How to write a scene

Thanks all for your supportive comments last week, when – cough, cough – I was very poorly. I’m pretty much back in the saddle this week, and I thought I’d bring you something sweet, simple and very actionable – a practical start to the New Year, in effect.

So: stories are made of scenes strung together in a plot. Let’s just assume for now that your plot is OK. In which case, the quality of your book is going to hang, to a very large extent, on the quality of your scenes. What makes a scene work? What are the tricks of the trade? What are the things you need to look out for?

Well, the curious little secret is that these things are (mostly) obvious and simple. They’re just hard to do. So here are some rules:

• Jump to the action as fast as you can
• If you want, you can jump right into the action, even at the cost of not quite making sense initially. You can then, 2-3 paragraphs in, go and back-fill the information the reader needs to make sense of things. So for example, you might start with dialogue, without the reader knowing where the characters are situated. Once you’ve got things going via dialogue, you can add the, “They were standing in the middle of a …, etc”. That often gives you a stronger more engaging start, than starting with a description could ever deliver.
• Leave the scene as fast as you can. You can always tie up any loose threads in the next scene … and you probably need to tie fewer things up than you might think.
• It’s often said that every scene needs to have a kind of conflict. I don’t think that’s quite right – or at least, it’s not the most helpful way of describing things. What IS true is that there needs to be something unsettled in the scene. Something mobile. A question that needs an answer.
• Your character’s emotions need to be engaged. If he/she doesn’t care, your reader won’t care.
• In general, but not always-always, you want a balance of scene description (so your scene is physically realised), dialogue (because that’s the most supple, alive element in any scene) and action (in the sense that we know what your characters are doing.)
• There should for preference be a useful reverberation between the action that’s taking place and the physical atmosphere in the scene. That can be obvious (a proposal in a rose garden) or contrasting (a proposal in a butcher’s shop), but you want some alive, interesting echo between action and place.
• And here’s a biggie: you structure your scenes much as you structure a story. You set up the question early on in the scene. You develop it. You reach a climax. You resolve quickly and move on.

Now all that seems pretty wholesome. A good, wholegrain style menu for writing a scene. But because that kind of advice seems pretty damn bland taken on its own, here’s a mini-scene of my own, with comments in italics added.

The situation here is that my character, Fiona, has just escaped from a damaging and traumatising situation. She has fled to a buddy of hers: a guy called Lev, who is ex-Russian Special Forces and not exactly a run-of-the-mill character. She trusts Lev to look after her, but Lev needs to find his range first. Here’s how things go:

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I park where Lev tells me to, outside a cream-painted house, with a sheet of graffitied chipboard for a door.

Very swift intro to the physical location. So brief, it hardly interrupts things

‘Is here,’ says Lev.

The door is held by a crude wooden catch. No lock.

Fiona’s observation this. By noticing the crudity of the accommodation, she is letting you know, in effect, what she’s thinking.

Lev opens the door for me – there are no hinges, so he has to lift it – and I step inside.

I knew that Lev didn’t have a permanent home in Britain or, I think, anywhere. Mostly he sleeps in his car or on the floors of friends’ houses. But when he isn’t doing those things, and isn’t abroad, he uses squats.

But knowing that and being here: two different things.

Again: Fiona isn’t saying, “I feel X about this place.” But she’s letting us know all the same. Indirect access to character emotions is just fine.

The downstairs room is lightless. The doors and windows have been boarded up front and rear. There’s a poor quality kitchen in place – white formica doors loose on their hinges, chipboard surfaces bubbling and splitting with damp – but I already know there’s no water in the tap, no power in the sockets.

More physical description. But this isn’t done for its own sake. By now, it’s clear that the question raised by this scene is roughly: “Is this horrible squat going to satisfy Fiona’s needs for sanctuary? And how will her discomfort shift her relationship with Lev?” Those aren’t huge questions in the context of the story. But they don’t have to be. They just have to feel alive and important for the duration of a (shortish) scene.

Lev says nothing. Just points me upstairs.

Upstairs: two bedrooms, one bathroom, nothing else. Bare boards. No furniture. No heating. No bathroom fittings, even. Lev has taken over the larger of the two bedrooms. A military looking roll of bedding, neatly furled. A ten-litre jerry can of water. A wash bowl. A primus stove and basic cooking equipment, all clean, all tidy. A black bag, of clothes I presume. A small box of food. The front window was boarded, but Lev has removed the boards and they stand leaning against the wall.

This is the first revelation of the accommodation proper. In that sense, what’s gone before has been just preamble. This is where the scene-question gets sharpened up further.

Light enters the room in silence. Leaves again the same way.

I don’t say anything.

Don’t even step into the room, not really. Just stand there in the doorway.

So everything’s hanging. At the moment, we’re reaching a moment of crisis in our mini-story. Will this squat work for Fiona? It’s not looking good. Her hanging back in the doorway (rather than stepping forward into the room) is as close as she gets to actual conflict with Lev. And that’s not much conflict. That’s why I don’t think focusing on conflict is especially helpful.

I am not what you would call a girly girl. I don’t have a particular relationship with pink. Don’t revere handbags or hoard shoes. I don’t love to dress up, or bake, or follow faddy diets, or learn new ways to decorate my home. On the other hand, I have just spent the weekend being tortured in a barn near Rhayader and I was, I admit it, wanting something a bit homelier than this.

Fiona humour! And for the first time really direct access to her thoughts / feelings. Again, this is pushing us closer to the point of crisis/decision/resolution.

Lev stands behind me seeing the room through my eyes. Perhaps he was secretly expecting me to be thrilled. Perhaps he is thinking dark thoughts about decadent Western girls, our need for luxury.

More humour. But here we have Lev’s position and Fiona’s. At the moment, these are two opposed, unresolved forces. We don’t yet know how this is going to resolve.

He says nothing. Not straight away. We just stand there in the pale light. Even the tiniest sounds echo among these hard surfaces, so a single creak of a floorboard rolls around the room, like a pea in a shoebox.

Tension ratchets up for a couple of lines. Then …

Then Lev says, ‘Is not suitable.’

That was halfway between a question and a statement, but I let it be a statement.

Lev says, ‘We go somewhere else.’

Boom! Done. We know that Fiona’s opposition has won the day. As far as we can tell at this stage, the Fiona / Lev relationship hasn’t been injured by that micro-conflict. And of course a new story question is immediately launched: Lev still seems willing to find sanctuary for Fiona, but what is he going to offer? Will Fiona find her sanctuary? And will that be enough to allow for her recovery? Those questions are immediately tackled by the scenes that follow.

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That’s it. As you can see, not a lot of heavy-duty story-freight hangs on that scene. In a way, you could cut it completely and the book would lose nothing much in terms of plot. But from the reader’s perspective, the scene is funny. It’s tense. And they learn something about Lev (the way he lives) that they may have been curious about for the space of about 400,000 words (ie: since the moment they first met him in book #1 of the series.)

And one other thing: the scene is short. That whole thing notches up just 450 words, or about a page and a half of a paperback. But that’s still long enough to launch a question, develop it, build some tension round it, have plenty of personality / emotion / humour in the situation, then resolve it and move on. Do that enough times in the course of a properly plotted story, and you have a book, my friend.

How about you? DO you have a way you like to write scenes? Recipes you follow? Rules you adopt? Let me know and we’ll all have a Heated Debate.