Your story, be it a novel, screenplay, memoir, or short story, is made up of scenes. And these scenes need to work hard.

In part I of this post, I defined a scene and explained what it means to “work hard.” In the thrilling conclusion, I’m going to dig deeper, discussing some practical tools I use to make my scenes work harder.

Remember, the key to working hard is to dig out more than what’s visible on the surface. So let’s start with assessing whether or not a scene does this.

The rule of three

This is a personal rule I try to live by: a scene can’t possibly be working hard for me if it’s not advancing multiple aspects of my story. In fact, I (somewhat arbitrarily) believe it should advance no less than three of these aspects.

The rule of three

Does this scene advance at least three aspects of my story?

The idea behind this rule is simple: a scene that simply moves the plot forward, or simply deepens my understanding of a character, isn’t working all that hard. So how can I press it to do more? As I noted in the prior post, this doesn’t necessarily mean adding elements. It might be about finding that single element which exposes many facets.

What gets advanced can be any of the following:

• Plot
• Character
• World
• Theme
• Backstory
• Conflict

The point is that if I can’t name three elements advanced, the scene isn’t working hard enough. I need to try again.

In my prior post, look at the song “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. Here it is again:

The song doesn’t advance the plot at all, but few would argue that it’s not a great scene, particularly as played by Anne Hathaway. That’s because it works exceptionally hard: we’re understanding Fantine’s character, along with the world that made her. The song explains her backstory, a story that perfectly encapsulates the story’s core theme. And all of this is wrapped in conflict (and not a single conflict, but in fact multiple conflicts, for she has struggled against the world, against an unfaithful lover, even against herself).

But sometimes stuff just has to “happen” right?

This comes up all the time. “I just need this scene to make the story work,” I cry out to myself. Never mind the theme, the characters, the world-building…if my story is to advance, I need X to happen. Lacking that plot advancement, the story stalls.

When this comes up, the question I ask myself is…why? Why do you need this to happen? McKee’s adage “if your story’s about what it’s about, you’re in trouble” plays big-time here. Your story isn’t about a spaceship battle or heisting the diamond, or meeting the love interest with the rippling muscles. That’s just plot. The story is the theme, something deeper that you want to say, something lurking beneath the surface.

If my story needs a scene to make the plot work, and that something doesn’t build on my theme, there’s something wrong either with the theme, with the plot, or with my thinking on those things.

Try again. Find the thing that propels the plot and builds on the theme.

Observe…observe…observe again

Once we’ve assessed, how can we make our scene work harder?

In my opinion, no single tool in my works-hard arsenal is more powerful than observation. The collective observations I make when writing characters and settings fundamentally define everything else in the story.

Consider the girl-meets-girl example from my previous post.

Alice sees Wendy at a party, but can’t get up the nerve to introduce herself. She watches as Wendy takes a pill.

It’s pure observation: the party, the social awkwardness, the pill-taking. Every character and scene carries a mountain of potential detail. Does one character have a tendency to brush her hair out of her eyes? Another to take a drink between sentences? Yet another to stammer? Is the music loud or mellow? Are we in a frat house? At a wedding? A bar? More importantly…why are these the details? There’s value in differentiating characters, certainly, and in picking an interesting location. But for these things to make a scene work harder, the details should convey meaning.

Perhaps the girl brushes hair out of her eyes because she’s hiding herself (character). And why does she want to hide herself (backstory)? Maybe she’s searching for something (theme). Or she just needs a haircut (plot advancement).

When you’re writing, space is at a premium. Most writers have a limited word or page count, and all writers have to maintain their audience’s attention. So make the details count. Make them work hard to reveal your characters, your theme, your world, and your story. Details added entirely at random are most often just clutter.

Beware of stereotype

A word of caution here. Once upon a time, it was common to use physical characteristics to explicitly suggest character flaws. One observed Richard III’s internal evil through his disfigurement. John Falstaff might be merry and good fun, but his extreme weight informed you that his life was purely sinful. Today, using skin color, gender, height, weight, illness, ugliness (and beauty), and the like is apt to get you into hot water. Not only is this direct interiority/exteriority largely considered inappropriate by most, it’s heavily trodden ground and therefore almost certainly cliché. All those old tropes had their time, but they’ve become stereotypes at best, overused to the point where they feel too on-the-nose to be useful in most cases.

Make things hard

One great way to make a scene work harder is to introduce complications. Look at my vodka/freezer snippet from the previous post:

Bob clawed through the freezer, rooted through boxes of ancient ice cream, tupperwares with contents he could only guess at. A bead of sweat appeared on his temple despite the cold. Goddamn it, where the hell’s the vodka? If Linda’s taken it again…

There’s little satisfaction in a story where the protagonist just gets what they want. Make them work for it. Bob must dig for the vodka. Linda’s hidden it. He’s desperate. Instead of giving Bob what he wants, we make it hard, amping up the pressure.

In Story, Robert McKee calls this The Law of Conflict: nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

Luke can’t just ring Obi-Wan’s doorbell. He has to confront obstacles: a runaway droid and vicious Sand People. Even Obi-Wan himself presents initially as a possible threat: a wailing monster. Each of these complications — and Luke’s reaction to them — helps to build Luke’s character and the nature of the world around him.

