How to *actually* write a scene for a fiction book

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to my channel my name is Tara East I'm an academic a writer and a teacher of writing and I'm the author of the mystery novel every time he dies so a month or two ago one of my students shared that they were a little bit lost around how to actually write a scene they've read many writing advice articles online they've read craft books they're also an Avid Reader but when they open the word document or open scrier and they're faced with the blank page they literally think okay I've got this story in my head I've got these characters and this setting in this plot but like what do I actually write now the problem with writing advice at least in this format in a video like this on YouTube is that anything I say is going to be pretty General generic advice I cannot tell you how to write the specific scene for your particular novel only you can figure that out through Drafting and revision but hopefully the following points I'm going to discuss in this video might give you things to think about and to hold on to and to develop as you both draft your scene and revise it again and again so in this video I'm not going to be unpacking basic building blocks like character setting theme plot I'm just going to go ahead and assume that you know what those things are I will however mention these building blocks of narrative whenever they're relevant to the other topics that I'll be covering today so the first point I really want to unpack is the balancing between scene and summary or what some people like to call telling versus showing so writers are often told to show instead of tell but of course there are instances where it is actually much better to some sumarize or to Omit an event entirely so for example if two characters are having a discussion in a kitchen we don't need to see Michael filling up the kettle pulling out the mugs opening the jar of coffee spooning the coffee into the mugs walking across the kitchen opening the fridge and pulling out the milk instead we can just say Michael made the coffee however I would add the caveat that maybe we would slow down down the pace and show every single step of this coffee making process if say Michael knew that the conversation was about to take an uncomfortable turn and he's trying to focus on something else or perhaps Michael is in a State of Shock and they're trying to focus on these small controllable actions or maybe you are trying to build tension and anticipation depending on what the other character in this scene is doing so for example let's say Tony is the second character in the scene and Tony is pointing a gun at Michael maybe now we are showing all of these small actions because Michael is nervous his hands are shaking and he's afraid if he drops the milk H Tony's going to get a fright and then the gun's going to go off because as it turns out Tony's not so great with guns when it comes to showing versus telling you will use the technique that most supports the intentions of the scene you are writing when we show something the pace often slows down because we using many words to describe the setting action or circumstances of what is happening when we slow things down readers know that what we are showing them is important they know that they need to pay attention we might be revealing something about character the work's theme or an important plot point when we tell it is often shorter because we're quickly summarizing information when we show we are emphasizing something we're underscoring it but when we tell and we're summarizing information in some ways we're sort of deemphasizing it the information could still be very important information it might be new information that's introduced or it might be reminding us of something that had previously been mentioned but the thing is this information doesn't need to be described in detail now sometimes you might use telling intentionally to sort of deemphasize important information like if you're writing a mystery novel and you want to include a clue but be a little bit subtle about it you don't want to shine a giant big Spotlight on this dead giveaway information so you need to be mindful of why you're showing and why you're telling and what the intention of both are so all of this is to say that showing and telling scene and summary are both useful writing techniques when building a scene and whichever one you use is just completely dependent upon the effect that you're going for now I want to talk about description now description is a really difficult one to talk about because how you include description in your work is going to be hugely dependent on your own personal writing style for example you might tend towards a minimal literary style when it comes to describing settings and characters if your natural writing style is more onate and when I think of orate writing I always think of Sarah Waters then you might be a little bit more indulgent when it comes to describing physical appearances clothes buildings Landscapes and so on so fantasy novels are often longer because a great deal of time is spent describing the world and explaining how it works but if you're you're writing a scene where a character is boarding an airplane you'll likely provide very little description because we all know what an airplane looks like and if you were to provide painstaking description it would be incredibly boring so when it comes to setting a general rule is to describe the unfamiliar and then to mention the familiar so let's look at an example from a description you might find in a fantasy novel you could say something like on the edge of a Crystal Clear Lake sat a castle made of white stone its delicate archways were carved with flowers and Vines and the fine pointed Towers were all covered with moss you'll note that in this description I not detailing every little aspect of the castle but I am describing particular features and using certain adjectives to hint at the general appearance and then your mind is just going to build the r of it if a character was entering a more