How to Write a Scene: 10 Key Ingredients
When I first started writing, I wrote stories filled with exposition or summary without even knowing it. I
was writing by instinct based on my years of experience as a reader and I didn’t know the technical aspects of writing, the craft of developing stories that work.
That’s a great phase to be in, because all things are possible and we’re learning so much about ourselves as writers and – if we seek it out – we’re also learning lots about craft. The quality of our writing can grow exponentially as we learn new techniques.
Scene-building is one of those essential skills for a writer because the scene is a basic building block of narrative. At its most basic level, a novel, or memoir, is fundamentally a stacked set of scenes linked together by exposition.
How to Write a Scene: Definition
What makes a scene anyway?
A scene is a unit or section of a story that contains the following elements:
- Characters
- One location
- A specific time
e.g. Susan and her 5-year old son, Alex [characters] are in the kitchen [location] on the morning of the first day of school. [time]
If another character – let’s call him Andrew, Susan’s husband – joins them in the kitchen, it’s a new scene. If they change location and move out into their backyard, it’s a new scene. And if we’re now in a different time period, say later that same day, then it’s a new scene.
Scene and Point of View (POV)
Some books on craft will include Point-of-View as a scene element, emphasizing that you must have one clear point-of-view in a scene and when the point-of-view shifts (that is, we’re now seeing the story through a different set of eyes) then a new scene has started.
While that’s true, and still holds for literary fiction and much commercial fiction, there are occasions in contemporary romance or mass-market fiction when the author includes two points-of-view in a scene. Think of the romance scene where we get both main characters’ perspectives and hear their different takes on one another.
These exceptions are rare however, and even a romance author typically will tell the story from one character’s perspective most of the time, or make clear shifts between characters but hold the POV steady most of the time. Shifting point-of-view is known as “head-hopping” and generally frowned upon by editors.
The Old Chestnut: Show, Don’t Tell
For years I would hear the phrase “Show, Don’t Tell” and I would nod my head in agreement but I didn’t really understand what it meant.
Show, don’t tell translates as: write in scene most of the time.
Let what needs to happen unfold for the reader in front of them in real story time.
All scenes happen in the present story moment, and by writing a scene in which a character acts and responds to others, you can show us their thoughts and feelings in a way that enables the reader to experience it for themselves. Most of the time, A scene will have greater emotional weight for the reader than exposition or summary.
The more important something is for your story, the more essential it is that you show it in a scene.
e.g. Susan finding out Andrew has cheated on her with Alex’s schoolteacher: SCENE. Susan packing for the family to leave on vacation: SUMMARY. (If it’s even needed at all: the reader can assume some things as well.)
Scenes and Pacing
Scenes also help with the pacing of a story. Because scenes slow things down and we see the detail, even in a short scene, the reader has a sense of being stopped in time.
As a general rule, you would use summary to have a long period of time pass quickly on the page, and scenes to explore an important moment and have it stand out as memorable for the reader.
Scenes also tend to progress…that is, as characters act and respond to one another, tension will rise. This may be subtle in nature and more internal (e.g. as the scene goes on, Susan realizes Andrew never really listens to what she or Alex are saying) OR it may be a rising of external action (e.g. Susan sees Andrew’s lover in the supermarket and drops her shopping basket so that her lettuce rolls across the floor, people stare and she runs out of the supermarket with her heart racing.)
Scene Progression and Beats
Scenes are composed of beats. This is common parlance in screen-writing but understanding what beats are can help you with novel-writing as well.
A beat in plain language is just a moment in time, and in scenes that work well beats can be thought of as progressing, so we have ACTION-REACTION or CAUSE-EFFECT.
BEAT: Andrew and Susan talk about summer vacation plans.
BEAT: Andrew moves past Susan to get a bottle of water from the fridge.
BEAT: Susan smells another woman’s fragrance coming off his shirt.
BEAT: Susan flashes back to the call last night saying he'd working late.
BEAT: Susan throws her glass of red wine at Andrew.
Beats are the moments that layer on top of one another to compose a scene.
Your scene will progress (known as scene progression) through the ordering of beats. You want your beats to build on one another to create a sense of rising action in the scene, whether the action is internal (e.g. Susan realizes Andrew has been lying to her about working late) or external (e.g. Susan throws her wine glass at Andrew.) You want the overall effect to be cumulative and feel natural.
How to Write a Scene: Know Your Goal(s)
To write a great supermarket scene for the story we’ve been imagining, I have to ask myself “What does Susan want?”
For the larger novel, I want to know what my character wants overall. For example, perhaps Susan is someone who craves stability in her adult life due to the instability she experienced as a child. That’s known as the Story Goal.
