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Novel Scenes
By E. A. Hill ©2010
Scenes. They’re the anchors for your characters, allowing them to experience adventures undreamed of. Scenes are the visual elements that, strung together, make navigating your story entertaining and logical.
Scenes are the pulse of your novel. With each successive beat, characters discover more, reveal more, live more. And readers feel that life. The pulse, the heartbeat of your story, resonates in them, and if the beat is strong enough, it will keep them connected, not wanting to leave. Not wanting to cut off that heartbeat that has become part of them.
We all know what it’s like to be interrupted when we’re at the good part. Make your story pulse with the good part from beginning to end. Give the reader not only a vivid character, but vivid scenes that will echo in his mind and heart. Scenes that will keep him attached to your tale.
Scenes. Not descriptions. Not a reporting of events. Scenes.
Write them. From page one, write them.
They’re what’s vibrant about your story. They are
events happening in a specific place.
Don’t tell us Max did this and Sally did that and Mortimer
did a little of both. Don’t give us diary entries or a
school report. Don’t even give us a letter to a pen pal. Put
your characters into a specific time, a specific locale, and give them a task.
And once you write your scene, don’t fill pages with delay, describing the route to an event and then the décor once we get there.
Get to the point.
Dump us into action. Event. Happening.
Paint us a picture of someone doing something somewhere.
Think of a series of events, as in a movie. Write those events. Connect them with narrative. And then write more events.
Yes, thinking can be an event. So can dialogue. But events also include someone robbing a house, a teen learning to drive, a woman kissing a man.
Give your readers events and action they can dive into. Give them places they can see, objects they can touch, sounds to hear and wonder over. Write for the senses and the emotions and the mind. And put your characters in a location.
Don’t forget that people move and touch and see while they’re interacting.
If you’re going to use a scene with a lot of thought and/or dialogue—either one person thinking without interaction with another or multiple characters speaking back and forth—make sure the reader knows the where and when of the scene. Don’t write disembodied thoughts for two pages. Put us in a place, show us why the character is having these thoughts, and then go at those thoughts.
Think place. Passage of time. Events happening while the character ruminates or reminisces or cogitates.
Don’t give us only talking heads, existing independently of all else. (When Elsie was young, she always brushed her teeth five times a day. Not six. Not four. She . . . ) If you choose to throw in back story, first show us where the character is and what brought about these deep thoughts of the past. Does the character walk around randomly thinking of the past? Or is there something in the story—related to plot, of course—that drives those reminiscences? Unless your character is naturally crazy, go for something that sets him off. And don’t forget to let us know what’s happening while the character is off remembering. Ground the character—and the reader—in a place and then do your thing with deep thoughts.
Use description in scenes, but don’t only describe. Have your characters interact with their locale, other characters, and their own demons.
Don’t try to narrate scenes—she did this and that and then she cried. Make the story events real. Make the reader live those events, feel those emotions, quiver with pain and gasp with shock.
What I did on vacation. A school report.
My family went to Majorca for two weeks. We built sand castles on the shore, and one beach was so awesome we went back four times. We ate new foods. My sister lost her sandals one day, but it turns out that this guy had a crush on her and had taken them to get her attention. My little brother wasn’t as obnoxious as he usually was.
What I did on vacation. Fiction (narrative and scene).
Majorca used to be popular with American military families stationed in Germany, so Mom and Dad knew a lot about it. I didn’t want to go—my sister was fighting with her boyfriend and I knew she’d use me as a sounding board. I’d have to hear all the reasons he was a jerk and then the zillion and one reasons why she’d take him back.
The first day I found a cave at the beach, maybe a half mile away from my parents.
I sat inside, arms around my legs, and stared at the so-
Instead, I heard only swoosh and whoosh and crash.
I closed my eyes, relieved.
I liked the sounds of swoosh and crash. I didn’t like the voices of death.
What I did on vacation. Fiction (narrative and scene, a variation)
I ran and ran and ran. Down the beach, up the dunes. I fell. I cut myself on a stupid
pop can. I peed behind the Porta-
And then I found the cave. Not Aladdin’s cave. Not Blackbeard’s either. It was all mine. Tessa’s cave. I imagined no one else had ever crawled inside, abrading knees and sinking fingers into cool sand. No other hands had feverishly fashioned a sand throne to elevate the occupant to the height of the cave’s ceiling.
No other had found comfort in the ocean’s hum as it echoed from the cave walls.
No one else had found sanctuary in a beach cave on the shore of some silly island I couldn’t find on a map. In a country halfway around the world from home. In a hot land so unlike
suburban Bismarck that I didn’t recognize the smell of the air and the grit against my skin and the taste of food on my tongue.
And no one else had used the cave to fight demons that tore at the mind, weakening resolve. No other had used Tessa’s cave to block out voices that called for death. Death to the one who’d crawled inside. Death to the one who’d fashioned the sand throne. Death to the one who sought sanctuary in the cave on the shore of that silly island that I couldn’t find on a map, in a hot land halfway around the world from home.
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Scenes are the pulse of your novel. With each successive beat, characters discover more, reveal more, live more. And readers feel that life.