you like your emotion in fiction? Come share!

Photo by Steve Ventress

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Technique

Secret sauce: motivating and manipulating your characters

This entry is part 10 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

You know your writerly friends (some of them are you guys) who say of their characters, “I can’t write; Jimmy’s rebelling. He won’t go to Angela’s”? This isn’t something I’ve struggled with a whole lot, but that might be because I have no problem manipulating my characters to get what I want.

I think author/former literary agent Nathan Bransford says it well:


And this [characters coming alive and taking the story in another direction] can really help out a story – while obviously the characters are only alive insasmuch as they’re in the author’s (living) head, this may be a way of expressing that the author is being true to the logic of a situation. The author has a sense of the character, and it’s important that the character’s actions are logically consistent.

At the same time, I always find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Hint: the author.

Manipulating your characters with motivation

I try not to over outline, but I usually know (or figure out during the course of a scene or sequence) what my characters need to do next, either for themselves or for the external plot. This isn’t to say it’s always easy to “make” them do that, or to make the jump—I do sometimes stop and say, “Now, why would s/he do that? What would motivate him to do that?” (Or “how can I make him do that, or want to do that?”)

I’m not the only one who believes in character manipulation through motivation. In Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham gives a great example of how character motivation can move a character into place on a scene level:

In one of my recent novels published under a pseudonym which I don’t want to reveal, my heroine at one crucial turning point must decide to visit the room of a sick person in the retirement center where the heroine works. She has just learned at the end of a scene that the resident is more ill than she had imagined; but there are both a doctor and a nurse on duty, and there seemed to me at first to be no emotional or logical reason for my very-busy heroine to drop everything and fall even further behind in her pressing work to pay a visit when such good care is already available. But that was exactly what my plot plans required that she somehow logically do. (56)

Breaking in here to add: note the emphasis on doing this logically. We can’t drag our characters around like marionettes! We have to find something within our characters to motivate them to act how we want—or we need to add something external to prompt them back into our plot. Now, back to Jack:

It took considerable doing on my part to have my heroine feel terribly shocked to learn how serious the illness might be . . . then review her fine relationship with the sick person . .. then realize that good care was being provided . . . but then decide that she would never be able to work efficiently this day as long as she remained so worried and preoccupied, and that she owed it to herself — to make herself feel more at ease about the illness — to make a brief visit to the sick person’s room and reassure herself that the sick friend did not appear at death’s door. Only in this way, she decided, would she have enough peace of mind to return to her overloaded work schedule and try to get caught up.

In this way I was able to build logic into a key turning point of the story and make my heroine’s immediate cessation of regular work, and visit to the sick room, believable. But none of this would have been possible if I hadn’t put myself into my character’s feelings and thoughts. (56)

To be clear: I have had characters “tell” me things—back stories, histories, twists that can affect and enrich the plot. I’ve had their inner conflicts develop into major interpersonal conflicts over the course of the story. I do sometimes let the plot take a different route that better suits my characters, but the final destination doesn’t change.

But more importantly, as I put more emphasis on figuring out what motivates my characters, what makes them tick, I not only know how to manipulate them better to still accomplish the purposes of the plot (if not the exact scenes I was planning), but I know the characters themselves better, making them more well-rounded and realistic.

My secret sauce example: motivation and characterization

For me, my character motivation revelation came at a high level. Originally, I wrote a novel where the heroine was . . . well, kinda wishy-washy. Halfway through the book, I decided/discovered (I forget; it’s been four and a half years!) that she was an ex-cop. Wishy-washy + ex-LEO, no matter how long she’s been off the force, do not = a character that makes sense.

Finally, I let go of the wishy-washier side of her nature. I changed her motivations throughout the book. Instead of being frightened by the villains, she was trying to protect other people from them. Instead of backing down, she stood up and she fought. Instead of keeping quiet, she kept dangerous secrets for the sake of others.

This changed a whole lot about her, but the plot actions of the story were largely (though not totally) the same. She became a character not to be pitied, but someone you’d want on your side in a fight—and her motivations and her character as a whole finally made sense.

And, yep, this is a change I made in the book that went from rejection to offer!

What do you think? How do you manipulate your characters’ motivations?

Photo credit: Robert V; marionettes—Eugene Wei

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Writing Life

Discovering the secret sauce

This entry is part 10 of 14 in the series My writing journey

I think secretly, we all believe we’re the exception to the rejection rule. Most everybody gets rejected, which means approximately 99.9% of writers have the first thing they submit rejected.

