Plotting Well: Scene Questions

Hi, welcome back to Write Better Right Now. I’ve been talking about goal, motivation, and conflict. That’s how you make sure your stories are exciting and have plenty of drama to keep readers turning the page.

• Characters have clear goals.

• The goals are important to them. That's your motivation.

• And it is difficult. That provides the conflict.

This is important for the overall novel, but it is also important for individual scenes. A scene is basically when the actors come onto the stage, they start talking and moving and doing things. The scene ends when the actors leave, or in a story, when the time jumps to a new different time or a different location. Then you start a new scene.

Every scene is basically like a short story that becomes part of the overall longer story in a novel. That means each scene needs a character with a goal motivation and conflict. You need to show that goal clearly.

One of the challenges I see when I'm critiquing manuscripts is that the goals are not shown very well in the beginning of each scene. Sometimes it may be that the author has sort of lost track of that overall goal. Or the character seems to have changed their goal, and it's not shown on the page why that is. Sometimes it's just that the author assumes it will be clear to the reader, but it's not.

You almost can't be too clear in terms of establishing the character's goal at the beginning of a scene. If you ended the last chapter with a character saying or thinking, “This is what I'm going to do next,” you may not have to repeat that at the beginning of the new chapter. But make sure that in one of those places, the end of the last scene or the beginning of this scene, you have clearly shown what the character is trying to accomplish immediately.

For example, in a mystery novel, their overall goal is to solve the mystery. You want to establish in this scene that they're going to talk to a certain person and try to get specific information. Don't just have several pages where they're traveling to get to that person, they're having initial conversation, and you're halfway through the chapter before the reader knows what exactly the

character is trying to do. Go ahead and have your character think about what their goal is early in the scene.

Then, of course, make sure that your character is working toward that goal, not just passively waiting to see if something will happen.

Scene Questions

At the end of the scene, we need to know whether or not the character succeeded. There are several different ways you can answer that question.

Let's say that we are writing a scene where the main character needs to ask her boss for a raise, because she needs to pay for her husband's experimental medical treatments. So we know at the beginning she's going in to talk to her boss to ask for a raise.

One possible answer to the question of did she succeed is Yes, her boss said that she could have a raise. You don't want too many yes answers because it makes things seem easy for the character and it lowers the tension. So if you have a yes answer, you want the reader to know that things are not easy now. It's not over. The question becomes, what's next? I've dealt with this one particular problem, but there are more ahead.