For the scene, I need to know what Susan wants in the NOW of the story. Here she is entering the supermarket in a vulnerable state, having learned that Andrew is cheating on her. What does she want NOW? This is the Scene Goal.
Thinking externally, Susan wants to get her shopping done quickly and get home to greet Alex when he gets home from his after-school program and to remain calm for him so he doesn’t suspect anything is wrong. Internally, she wants to hold it together – in fact, that’s the mantra running through her head right now as she enters the supermarket: “Hold it together, Susan.”
And then she sees her husband’s lover, standing over by the dairy section, looking pert and pretty as only a jean-short-wearing kindergarten teacher in her late-twenties can. NOW what does she want? She wants to get out of there without embarrassing herself and without having to interact with little Miss Pert.
When I know my scene goal, I can then place my characters in situations within the scene that run contrary to that goal. This is one way to introduce tension into a scene. If I didn’t know Susan is concentrating on holding it together, then my scene could be a flat one – Susan buys groceries while thinking things and then goes home.
But because I know her goal is to hold herself together and stay calm for her son, I can introduce an element that makes it hard for her to achieve her goal, which makes the scene suddenly far more interesting.
Humans exist in a perpetual state of wanting. Characters all enter a scene wanting something. This is true in real life, and it’s certainly true in fiction.
I have writers in my First Book Finish program create a Scene Inventory as one of their first tasks when they’ve completed a draft. (A Scene Inventory is just a short summary of each individual scene in your book: who’s in the scene, where are they and what’s happening.)
When you know who’s in the scene, where they are and what’s happening, you can then look for the scene’s overall purpose AND individual character purpose.
Knowing the scene’s overall purpose keeps you from including scenes in your book that just don’t matter, that add nothing significant to the narrative and therefore are likely to bore the reader.
Knowing the purpose of an individual character in a scene helps you to create scenes that have tension and emotional weight to them. Ask yourself what each character in a scene wants or needs when they enter a scene – even if it’s just a glass of water –, and ideally have them try to navigate meeting that need in the face of another character wanting something else.
e.g. Andrew is hot and thirsty after soccer practice and wants a cold glass of water and a cool shower. Susan wants to be on time for the parent-teacher meeting at the school.
You can see the potential for tension here, and depending on the context, this tension might even progress to open conflict. Conflict is the driving pulse of narrative.
Key Scene Goal Question
Here’s the key question to ask yourself in order to clarify your scene goal.
What does your point-of-view character want to do, get, seek or avoid right NOW?
To help identify how the scene might progress, you can then ask this question of other characters in the scene as well.
A Great Resource on Story Goals
I love how book coach Jennie Nash talks about the concept of story goal. Her book “Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel from the Inside Out” walks you through what is essentially a method for uncovering story goals. It’s a short read and the Kindle version is inexpensive – I highly recommend it as an additional resource for anyone working on a novel.
Jennie also has a free handout she offers on her website that walks you through her basic process and you can find it here.
7 Scene Mistakes to Avoid
- Avoid having a scene start in transit to a location. What if the scene just opened at the location instead?
- Avoid vague descriptions, or not enough detail, so that the reader can’t picture what the location looks like.
- Avoid excessive description that overwhelms the reader and gets in the way of scene progression.
- Avoid shifting point-of-view. Stay in one character’s point-of-view or perspective throughout.
- Avoid repeating information the reader already knows from another part of the story.
- Avoid scenes where nothing significant happens. If your scene could be summarized as “Susan dropped Alex off at school,” then perhaps it does belong in summary instead of scene.
- Avoid scenes that are just people sitting around talking for long stretches of time. Insert some action and tension.
The Structural Weight of Scenes
There’s something that didn’t click for me about scenes when I first began writing. I would write scene after scene out of some instinctive sense that this is what should happen NOW, in the present moment of the story, with these characters.
But what I was missing was the glue that holds a story together. What happens in one scene should drive the story forward so that it determines what happens next. A choice my character makes in this scene will result in the actions they need to take in the next scene.
The ordering of scenes in a book gives us the story's spine, or structure. One way to think about book structure is ACTION-CHOICE-ACTION. That might not be the world's most elaborate diagram but it will get you all the way to the end of a first draft.
One way to think about the ending of your scenes is to ask yourself: “What choice has my point-of-view character made by the end of this scene?”
When this clicked for me, I no longer had to worry about what I was going to write next. I wasn’t “making it up” in a vacuum any more, the story logic began to drive itself and scenes began to flow more easily for me.
I hope this article helps scenes flow more easily for you as well!
Scene-Building Writing Prompt
What happened to Susan? If you’d like a story prompt for your next writing session you can use this one: a woman discovers her husband has been cheating on her with their son’s kindergarten teacher... Write the scene where she realizes this. How does the story evolve from there?
