Scenes are the building blocks of novels, memoirs, and other types of narrative nonfiction. They’re like stories unto themselves. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They’re where things happen in real time in a specific place, where characters interact with each other, and where the larger story advances.
This may seem obvious to you, but I regularly see manuscripts by beginning writers who don’t have a tactile, granular understanding of what a scene is, what its job is, or how to structure one. If you can’t tell me, right off the top of your head and without looking anything up or checking your notes, how to structure a scene from beginning to end, you need to keep reading.
Before I explain what a scene is, let me tell you what a scene isn’t. A biographical sketch of Jimmy Jim’s childhood isn’t a scene. An info dump about how magic works in the Kingdom of Throth isn’t a scene. A potted history of the Baltimore police department isn’t a scene.
A fully developed scene in a book is no different from a scene in a film or a play. Which means if it can’t be filmed or performed by actors on a stage, it isn’t a scene.
There’s more to it than that, though. Being filmable isn’t enough. You could write page after page about characters driving across town, wandering around the office, searching for a book in the library, or having a long conversation about where to meet for dinner. Such “scenes” could have characters, setting, action (sort of), and dialogue, but they’re fake scenes. They’re fake because there’s no conflict or drama. They don’t drive the main story forward. They don’t add anything to character development. They’re just filler. Real life is full of filler moments. Hell, most of real life is filler. You’re supposed to skip that stuff when you write stories. It may take you thirty minutes to clean the kitchen after dinner, but imagine watching thirty minutes of Harrison Ford quietly doing the dishes in the next Indiana Jones installment.
I have yet to see a manuscript narrating thirty minutes of kitchen cleanup, but I regularly see manuscripts where the viewpoint character is driving across town or spending a full page or more discussing where to meet another character for dinner. Skip all that and start when they’re at the restaurant unless your characters get into a gigantic fight about where to eat and drive through the scene of a riot on the way to the steakhouse. And skip the small talk too. Small talk is realistic, sure, but it’s boring. No one will notice if you skip it, but they will notice—and they won’t like it—if you include it.
I often see manuscripts that don’t include a single scene until dozens of pages in. If you don’t include your first scene until page 37, I’m probably going to tell you to delete your first 36 pages. And chances are high that if your first scene does appear on page 37, it won’t work well as the opening scene because you probably didn’t imagine it and write it as the opening scene. Otherwise, it would appear on page 1.
A scene has the following jobs:
• Establish the setting, atmosphere, and mood
• Create (or escalate) conflict and tension
• Advance the plot
• Reveal character
In order for a scene to do those jobs, it requires the following elements:
• A clear setting in a specific place and time
• A main point-of-view character
• A character goal and motivation
• At least one obstacle in the character’s way
• Dialogue between characters (unless your character is alone, but then she’ll probably have some internal thoughts and dialogue with herself)
• Action
• Emotion
• Resolution
Now I’m going to show you the standard way to structure a scene. You don’t have to follow these instructions exactly every single time. This isn’t a formula. It’s simply normal, conventional scene structure, and it’s what readers expect.
Start with a Point-of-View Character in a Specific Setting
Readers imagine a novel like it’s a movie playing in their minds, but they can’t do that if they don’t know where a scene is set. Having your characters talking to each other and moving around is great, but there’s a big difference between two people having a conversation behind a barn at midnight and the same two characters shouting at each other over dance music at a nightclub. So let us know as early as possible where this is taking place. Are we in the kitchen? Great. You don’t need to describe the kitchen in painstaking detail or even much detail at all unless there’s something truly interesting about it, but if the scene takes place in a kitchen in your mind but you don’t tell us, readers will picture the same scene taking place in whatever space their imagination conjures up: a living room, a backyard, the cockpit of the space shuttle as it’s hurtling around the planet at 17,500 miles per hour.
And whose point of view are we in? It’s all fine and good if we can hear Fatima and Fulgencio arguing about how best to evade the police, but if the previous scene was from Fatima’s point of view and the current scene is from Fulgencio’s, make sure we know that as early as possible, preferably in the scene’s first sentence and no later than the first paragraph. You’ll create a serious record-scratch moment if readers think they’re in Fatima’s point of view only to discover a couple of pages later that they’ve been in Fulgencio’s all this time.
