Scene Breakdown: 6 Things Jane Austen Does RIGHT (How to Write a Great Scene)

what does a perfectly crafted scene look like I recently put up a video walking through the top 10 mistakes that writers make when creating their scenes and I'll put a link you know up here or over there or down in the description somewhere but if you haven't watched it go watch it so it's easy to just point out all the mistakes that we make as writers but now let's look at a perfectly written scene to see how a Masterwork writer puts together a scene so we're going to look at the first scene in the book Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen so let's just jump in and start going through and looking at everything that she got right so the first thing I want to point out here is this just top bit right here it's like 77 words it was written 210 years ago in a time that we are not familiar with and yet somehow Jane Austen immediately drops us in the world that she's living in and we immediately know what's going on and we we feel comfortable in this world and I point this out because one of the biggest mistakes I pointed out is that authors love to info dump they love to just load lots and lots and lots of information in because they're afraid the reader is going to get lost and they want to make sure they understand where they are in the world Jane Austen doesn't do that here in just a few sentences she drops us in the world and now even 210 years after this book was first published you and I can read this and we feel perfectly comfortable with what's happening here so I just want to point this out that she doesn't info dump she gives us just enough information this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say give minimum viable Exposition and then get into the action of the story and Jane Austen does it perfectly right here the next thing I want to point out is the expertly crafted dialogue now I put these little divider lines here so you could see where the Beats start and finish throughout this entire scene and you can see this input and output where Miss Mrs Bennett comes in and start starts talking to Mr Bennett and why I want to point this out is I talked about how a lot of times writers create dialogue that is attuned where the people talking are basically saying the same things at the same level and as you can see Jane Austen does a perfect job of making these miss a tune a Miss Bennett comes in she tells him hey this guy's moved into netherfield park and he's like oh I didn't know that right so immediately he's not like oh yes I did know that this is something where he said he didn't know so he's already a little bit of combative and then she says this next thing and you see Mr Bennett doesn't even respond so this is what we would call a freeze response so again this is Miss a tune she says something to him and instead of responding he just sits there quietly the next thing she says is do not you want to know who has taken it cried his wife impatiently so she's going up she's getting worked up and he just says you want to tell me and I have no objection to hearing it right so he stays down so he doesn't go up there and meet her at that level and you just see this go back and forth and back and forth where there's never a time where he responds at the same level as his wife he lets her go up and down and he keeps going up and down against her and he's always combative with her through the entire scene you just see this over and over and over let me just point out a couple more beats Here My Dear Mr Bennett replied his wife how can you be so tiresome you must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them she's talking about one of their daughters and he says is that his design and settling here so he's saying is that why this guy moved here so again he's already arguing right so she's saying well I want him to marry one of our daughters and he's like is that why he came here to marry one of our daughters so arguing with her obviously not giving her what she wants throughout this entire scene it's really clear that she wants him to go see this guy that just moved in and at every chance at every beat in every interchange of dialogue he is undercutting and avoiding what he knows his wife wants him to do and then here Mrs Bennett says but my dear you must indeed go and see Mr Bingley when he comes into the neighborhood and Mr Bennett responds it is more than I engaged for I assure you he's basically saying no I'm not going to do that and you just again see this go back and forth back and forth so if you want to understand what we mean by not having a tune dialogue you have to have Miss a tune dialogue this is a great scene to take a look at next up let's look at what changes in this scene right and this is where we track the five Commandments of Storytelling so the first commandment is the inciting incident and that's where the protagonist life gets knocked off balance the protagonist of this particular scene is Mr Bennett I'm going to come back and talk about that in just a second but this first line right here is what knocks his life off balance is when he's just minding his own business living his life and his wife comes in and says hey have you heard about this guy that's moved in to netherfield park this is the moment when Mr Bennett's life is knocked off ballot the inciting incident is when Mrs Bennett comes in and tells Mr Bennett that somebody has moved into netherfield park so then they go back and forth for a little bit and it's building and its building and its building and he keeps kind of pushing it off pushing it off pushing it off until this moment right here this is the moment when she first explicitly tells him that he needs to go visit and there's nobody else that can go because first she asks and he's like well why don't you go and he keeps kind of putting it off and this is the moment that it turns the turning point is when we aren't going to just go back to the way things are so if at this