Make a Scene – Becky Levine

I’ve been thinking about scenes lately, one of my favorite elements of writing, and thought I’d share.

1. Your hero has to be active. She has to want something and go after it.

2. Your antagonist has to be active. Just like the hero. Even if it’s from behind the scenes.

3. Both goals have to matter. Something has to be at stake; something bad has to result if (almost always when) the hero or antagonist doesn’t succeed.

4. Things have to get worse. Your hero can’t just make one try for the goal, fail, give up, and go back to being okay. He has to do battle, against increasing odds, across the scene. Then he can fail. Badly. (But not give up!)

5. Your hero may have only one antagonist, but that antagonist is not the only place that obstacles come from. Friends cause problems, parents step in the way, your hero becomes self-destructive. The world itself makes trouble–weather, culture, history—everything can conspire to stop your hero from reaching their goal. Obviously, you’re not going to throw everything all together in one scene, but remember to check out all the choices in the smorgasbord of obstacles, and pick the ones that fit the moment best.

To read more about scene, pick up one or both of these great books: James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure and Jordan Rosenfeld’s Make a Scene. Then go write a few wonderful scenes of your own.

Friday, I had a pretty productive day. I sat down and did some thinking about some new scenes in my WIP, and I ended up with a basic plot arc–styled after Martha Alderson’s Plot Planner in Blockbuster Plots-Pure and Simple. I took a photo and posted it on my other blog, if you want to check it out.

As I worked on the plot arc, though, I could see all these threads that I don’t have woven in yet. This is fine, obviously, since I’m just getting started. Still, too many loose story threads, just like too many loose threads on my clothes, can drive me a bit nuts until I get them a little more tucked away.

So this morning I’ve been browsing through some writing books–reading up on beginnings, middles, and ends–and trying for an early placement of some of these threads. This seems to help me look at the rising (hopefully!) tension of the plot, to think about where the big things should happen and how I can build to those spots. For me, it’s mostly about what happens:

Before the hero’s first threshold–that inciting incident that is a microcosm of the whole, big story problem.
After the hero’s death (symbolic or otherwise)–when they face their worst crisis and make their most important (and hardest) choice.
Everything in between.

Here are a few things I came up with, in general terms, for what we should be doing in each of those sections.

Beginnings

Introduce the compelling hero
Establish the hero’s story goal/problem
Create a push/pull tension for hero around that problem
Establish the primary/most threatening antagonist
Establish the story world
Disturb that story world (seriously disturb it!)

Middles

Strengthen hero’s goal & opposition to that goal
Amp up the stakes for hero
Amp up the stakes for the antagonist
Strengthen and complicate character relationships
Throw in some new, surprising information (Thanks to Jordan E. Rosenfeld, in Make a Scene, for this one.)
Establish a sense of death hanging over the story world (And thanks to James Scott Bell, in Plot & Structure, for this one.)
Set up hero to make big choice, while making it “impossible” for hero to make that choice
Seed and (later) reveal secrets.

Endings

Resolve all story threads
Test, one more time, hero’s big choice
Show the impact of that choice choice–on hero and the whole story world

What about you. When you plot, do you just work through scenes in the order they play out? Or do you, like me, try to position them in one of the main sections of the story arc? And, please, freel free to tell me anything I’ve missed! 🙂

Tag: Make a Scene

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