But that 0.1% (or 0.0001%) give a lot more of us hope—or maybe they give us all enough hope to at least try. Unless you’re one of the brave writers who bites the “might as well get that first R over with” bullet, there’s probably some little shred of hope.

Until cold, hard reality hits reply.

Most of the time, our first steps down the professional publishing path just aren’t ready. And most of the time, on the off chance they are, it’s still kind of a cosmic wonder that we connect with an agent or editor in the first place. Not only does our writing have to be stellar-awesome-with-sprinkles, but it has to be something that speaks to the agent/editor. (How often do you put down a book because you’re just not that into it?) And then you have to go the extra mile—when was the last time you loved a book so much you instantly thought of 4-5 reader friends who would also love it?

I was extremely fortunate with my first rejection. I knew that this publishing company used evaluators for each submitted manuscript, and these evaluators are required to fill out a feedback form. So, like a very brave soul, I asked the editor for those feedback forms.

One of my friends once told me the feedback forms she received usually comprised one completely vague and basically useless form, one unhelpful and perhaps even harsh form, and one good/helpful form. That was exactly my experience, too. However, I was also fortunate that even the vague and the harsh feedback forms agreed there were certain changes needed to be made to my perfect little baby.

Big, sweeping changes.

Rethinking the plot changes.

It might be easier to move on to the next project changes.

However, the morning I received my rejection (before the email came in), I was thinking about this book and these characters, and I really felt compelled to share these people and this story with readers. They were just too real to me to give up, to let them live on only in my imagination.

So I gave myself a break. Okay, first I called Sarah and my mother and cornered my husband and anyone else who’d listen to complain about the stupid things they didn’t like, gush about the things they did like, lament the rejection, etc. After about a week of that, the horse was dead. DEAD. And I stopped beating it.

I took a little time off (it was Christmas and I was traveling with two small children to visit my family), and really weighed out the comments I’d received. Where the three really seemed to agree was that this romantic suspense novel was relying a little too much on the romance for suspense, and that grew tiresome.

I needed more tension. I needed more danger. I needed more suspense.

And secretly, I knew they were right because I’d worried about that all along. <Major lesson!

So I started through the book, looking carefully at the story structure, performing that tension check, looking at the scene goals, asking myself how the antagonists might make an appearance or play a bigger role here. I have very strict rules in revision: my first time through, I’m not allowed to correct or change anything (except typos), only make comments. So I made the comments, let the ideas percolate, and started in to work on the changes.

It. Was. Not. Easy. I had to kill my darlings, including a very cute scene that one of the reviewers specifically mentioned liking. Unfortunately, the tension was too low, so large parts of the scene had to go. The heroine transformed from a weak, weepy woman to a fierce, fighting female. I tried to draw the antagonists into every possible scene, beefed up the interactions and tension with the villain, and upped the danger whenever possible.

Sound like a lot of work? It was.

changes from first sub to storymakers
One page from the first chapter, showing the changes from the original submitted version up to the version right before this conference.

By the end of April/beginning of May, I was pretty sure I had something worlds better. I’d submitted the first chapter to the LDStorymakers Conference First Chapter Contest and was trying to forget it. It didn’t work. (I guess I glossed over this, but I hadn’t had the best experiences with contests in the past.)

I guess you could say what followed was the best of times. And the worst of times. But I wasn’t ready to give up on this book quite yet. After all, it was only one rejection, right?

What do you think? When do you give up on a project, and when do you fight for it? Come join in the conversation!

Photo credit: Tilemahos Efthimiadis

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Technique

Secret sauce: tension check

This entry is part 9 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

THIS is what made the real leap to publishability for me more than any other ingredient in the secret sauce! (Naturally, this will vary from writer to writer and manuscript to manuscript, but it really made a difference for me!)

An actual envelope factory. Love it.I firmly believe that tension is necessary in every scene. That doesn’t mean every scene has to be a nail-biter or a fistfight or an argument—but there does need to be some source of tension, some uncertainty, something to compel the reader to find. out. what. happens.

I use these steps (still!) to figure out if I have that in my scenes and my story.

Step 1: Assess the current tension

I like to use that handy-dandy scene chart to do this! As I mentioned before, for each scene, I list the POV character’s goal. Scene goals aren’t just for the beginning and end of scenes. You can use The goal can be the source of tension—and if there’s no goal, there’s often no tension.

One way to look at this visually is to use a numerical tension rating in your scene chart. In most spreadsheet software, you can create a line graph from that column of data—Kaye Dacus calls this an “EKG” for your story (you know, an electrocardiogram? Like a heartbeat chart?).