familiar space you might simply say they boarded the cruise ship or they entered the corner store or they took the table at the back of the small library and so on I think we've all had that experience of reading a book in which the setting was so clear in our mind it felt as if we were actually there often though not always we can build an entire room by focusing on just a handful of specific items and then our imagination will just fill in the blanks so for example if I were to say she entered the room and noted the cream and pastel green striped wallpaper the immaculate clean and white fireplace and the vase of fresh lies on the table from this description you can immediately imagine what this room looks like and the type of person who might inhabit it as well as what the rest of the house might look like like now here's a very different example she entered the room and sunk onto the cot in the corner pulling the coarse blanket over her head now we all see a very different type of room and I'm sure you can imagine how these two very distinct settings would heavily influence the direction of that particular scene and the types of events that might occur in it how you use description again may also depend on your narrative intentions so for example in Pride and Prejudice Jane Austin almost never describes the setting of any scene in detail her descriptions are very minimal and sometimes are supplied almost as an afterthought at the end of a scene but when Elizabeth Bennett sees Mr Darcy's estate pemberly a whole paragraph is dedicated to describing this estate this moment is so signif ific because it is stylistically different to the rest of the novel so the reader knows we can literally see how important this moment is to Elizabeth and her changing perception of Mr Dary in general most of us will include some description about our characters their clothes the setting and other important objects as a way to build imagery into the scene so that it is easier for readers to imagine the acttion that is being described we might think that a great deal of detail is required to achieve this but often a few very specific and precise descriptions is all that is needed to build a full scene and create a sense of space and place but without jeopardizing the pace so the next thing I want to talk about is tension we can think of this also as conflict or even contrast but we think of tension we can fall into the Trap of thinking about things in terms of high stakes but that is not always the case in fact some scenes may have very little tension but we'll come back to that idea in a moment now the tension in your scene may come from external sources or internal sources or you might have both forms of tension within any particular scene an external source of tension is something outside of the character that is then impacting AC ing the character like a bad boss a natural disaster a competition they're preparing for or a love interest an internal source of tension is what we might also call a fatal flaw so it's some sort of internal challenge that the character is dealing with throughout the novel so for example they hate their boss but they really want to keep their job to make their parents happy they're experiencing this flood but they know if they're actually strong enough to survive this natural disaster they're training for this competition but they actually really doubt their ability to win it they have a love interest someone they're interested in but they've been burnt by love in the past so they're kind of hesitant to put themselves out there again when thinking about your plot in general it is good to be aware of the external and internal sources of tension that are going to appear throughout and to consider how these may be either the primary focus of a particular scene or a gentler influence on the events that are unfolding and your character's responses to those events now you may have noticed that these two sources of conflict can contrast one another they can have a link this doesn't have to be the case they don't have to be linked or related to one another but it can really assist in increasing the tension within your book if they do in some cases the external source of tension may be more present and more pressing and in other types of books it might be more internally driven so as a general rule though the pressure that these two sources of conflict put on the character usually increase as the novel moves towards the climax of the plot and if there is a link between the two the climax is when we will see these two sources of tension finally buttheads now I want to talk about narrative drive because depending on the type of book you're writing you may have a scene that as I mentioned before contains very little tension or quiet tension so narrative Drive is the element of the story that is pushing the story forward so for example your novel may use a rotating point of view where where alternating between different point of views between different chapters so let's say we've got two character and we're jumping between their point of view the question in the book is when and how will these two story lines cross paths if you're working on a chirer scene you need to consider how narrative Drive can be used to keep the reader reading it could look like a character organizing or making plans for an upcoming event like organizing a lunch date with a significant character and then the reader is kind of excited for this builtup scene and they want to jump ahead to it so you're creating this sort of like tension to keep them reading to keep pulling them along with this kind of technique what you're doing is really sparking the reader's curiosity we want to see what is going to happen next so maybe you're writing a fantasy novel and the characters have received some important information this information may not be directly linked to the external Source or an internal source of conflict but it's sparking the reader's curiosity The Narrative Drive in Your Story can also be created by planting a question or a small mystery at some point in the book we are then reminded of that