point Mrs Bennett would have said okay I'm just gonna go see him myself then Mr Bennett could go right back to the way things were and everything would be fine and this is the point when it turns because she specifically says only Mr Bennett can go and visit this new person that has come to netherfield park so this is the turning point now the crisis is throughout this entire scene so the crisis is the choice the protagonist has to make he has to do a or b it has to be irreconcilable Goods or best bad choice in this particular scene what Mr Bennett is choosing between is do I make my wife upset and I don't go or do I have to actually get off my lazy ass and go see this guys and so this puts Mr Bennett in a best bad choice situation so again this crisis does show up throughout the scene but I think right here is where we see it on the page for sure is when she says it will be no use to us if 20 such should come since you will not visit them so she's basically saying even if 20 eligible bachelors came to town you're never gonna go see them and this is the point where Mr Bennett just says once and for all he is not gonna go so that is the climax right here is when he's like it doesn't matter I'm not gonna go and he does it by saying yeah when 20 come to town then I'll go see them all and then we move into the resolution and this is just what happens as a response to him saying no these are the five Commandments this is how you track the change in the scene and we go from Hope to despair if we're looking at the global love story that is Pride and Prejudice in this particular scene we get a little bit further away from love right we get a little bit further away because if Mr Bennett had gone to see this new visitor maybe his daughters would have a chance at love but instead he says no so in this first scene we actually move away from love and we move from hope that love is going to happen to despair that it's not going to happen now I want to come back to this idea of the protagonist now one of the things that we have to ensure in our scenes is that the protagonist is the outputer they are the one whose life is being knocked off balance one of the problems we see in a lot of scenes is that the protagonist is the one driving the action and that is not how it can be stories are about a protagonist's life being knocked out of balance by an inciting incident and then them trying to find their way back now the global protagonist in this story of course is Elizabeth Bennett but in this particular Scene It is Mr Bennett his life is the one that's knocked off balance and that's how you can see in each of these beats he is the outputer he is the one responding he is the one where Mrs Bennett is saying something to him and he's being forced to respond when he just wants to go back to doing nothing which is what he was doing at the beginning of the scene this is an extremely important part of scene writing is making sure the protagonist is the output or their life is the one being knocked off balance because the reader is going to automatically map onto and empathize with the person in the scene whose life has been knocked off balance they are going to map onto the outputter so it is important when you're writing your scene that you're protagon is the one who is responding to the input not the one doing the input to the other characters I also want to point out here there are super clear objects of desire for each of these characters Mrs Bennett obviously wants Mr Bennett to go see this visitor that is moved into netherfield park and then Mr Bennett doesn't want to do anything he wants to go back to just being lazy and not doing anything so one of the big mistakes we see writers making in their scene is not having clear objects of desire and as you can see in this perfectly written scene by Jane Austen it is very clear what these characters want in the scene and they are going about getting it and again going back to the dialogue each interchange and dialogue is each of them trying to get what they want and that's where the tension and misattunement comes in each line of dialogue and the last thing I'll mention in particular is that each of the characters acts consistently this is what we see a lot of times in scenes is that the characters start doing random stuff each of these things is not surprising every time the character acts even though it's still an engaging scene it's a well-paced scene you want to read and know what happens next nothing that either of the characters does is surprising to the reader is out of character for that character and so the characters are very consistent so I could go on and on about this scene this is one of my favorite scenes it's one of those scenes that every time I read it every time I study it I learn something new and this is why it's important for you to study Masterworks looking really really closely at a particular Masterwork is how you get better at writing I did a whole video about how read a lot write a lot is horrible advice and I said you have to study Masterworks and that's what I wanted to do in this video is just show you how much you can learn by just looking at one scene in a Masterwork and this Masterwork written 210 years ago is still in example of great writing at story grid we want you to learn the skills write a book and leave your legacy and studying Masterworks is just one of the ways that we do that we offer lots of free resources if you go to storygrid.com make sure you sign up for the newsletter there's lots of articles there lots of stuff for you there to help you become a better writer also make sure that you subscribe to this channel hit that Bell so that you get notified of all the videos that we come out with but as always thanks for being a writer thanks for being a part of our community here at story grid and we'll see you next time

Channel: Story Grid

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Id: D3vyCgRzyUc

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023