Also in the scene chart, I like to devote a column to writing out what the source of tension is supposed to be in the scene. Is it hoping the character achieves the scene goal? Is it the fact that she’s undercover? Is it the romantic tension?

Step 2: Identify problem scenes and sections

While there are also good uses for parallels, scenes with the same character goal are often a sign that the character isn’t making enough progress. While we definitely don’t want to make things easy for our characters, watching a character fail repeatedly at the same thing wears down the suspense. We may begin not to care whether they’re going to succeed or not, unless each scene has high tension—or the character goal can be refined to relate to the specific events, conflict and disaster for that scene.

But probably most important in the EKG are the sections where the tension level doesn’t change or varies only slightly for several scenes in a row. In Writing Mysteries, one writer shared some advice from an editor: “I must not try to keep everything at high pitch all the way through a story. Excitement, if too steady, can be as boring as having nothing at all happening” (109).

Naturally, at the climax of a book, the tension will be quite high, probably for several scenes. But is the tension flat in there? Are there other “plateaus” or “plains”? Does the tension start out much higher than it ends?

If the end isn’t satisfying because it doesn’t match the tension of the rest of the book, don’t lower the suspense! Fix the end!! Change things up in plains and plateaus—if you can, add what looks like a reprieve, or a rest for a little bit before plunging them back into danger, and keep the danger or at least the tension going until as close to the end of the book as you can. Find another source of tension for those wrap up chapters if you have to. (This is where I STILL need work on early drafts!)

Step 3: Fix!

For low tension scenes (in fact, for my “secret sauce” manuscript, I did this for EVERY scene), I look back at that “source of tension” column in my scene chart. I look for ways to incorporate that source of tension more:

  • Refer back to the scene goal. By reminding the readers what the character is after—and showing the growing disparity between her goal and reality—we can draw the reader along through the scene.
  • Remind the reader of the stakes or impending doom.
  • Add or increase an emotional response from the POV character to the source of tension
  • If that’s not possible—say, if the source of tension is something that the reader knows but the POV character doesn’t—have another character highlight or allude to the source of tension
  • Again, if the source of the tension is something that the reader knows that the POV character doesn’t, see if you can add another scene (usually immediately before this one) to remind the reader of the dramatic irony (yay 9th grade English!)
  • Highlight the source of the tension in a few character actions and thoughts throughout the scene. The exact number depends on the length of the scene, but it’s always good to hit on it near the beginning, and at least twice more in an average-length scene (whatever that might be for you).

On the other hand, sometimes that’s just not enough. If the source of tension is non-existent or insufficient, I look for ways to increase the tension, usually by asking myself questions like these:

  • What is the character’s goal for this scene?
  • How can things get worse?
  • How can I raise the stakes?
  • What is the source of conflict in this scene and how can I make the conflict bigger?
  • How can I weave in the antagonist, the plot, a subplot or a character turning point?
  • Who is the worst person who could walk in right now?
  • What would happen if this scene took place somewhere else?
  • What is the character feeling and have I shown it enough on the page?

Janice Hardy also offers a list of things to look at to help make your scenes matter (and there’s some overlap, but I wrote out my mental list before reading her post):

  • What is your protag doing?
  • Where does this scene take place (setting)?
  • Who else is in the scene?
  • Where structurally does this scene take place (act one, midpoint, act two, etc)?
  • What happens right before this scene?
  • What happens right after this scene?
  • What’s your theme?
  • What are the stakes?

Sometimes, it’s less the scene itself and more the context it’s in—either the spikes in your EKG are too sharp, or you’ve got a major plateau. My critique partner, Emily Gray Clawson, wrote a great post on keeping up the tension in your story by switching between types of tension or storylines.

Finally, I have a whole series on Tension, Suspense and Surprise with 35 pages on the importance of those elements in your story—and dozens of ways to fix them if they’re off—now available as a free PDF.

What do you think? Have you checked your tension lately? How do you fix low-tension scenes?

Photo credits: tension envelopes—Chris Murphy; question mark—Alexander Drachmann; high-tension wires—Redvers

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Technique

Secret sauce: scene goals

2 Comments
This entry is part 8 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

I learned the concept of scene goals when I read Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure. Simply, a scene goal is the character’s immediate goal at the outset of a scene. But it’s amazing how this very simple concept can strengthen your fiction.

Finding scene goals

We mentioned scene goals last week in scene charts. As I forced myself to write out the character’s immediate goal at the outset of the scene, I found that sometimes the character didn’t know what his or her immediate purpose was. The scenes that lacked a goal for the character (or a unique goal, as opposed to one that the character’s had four times now) were often the unfocused scenes I needed the most work on—or to be cut altogether.