Your Point-of-View Character Needs an Immediate Goal
The main character in your scene needs to want something and have a goal that can at least theoretically be accomplished in the next couple of minutes or hours. It could be anything. Batman needs to figure out what in the hell the latest riddle means. Boopsie needs to get her cat out of the tree. Officer Smithers needs a confession from the meth head who broke all the potted plants Betsy had on her porch. Andrea needs to get through the next five minutes without punching Rodrigo.
The rest of the scene needs to be about your point-of-view character’s pursuit of whatever the goal is.
Put Obstacles in Your Characters’ Paths
Now it’s time to make things difficult for your characters. Most of the time, they need to fail to get what they want, and ideally this failure will make their overall situation worse. If your characters get everything they want, you’re writing a story about smiling people in Pleasantville, which means you don’t have a real story.
Layla hopes to smooth things over with her mother after the bruising fight the night before, but now her mother is more enraged than ever and is throwing plates at the wall. Burt expects a promotion when the boss calls him into the office, but instead he’s being fired. Cletus needs to get from the farmhouse to the barn, but a gigantic crack opens up in the earth right in front of him and swallows his cows. Roger just wants a cup of coffee in the breakroom before his next meeting, but BotCorp’s office droid suddenly becomes self-aware and threatens to kill anyone who goes anywhere near the espresso machine. Mary Sue is trying to gin up the courage to ask Dennis if he’d like to join her for lunch, but then Emily asks him first.
Act like an evil god when you construct your scenes. Shoot at your characters. Set them on fire. Have the cops slam them onto the ground. Have somebody steal the last Twinkie as the zombies close in.
Make Your Characters Talk
Unless you’re writing a survival story about a woman stuck in the middle of the Pacific by herself in a raft, have your characters talk to each other. Use quotation marks. I mean it. Do not write something like this:
He got into a screaming match with his father, and he was tempted to punch a wall during the worst of it.
What did his father say? Readers need to “hear” it, which means you need to put it in quotation marks. Don’t summarize the dialogue unless you’re fast-forwarding through the boring parts to get to the good stuff. And when you do get to the good stuff, put that dialogue in quotation marks.
Imagine that Hollywood wants to turn your book into a movie. Give them some word-for-word dialogue to work with. If you do this correctly, the screenwriter should be able to copy and paste your dialogue directly into the screenplay.
Even if Hollywood doesn’t come knocking, your readers are going to imagine your book as if it’s a movie, but they can’t do that if you summarize (in other words, skip) most of your dialogue.
Give Us Some Action, Baby
Even if you’re not writing an action-adventure novel, readers want some action. Not necessarily car chases, but your characters need to be doing things, going places, interacting with each other, trying to figure things out, and expending serious energy against whoever and whatever is standing in the way of their goal. You are not going to write a compelling scene if your point-of-view character is sitting on the couch and eating Doritos while watching porn on his phone.
Show Some Emotion
Your character has problems. His main problem is an evil god of an author who keeps setting him on fire. Imagine what that feels like. It has to suck.
So show us a little emotion. Don’t tell us that Bob is sad. Have his heart rip in two as he clutches a dying child.
Resolve the Scene
More often than not, your characters need to fail to get what they want at the end of a scene. Not every time, but most of the time, because that’s the only way you’ll make their problems worse, and making their problems worse is how you raise the stakes and increase tension and ramp up conflict as you hurtle toward the climax. If everything keeps getting easier, if your characters move from success to success, readers will never know how the story ends because they’ll put down your book and look for something on Netflix.
Follow Your Scene with a “Sequel”
You need to follow a scene with its “sequel,” an unfortunate term but a groundbreaking concept that we can credit to Dwight V. Swain in his book Techniques of the Selling Writer, first published in 1965.
A “sequel” to a scene is nothing like a movie sequel. It’s not Jaws 2, The Empire Strikes Back, or More Snakes on a Plane. A “sequel” isn’t a follow-up scene or even a proper scene at all. It’s another kind of storytelling unit, one that takes place in between your dramatized scenes.
