Anatomy of Scene Writing
What is A Scene?
A scene is the smallest unit of a story where characters come into view, and action occurs. But as soon as you switch location, time, sometimes change the point of view, you are switching the scene.
Although, a scene should either advance the plot or reveal a character; in both ways, it is something that pushes a story to another junction. If you want strong pacing, showing rather than telling, also creating empathy for the protagonist, then follow the steps below to understand it better.
Steps of Writing Scene
It is difficult to set up a scene that readers won’t forget. But if you follow some basic steps, you can finish your journey just well. Plus, if you want mystery and conflict in every scene to keep readers turning the pages, then keep these steps to finish your scene.
1. The Purpose
Identifying the reason for your scene is the first basic thing to know. You need to ask yourself what is the reason I’m writing this scene, why should I write this scene, or is this scene really necessary? These questions will bother your brain to think about the reason for writing it. For example; I’m writing a scene of my contemporary romance novel where I’m showing the cute meet. My purpose in writing the scene is to show the readers that the hero is going to meet the heroin for the very first time. There I show them how they meet. So, the purpose of the scene is to let the hero meet the heroin. The first step to know is to know what you want.
2. Opening
The perfect opening gives a scene its tone, mood, and a sense of the possible or impossible. Below are some useful points to remember when opening a scene.
- Start a scene with a setting that feels connected to the current desires or emotional states of your characters.
- To make directions, ignite the scene with mysterious ways of suspense.
- Anchor your scene opening with some action to create momentum.
- You can start a scene with a context-giving summary.
- More interest can build when you start a scene with intriguing dialogue.
3. Description
No matter what kind of novel you’re writing, it’s a good idea to introduce a sense of place in opening a scene. Hence, every reader wants to open a book and experience instant immersion. They want to experience the world you created with every sense. They want to feel as if they are really there, right amid the story. No matter what genre you’re writing in, this can be achieved through believable world-building. These are some ideas you can follow when writing a scene:
- Describe place through characters’ senses, such as smell around, the sight of something or someone, touch, hearing sounds.
- Include time period in the description, for example, what was the time when that happened, morning, evening, night, etc.
- Show the reaction of your characters; show how they feel about the setting. What is their reaction to the world? Do they like or dislike? Keep setting descriptions relevant to the story. Because if it’s out of tone, your novel will fall out of the market.
- Make a list of adjectives to describe the locations of your story.
4. Create Mesmerizing Dialogues
Good dialogue reveals the personality of your characters. What characters speak keeps readers turning the pages. So when two characters go back and forth explaining correctly what they are feeling or thinking to each other, it pushes the story forward. Thus, good dialogue comprises attempts at articulation.
- Pay attention to your surroundings and listen to other people speaking. Though, this advice is pretty self-explanatory.
- Read the dialogues out loud after you finish writing a scene, read it out loud to yourself; trust me, you will know where you’re lacking.
- Pay attention to punctuation. Never forget to mark it with quotation marks.
- Follow your dialogues with a dialogue tag (for example, he said, asked, replied). After that, use a comma before the closing quote. If there is no tag, then close the text with punctuation.
5. Ending
Every author struggles with ending a scene well. This stress is a part of writing. Every scene has the power to change how a reader feels about the scene they just read. In short, it’s really hard to get right; good thing I’m here to help. Below are some ideas to end the scene well.
- End it with suspenseful action.
- End scenes with a surprise.
- The most followed way to end the scene is to finish it with a hint of what’s to come.
- Finish it with a situation that implies consequences.
- Finish scenes with a hint of what’s to come.
- Finish a scene with the consequences of earlier action.
- Arrivals or departures are also good ideas to end the scene.
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