The goal of a scene should be very, very obvious to the writer, the reader and the character. In fact, in Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham says that our POV characters should state their goals for that scene fairly early on.

The prototypical scene begins with the most important character—invariably the viewpoint character—walking into a simulation with a definite, clear-cut, specific goal which appears to be immediately attainable. This goal represents an important step in the character’s game plan—something to be obtained or achieved which will move him one big step closer to the attainment of his major story goal. . . . (24)

The scene begins with a stated, clear-cut goal. (25)

Scene goals are fantastic for structuring fiction at this level because they tell us, the writers, what needs to happen. Our character arrives at the car dealership with the mission to buy a car/talk to his ex-girlfriend/flirt with the new salesguy. (It sets up the “scene question,” if you will: will s/he get this goal?) The character works toward that goal, until the disaster, as Bickham calls it. We answer the scene question with, most likely, a “no” or a “yes, but [complication].” (Just plain yesses should be reserved for false victories, lulling characters into a sense of security, and, of course, the finale.)

Fixing scene goals

Typically, if a scene lacks a scene goal, the scene is not as strong as it could be. (Occasionally, we’ll have something unexpected befall a character in a scene. The POV character may not always have a goal at the beginning of a scene like this—but try to use this technique sparingly, or your characters might seem directionless and as though they’re not taking charge in their life.)

To fix a weak or missing scene goal, ask what the character is trying to accomplish right now? Why did s/he come here, call this person, or take another action. Why does s/he need to do this now?

A weak scene goal can also be shored up by another, stronger goal. Look for connections or other plot lines that you can tie in to this scene. What are the antagonists doing? What can the protagonist do to try to counter them right now?

Once you’ve found the answer, state the goal flat-out close to the beginning of the scene. “I need to get Y.” “He had to make sure everything was going smoothly.” “You must go into the cave to face your inner fears.”

Can scene goals be too obvious? Possibly. From time to time, laying out the character’s entire plan for achieving a goal can actually decrease the tension. Janice Hardy covers this pitfall of overexplaining scene goals well.

Advanced scene goal techniques

Scene goals can be a really powerful tool! Here are a few ways to use them:

Goals and character sympathy

Another role that goals can play in fiction is to help develop character sympathy. How? When readers support a character’s goal, they want the character to succeed. They care.

What does it take to get our readers on board? According to James N. Frey, it takes a noble goal. They can be a really detestable person (Frey’s example is of a convict who wants to break out of prison), but giving them a goal that we can all believe in helps us to believe in the character, too (Frey’s example, IIRC, is that the convict wants to get out of prison to help a family member). And this really works: I felt it happen to me while watching a game show.

What’s noble? Something that’s self-sacrificing, something that benefits another person more than it does the main character, something that helps the general populace (but that can be too vague: helping one concrete person, such as the character’s child, can actually be more effective as a character goal than trying to better the whole world).

Goals and characterization

Our characters sometimes do have life goals other than the plot-level story goals—goals that may or not play into our story, and goals that may or may not be fulfilled in the course of the story. The bed-and-breakfast, a job at the FBI, the private island in the Bahamas.

While these might not really influence the plot, they can still have a great effect on the story: adding layers to your characters. Like real people, our characters can have life goals and dreams. These goals help demonstrate the character’s depth, to round them out.

These goals can manifest in little ways: the FBI job is one of my character’s ultimate goals that doesn’t play into the plot of the story. That goal manifests in her hobbies: spy movies and spy novels. They can also come in handy when they play into the character’s motivations. (I’ll spare you the convoluted explanation of how this happens in my story.)

The biggest caution here: make sure this goal doesn’t upstage the main plot.

Goals and foreshadowing

Foreshadowing or burying clues is all about framing: mentioning the object or information in plain sight, but in light of something more important so that the reader doesn’t think, “Ah, this is out of place/overly conspicuous/waaay too innocent looking—it must mean something.”

This is why it’s sometimes possible to make the wildest excursions inside the conflict appear to have relevance: The viewpoint character will inevitably interpret almost anything as relating back to the goal; you can show his line of thinking in an internalization, and so drag the seeming excursion far afield back into apparent relevance.

When our characters are so focused on this goal, we can use that focus to help the character (and thus the reader) dismiss something that might obviously be a clue. “Oh, he’s just hanging around because he needs to get the assignment, too.”

The scene goal tempers how a character sees material clues. They can explain them away easily: “Oh, that paperwork is on her desk—good! She’s been busy. She hasn’t had a chance to look inside the folder.”