A scene is about conflict and forward momentum. Its sequel is the moment when a character reacts to what just happened. It’s when the character thinks, Now what? These are the moments when characters look inside themselves, sort out dilemmas, set new goals, make decisions, or just break down and cry. It can also be the dark night of the soul, the moment in a film where a character looks at herself in a cracked mirror or steps into a walk-in freezer, closes the door, and screams.
A sequel is rarely as long as a scene. It can be as short as a single sentence at the very end of a scene. If that’s the case, readers won’t think of it as a separate storytelling unit. It will come across to them as simply the final sentence of that scene. Or you might want to write an entire page or two about your character brooding in the car while trying to figure out just how in the hell to evade the bad guys closing in now that he knows they can track his credit card.
Perhaps your sequel takes place at a funeral. There won’t be any conflict here, at least not any external conflict. The turmoil will be entirely inside the character’s heart and mind.
You might write a sequel where your character tries to determine which available option is the least bad, whether to finally cross the line and break the law, or whether to call the police even though the kidnappers told her not to.
A sequel is where a decision is made that sets the stage for the next scene, where the external conflict resumes.
Sequels also give readers moments to catch their breath. Books that leap from one action-packed scene to another are exhausting, and they’re all but guaranteed to be thin on character development and transformation. If your character is constantly acting without ever pausing to think and feel, they’ll come across like chess pieces on a board rather than three-dimensional human beings. Readers won’t see them slowly transform from one kind of person to another, and stories are about character transformation as much as they’re about plot.
Sequels naturally slow down the pace of a story. If scenes are the gas pedal, sequels are the brake. Sequels in a crime thriller will naturally be shorter than sequels in a literary novel or a memoir. But even in a naturally slower-paced book, it’s probably best if some of your sequels are short, just a sentence or paragraph or two. Save the longer sequels to follow the bigger set-piece scenes and turning points of your story, the kind of events that in real life knock a person out of commission for days.
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If you want to get creative and tinker with scene structure once in a while with full awareness of what you’re doing and why, that’s okay (unless it isn’t, so be careful). Feel free to start a scene with a line of dialogue, for instance, if it makes good sense to do so in that particular scene. But if you deviate from this structure in most of your scenes, you’re going to have problems. Readers will sense that you don’t know what you’re doing even if they can’t put their finger on why. Scenes are the building blocks of a novel, and you can’t build a novel without them any more than you can build a house with a pile of leaves.
But don’t take my checklist above too seriously. Hold onto it lightly. I recently had a coaching session with a client who told me he’d read about scene structure in some other book and couldn’t make sense of it because he couldn’t always identify the point-of-view character’s goal in every scene in the books he reads. “I had the same problem with one of your books,” he told me. “Plenty of times, I had no idea what the character’s goal was in a particular scene.”
That’s okay. First, goals don’t always need to be explicitly stated in the text. Your readers aren’t children (unless you’re writing childrens’ books) who need everything explained to them in painstaking detail. And sometimes, your point-of-view character will be reacting to events rather than initiating them. If Mary is taking a nap on the couch and a man barges in with a gun, you don’t need to clearly state her goal and tell readers that she wants to avoid getting shot. It’s obvious.
And sometimes there will be dialogue in a “sequel” to a scene that isn’t a proper scene unto itself. If two characters just got their asses kicked and they’re discussing what to do next, that’s a sequel, not a scene, and you don’t need to hamfistedly cram in a goal. Anyway, consider the bullet list of scene elements as the Platonic ideal of a scene. Not every scene in every book needs to match it precisely. Life is messy, and so are stories. Once you’ve fully internalized the elements that make up the Platonic ideal of a scene, you should be able to intuit how to write one more or less correctly without checking your notes and without worrying if you’ve included every element every time.
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If you enjoyed this post, you can read so much more in my book Write, Edit, Publish: What Every Writer Needs to Know but Only an Editor Will Tell You. You can also hire me as a developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, or publishing consultant. Tell me what you’re working on, send me your questions, ask for a free sample edit, or just say hi.
