The Building Blocks of Scene

Image: a long line of people with shopping carts
Photo by Adrien Delforge on Unsplash

Today’s post is the first in a three-part series by Sharon Oard Warner, adapted from her book Writing the Novella. Read part two here and part three here.


Imagine you’re standing in the express line at your favorite grocery store. 

On your way inside, you bypassed the cart corral. Now, as you wait at the tail end of a longish line, you’re regretting it. Here you are: juggling a frozen pizza, a cucumber, and a package of paper napkins. Tucked under one arm is a weighty glass bottle of Merlot and under the other, a bottle of red wine vinaigrette.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights flicker. The line isn’t moving, and you are weary. You close your eyes for maybe a second, and when you open them again, a whip-thin, tattooed man has slipped in line ahead of you, a jar of pickles pressed to his chest. The young woman queued up behind you hisses over your shoulder:

“So, are you going to let that go?” Her question is loud enough for bystanders to hear.

The interloper’s back stiffens. He cocks his head and makes an odd clicking noise with his tongue that sounds menacing.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” asks the strident young woman. Is she addressing you or the interloper? From the front of the line, half a dozen faces swivel in your direction.  You feel yourself blushing. If there’s anything you hate, it’s for someone to make a scene, especially when you are forced to be part of it.

Making a scene on the page

Reflect now on what your mother meant when she said, “Don’t make a scene.”  She was asking/pleading with you not to do anything in public that would draw the attention of others. If there aren’t bystanders on hand to gawk, well, it isn’t really a scene. Note that “making a scene” need not be embarrassing or distressing, though that’s usually the case. Sometimes, a public display is carefully orchestrated—as in attention-getting marriage proposals and flash mob performances. The common denominator in all these situations, be they negative or positive, is emotion. Whatever is experienced by the participants—fear, jealousy, embarrassment, awe—is transferred to the audience.  Such experiences tend to be memorable.

Scenes are the building blocks of narrative, regardless of the form that narrative takes. Anyone who writes short stories, novellas, novels, memoirs, screenplays or dramatic plays must be proficient in crafting compelling scenes. All the significant moments in any narrative get conveyed through scenes. In fact, the decision to write in scene or in summary is decided based on importance. If the event or moment is noteworthy, chances are you will want to develop it through scene. What’s less important ends up being summarized.

As someone who has grown up in a culture obsessed with fictional narratives, you have been exposed to hundreds of thousands of scenes—beginning in your babyhood when, if you were lucky, your parents read to you at bedtime. From there, you have learned to read for yourself, and, if you want to write stories, you must have fallen in love with them. You have attended plays, gone to movies, watched television, played video games, all of which are dependent on scenes. So, you know their makeup well. But you have partaken of them, and now you will need to be able to take them apart.

Creating a public display of emotion, one way of describing what it means to “make a scene,” can and often does happen spontaneously, but creating scenes on paper usually requires considerable planning and forethought. In The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer, author Sandra Scofield defines scenes as “those passages in narrative when we slow down and focus on an event in the story so that we are ‘in the moment’ with characters in action.” If the scene is compelling enough, the reader becomes a bystander of sorts, and characters come to life.

The building blocks of scene

Some of what I am about to explain may seem self-evident, but I know from my own experience as a reader and writer of fiction, a creative writing instructor, and a book reviewer, that writing a compelling scene is hard work. I also know that well-constructed, compelling scenes are essential to the success of narrative prose.

