Fiction Writing: Make a Scene

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

I wrote fiction for the better part of 15 years before I finally realized what a scene really was. This is not to say that I had never written a scene—I’d written hundreds, possibly thousands of them, just without calling them by name or looking at their parts. I was, as many writers are, an intuitive writer—I grew up reading voraciously and taught myself to write by doing so. As I tell in the foreword to my writing book Make A Scene, it took a vivacious dance teacher, of all things, to teach me to hold my scenes up under a new lens and really look at their parts. The moment I began to do this, my fiction writing transformed.

Among my editing clients I find many writers like me—they bang out cumbersome scenes, or make notes to themselves in place of real scenes (“telling”) not because they lack talent, but they haven’t had the opportunity to see the parts of a scene clearly and therefore might over-burden it with setting details or fail to provide enough intelligent, plot-worthy action.

Scenes are, quite simply, the essential building blocks of great stories and novels—the cells of a body, if you will. If you can learn to write effective, vivid scenes, then your work as a writer actually becomes easier. A novel or story absolutely can be written scene by scene. When you focus on the container of the scene, you write more carefully and are forced to consider all the important elements, from setting details to action. And if you’re one of those writers who needs to run wild in your first draft, then you’ll be glad to know you can revise a rough draft into scenes, too. Learning to write great, competent scenes is the key to powerful story making.

Of all the ingredients of a good scene, however, there’s one that, without it, you really don’t have anything to show for yourself: Action. Why? Because when events happen in a semblance of real time in your pages, the reader is pulled headlong into your story. If, for paragraphs or pages, all you’ve written are lyrical sentences describing the color of the sky, a character’s beauty, and the halcyon days of her childhood, you can bet that you’ll have an impatient reader on your hands. Actually, the reader will be off your hands—because she’ll have gone on to find something that plugs her in and energizes her.

So keep in mind these key points about action in your scenes:
• Actions can be big or small, from car crashes to a slap on the cheek, but they must be there in every scene, and preferably involve your protagonist, or antagonist.
• Actions happen in “real time.” The reader must experience the actions as taking place “now.”

For more, consider taking one of my fiction writing workshops here through Editor Unleashed, or pick up my book Make A Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time.

Tagged as: fiction writing