Or they can just barely notice them—just enough to warrant a mention, but we have a MISSION here, people, and we are not going to get sidetracked!

Next week, we’ll talk about one more important use of scene goals. Until then, read more on goals in fiction, making scenes matter, and framing scene goals to bury clues.

What do you think? Do you consciously use scene goals? How do they effect your writing?

Photo credits: Goal Setting (brainstorm web)—Angie Torres;
Resolutions and goals (list)—Ed Donahue; Goals (poster)—Robert Degennaro

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Technique

Secret sauce: Behold, the scene chart!

3 Comments
This entry is part 7 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

There are probably as many ways to edit a story as there are to write one. One of my favorite tools has been a scene chart, inspired by a post on Edittorrent.

The original post suggested creating index cards for each scene, listing a number of important features—everything from where and when the scene is set, to first and last lines, to “promises” made to the reader, to important details like descriptions. Then you could move the index cards around to resequence events or scenes, or play with the story without hurting your MS.

Like many of the commentators on the post, however, I used a spreadsheet to do this in a very small space. I also combined this with probably the most important thing I learned from Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure—the structure of a scene and the importance of a scene goal—for the character, not just me as a writer. (More on scene goals next week!)

So here’s an example of the kind of scene chart I used, partially filled in for an imaginary story (anybody recognize the plot? Hint: it’s from an old card game). I didn’t use all of these columns myself (and if any of them aren’t clear, feel free to ask what I mean).

I liked this technique so well, I’ve used it on almost everything I’ve written since the first time I used it, more than four years ago. I can use it to make sure the vital elements of every scene are present.

Checking for these elements is a very powerful tool. It makes sure that:

  • Each scene is vital to your story
  • Each scene has direction and purpose
  • Each scene keeps your reader engaged and interested
  • The story is consistent in its details
  • There are no loose threads or forgotten promises

We’ll talk more about how the scene chart helps with some of these elements over the next couple weeks.

What do you think? Do you use a form of scene charts? What’s your favorite high-level editing technique?

Photo credit: Aaron Brown

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Technique

Secret sauce: scene structure

This entry is part 6 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Just like stories have structure, scenes have a specific structure, too. Story structure can help make sure your scenes matter; scene structure helps your scenes make sense. Your overall story might be on course, but if your scenes meander, readers will still feel lost.

Scene structure

In his aptly-named book Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham delves into the scene structure proposed by Dwight Swain. The basic structure of any scene, Bickham says, is Goal – Conflict – Disaster.

The Goal is the POV character’s goal at the start of the scene, for just that scene. (More about this later in the series!) The Conflict is what happens as the character pursues the Goal and meets resistance—dialogue, movement, pursuit, etc. The Conflict builds to the climax of the scene—the Disaster, when the character’s goal is frustrated.

Sequel structure

A scene is followed by a sequel, which has its own structure. Bickham’s structure for the sequel is Emotion – Thought – Decision – Action (which leads to another scene). The Emotion is the initial response to the events of the scene and its Disaster. When the character moves past the initial emotion, they think through the events, their response and their options in the Thought phase. This ultimately leads to a Decision, which takes the character to another Action—setting a goal for them.

Not all the steps of the sequel are necessary. In fact, the sequel itself might not be necessary—depends on the pacing and whether the emotional reaction constitutes a change. I often find my sequels very brief, or rolled into the beginning of the next scene.

How does all this help make your story stronger?

Scene structure is a basic good practice. Like I said at the beginning, it keeps scenes from wandering, and our readers’ attention spans from doing the same. It clues readers in from the beginning that the following does impact the story, keeping them hooked through the action.

As Bickham says it, the scene goal poses a question—will s/he get what he’s after? The character then pursues that goal until the disaster answers the question, most often with either “yes, but” (she achieves her intermediate goal, but a larger goal might have to be sacrificed) or “no, and furthermore” (not only does he not accomplish what he wanted, but now there are more problems!).

Our sequels motivate the next action. If you need a character do to something that might seem crazy next, the sequel is the place to give him or her a good reason, and to show the thought process, setting up the next goal and action. This pattern makes our scenes causally linked (instead of casually linked)—creating a plot instead of a sequence of events.

Believe it or not, this pattern can become so ingrained that it’s second nature. You still want to check to make sure you have the basics (more on that next week), but scene structure is so prevalent in modern literature that once you notice it, it’s easy to mimic, even on a subconscious level.

What do you think? How does the structure of scenes and sequels influence your writing? Come share!

Photo by Tony Case

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