So, let’s begin with the basics:

  • All scenes have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
  • Most scenes are preceded by orienting information: who, what, when, where. Readers can’t relax and enjoy the proceedings until they have their bearings.
  • Scenes are composed of action, description, dialogue, and thought. In any given scene, one of these components may well dominate while another recedes. (Think about it: Sometimes, we are doing a lot of talking, other times a lot of thinking.)
  • In general, the longer the scene, the more critical it is to the overall narrative.  Most often, plot point scenes will be among the most developed scenes in any narrative.
  • Readers enjoy scenes more than they enjoy summary. (Don’t believe me? Take note of your reading habits. Do you rush through exposition or page ahead to see when the next scene takes place? Most of us do.)
  • Scenes are rarely provided in their entirety. We writers skip over the niceties—the hellos and goodbyes, the chitchat and weather talk. We use summary as well as other techniques to fast-forward, slow down, or pause.
  • Longer fictional narratives will usually include one or more scene sequences. A sequence is a group of three or more related scenes that take the narrator/protagonist through a significant piece of action. An excellent example of a sequence is the opening of Fahrenheit 451. Montag burns books, is surprised on his way home by Clarice, discovers his unconscious wife, calls the EMTs, and finally takes a lozenge himself to get to sleep. As in this example, sequences will themselves have a beginning, middle, and end.
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Harald Johnson

As someone who writes in scenes, I like this take on it. Look forward to the next episodes.

Sharon O Warner

Thanks, Harald. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on next week’s post.

PJ Reece

Always good to be reminded of these basics, thank you… especially while I’m starting out a new novel. Cheers from the west coast of BC.

Sharon O Warner

Cheers to you from Austin, TX. (I bet it’s a lot cooler where you are.) Good luck on the new novel. And do look for next week’s installment on scenes.

David Michael Rice

Thank you.

“Scenes are composed of action, description, dialogue, and thought.”

Description includes smell, sounds, tastes, sights, feeling. One places the reader in a scene by the senses. If two characters are dining, the feel of the table cloth and the napkins can give the reader a sense of being there along with how the air smells, the dimness of the lighting, and the like.

“You close your eyes for maybe a second, and when you open them again, a whip-thin, tattooed man has slipped in line ahead of you….”

Ah, he must be French. They do this. All of them.

“Do you rush through exposition or page ahead to see when the next scene takes place?”

No. That makes no sense. If the book is not written well enough to read, I wish the book into the corn field.

I have sent to my Kindle reader a “free sample” of Writing the Novella.
The finest novella that I have ever encountered in 50+ years of reading is The Real Story written by Stephen Reed Donaldson. It is lean, with every word moving the story forward.

Sharon O Warner

Hi David: Love the responsive commentary! I hope you find the free sample helpful. And do check back on Thursday for Part Two.

Christine

Thank you for this post and your book Writing the Novella. The book showed this newbie writer how to structure and now in rewriting my first draft I got inspiration for the opening scene in my book.

Sharon O Warner

Christine: You’ve made my day! I’m delighted to learn that Writing the Novella has seen you through a first draft.

Lynanne Rockhill

As a former, professional theater actor, I studied a lot of scenes. Mostly drama. And with every great scene, drama is created by wants (objectives). Drama also needs an obstacle that stands in the way of getting the want. Obstacles are basic to life … and life has everything to do with what you want (objective), why you want it (emotional justification), and how you go about getting it (your intention) to overcome the obstacle. And in choosing specific ways (actions) to get what you want advances the story.

Every character I bring to life, I must know them intimately because they each manipulate their world with their own specific intentions and actions. And I aim for the most interesting and provocative ways to reveal that character in my scenes by the active way they try to get their objective(s).

I get excited just thinking about scene work and how each character does specific actions to get what they want from other characters, and the reactive behavior that comes from the other characters makes the scene live. For me it’s the instinctive choices they make that surprise me, and then I need to find the ‘exact words’ that fit their emotion into dialogue for the scene. It’s a lot of work … but I love it. 😉

Sharon O Warner

Your experience as an actor is surely a great asset to your writing scenes! I bet it comes in handy when you’re developing characters, too! Thank you for sharing.

Emma Foster

Thanks so much for this post! It’s refreshing to read an article about a basic aspect to a story but in a new and straightforward way. I look forward to reading more!

Sharon O Warner

Thank you, Emma. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Parts 2 and 3.