question or that mystery at various points throughout until it is eventually answered or resolved in some way now some scenes will naturally be a little bit quieter in terms of tension in these instances you need to consider how the scene is moving the plot forward or how it's revealing character including hints about character transformation now maybe it's even doing both and ideally it's doing both now it's also worth considering the narrative Arc of the single scene that you're writing what will keep the reader reading are they concerned for the character or are they curious about what is going to happen next so editing Tara here there was a point I wanted to make about editing and how to create contrast when writing a scene so when you're going through your scenes think about how your protagonist or your point of view character can be in contrast to the people around them as this can build microt tensions within any scene and it's a way to make a scene much more compelling because if you think about it if everybody in the scene just agrees with what your protagonist says all of a sudden there's no tension there's no meat and everything just kind of moves ahead really smoothly but if a character is in contrast to your protagonist one it shows that maybe your protagonist isn't perfect and their thinking isn't perfect and two it's creating tension because now we're having an obstacle that has been introduced within the scene so at the moment I'm reading the Familia by Lee bardugo and this is a really great example of a character who is in opposition to pretty much every other character in every single scene that I've read so far so um this book is by no means the only book that does it but it's a book I'm reading right now and it does it very well so I do recommend it if you want to kind of examine and study this particular technique of having characters who are in contrast to one another now back to the main video now that I have mentioned story Ox I think this is a great segue into the actual structure of a scene itself so we're all familiar with story structure methods things like the hero's journey the heroin's journey the 357 act structure and so on we can also think of scenes as having a similar structure but just on a much smaller scale so the beginning of a scene or a chapter could establish Where We Are Who we're with and what is happening the middle of the scene can contain a variety of things such as revealing consequences to previous decisions revealing character motivations introducing new information or new challenges essentially things need to become more complicated and more complex and we need to get a sense that the story is moving forward there's progression that's being made now the end of the scene this is a tricky one to talk about because we need a sense of satisfaction a sort of momentary sense of clo Ure or of course you can end on a bit of a cliffhanger or some sort of enticing sentence that's going to then pull the reader on into the next scene or into the next chapter and chances are within your novel you'll probably use a mixture of both of these methods where some scenes and some chapters have a momentary pause or a sense of closure because the reality is readers are going to have to put the book down at some point and you might also Al use Cliffhanger techniques in order to drag people over to the next scene or the next chapter now there's two things that every scene should or could include and the first is your character making decisions so these decisions may be intentional or subconscious depending on what kind of book you're writing and what kind of character you have created but we should see your character making decisions and taking action and AC with agency the second thing is your character should be encountering obstacles or challenges of some kind this is where your external or internal sources of tension kind of come into play now when it comes to the actual like content of any scene it's really important to ask why particular information or events have been included so what purpose do these elements really serve the story or the bigger question what purpose does this whole scene serve in terms of the overall narrative Arc well I would love to provide you with a very tidy blueprint of this is the exact way you should construct a scene the reality is I can't provide you with that information how you construct a scene for your novel will be hugely dependent and influenced by your writing style the genre you're working in and the target audience how however in terms of everything I just mentioned it can be useful to keep those Concepts Loosely in your mind when you're drafting a scene for the first time though I do encourage you to also write with joy and with play and to maybe leave the editor at the door but when it comes time to revising your scene to revising your manuscript that's where all of this constructive advice can help you revise your scenes and rewrite your scenes means so that they're as effective as possible and so that they are as gripping as they can be thank you so much for watching this video if you have any comments or Reflections that you would like to share around the writing process specifically writing scenes I would love to know so please leave them in the comments below if you'd like even more writing advice you can of course check out the other videos on my Channel or go to Tower east.com and dive into the archives while you're there please consider joining my email newsletter when you do I'll send you a free gift plus you receive an email in your inbox every single Thursday morning okay not every single Thursday morning but when I do send a newsletter it will contain a note by me a quote of the week some resources I've recently loved and think you will too and some information and tidbits that I only share via email thank you so much for being here I really appreciate it now go do some writing because the world actually does need more books

Channel: Dr Tara East

Views: 12,498

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Id: 79tg1etff5I

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024