In the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally, what could have been simple lunchtime banter about Harry’s love life gets complicated hilariously by Sally suddenly coming out of her prim shell.

What makes this hard isn’t that Sally disapproves of Harry’s serial relationships. That aspect of their friendship was already established. But through her actions Sally escalates their private conversation into a very, very public conflict, albeit a hilarious one. This advances her character: such a public display would have been unthinkable to who she was at the start of the story. We’re seeing her grow.

But her actions also makes Harry uncomfortable. The main theme of the story is “Can men and women just be friends?” Sally complicates not just the scene but the premise and their relationship with her display. And there’s just a hint in that final shot that Harry’s thinking about Sally has changed, advancing the plot.

Change and charge values

Recall from part I that a key aspect of a scene’s definition is that some value shift occurs. The balance of power changes. Someone finds or loses something. A secret gets revealed. Something destabilizes a previously stable state.

One great way to make a scene work hard is to increase, resolve, or alter a previous value state. Almost by definition, if any important value within the story alters, that propels the plot forward. But it can also affect much more.

When the Americans win at Yorktown in Hamilton, this resolves the dispute which drives the first half of the story. So obviously, we’ve advanced the plot, resolved a key conflict, and even created a new state for the world. At the same time, giving Alexander his command, placing him in the heat of battle, radically ups the personal stakes, pointing to his character. From the musical’s first song, we’ve known that Alexander’s time is limited, that he gets shot, and that core theme (mirrored in the refrain “I am not throwing away my shot!”) plays out as well.

Packing more weight and bigger value shifts can really help scenes to work harder.

Failing to create value shifts

Notice that failing to create value shifts can have precisely the opposite effect.

In fact, this was a familiar failing of episodic television throughout much of its history. TV executives believed that audiences wanted something comfortable: the same characters and situations week after week. More than this, they worried that audiences would get lost and confused. (Read: might not return and might therefore hemorrhage advertising revenue.) And in the days when there were no streaming services, DVRs or VCRs, when missing a show at the moment it aired actually meant missing the show, perhaps they had a point. Maintaining the status quo meant that anyone could always return and hook back into the story, regardless of what they had missed.

But TV creators eventually learned that an assured status quo was a recipe for boredom: if no one can ever be harmed or killed, if everything ends up exactly as it was the week before, few opportunities exist for real drama or emotion. This meant that TV often produced tepid products, sentencing itself to the permanent role of inferior junior sibling to the movies.

Only with the development of serialized plots in shows like Hill Street Blues and Babylon 5 did television begin to address this problem. Serialization allowed plots to carry over week-to-week, thereby permitting status changes to occur with more highly charged drama.

The result is that today, notwithstanding business difficulties in both the movie and TV industries, the two mediums exist on more nearly equal planes of prestige.

Using contrast

I’ve written an entire blog post on this topic, so I’ll just touch it lightly here.

Scenes tend to work harder when they employ contrast. Move from darkness to light. From quiet to loud to quiet again. Humor after tension. This works for the sub-beats within a scene. It also works between scenes. If you’ve just finished an explosive confrontation, sit with it a moment; allow your characters to reflect on what they’ve lost or gained.

Doing so doesn’t inherently make a scene work harder. Plenty of empty-headed action movies do this simply because the maker knows a big explosion emerging from calm will grab an audience’s attention. But there’s something about the thought process of shifting gears that I believe helps a writer to analyze what’s happening and build on it.

Thinking, talking, joking about a conflict which just ended will tend to expose character and theme. Going from a static sequence to a kinetic sequence usually advances plot, world, and conflict.

Dealing with exposition

Coming back to stuff that “just has to happen…”

Exposition can be one of the hardest aspects of any story. We need the reader to know stuff to build the world, draw the characters, and advance the story, but simply telling them comes with a slew of downsides.

First, it gets boring. No one wants to hear a mountain of explanation. Consider this scene from Back to the Future, Part II. I’ll forgive you if you don’t watch the whole clip. All props to the marvelous Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, but it’s mind-numbing to listen to Doc Brown spell out how altered timelines work and Marty to declare “it’s my fault!” The mere fact that the story needs all this exposition (and a frikkin’ drawing, to boot!) is a huge red flag.

Second, it taxes the audience. Every bit of added exposition becomes something else the audience needs to remember. Big blocks of it — the dreaded “exposition dump” — are nearly impossible to absorb. We often see such scenes in police and court procedurals, as well as spy movies: across pages of text, some functionary lets us know who was where, when, what the challenge is, and what the stakes are.

Finally, direct exposition tends to make for flat, obvious storytelling.

“When I was a kid, my father tried to surprise us by coming down the chimney as Santa Claus. He got stuck and died horribly. And that’s why I hate Christmas.”

In general, direct exposition is best avoided. Telling the reader that a thing is true, or presenting them with important facts, is almost always weaker than making the audience work to receive that information. Show, don’t tell.

Exposition to demonstrate character

That said, we do need to deliver information to our characters (and to our audience). Sometimes an exposition dump is unavoidable. There are ways to make this work.

Consider the briefing scene from The Hunt for Red October.

This scene is eight minutes, meaning that the filmmakers devoted almost 6% of the movie’s runtime to this giant exposition dump. And boy do they drop a metric ton of info: background — i.e., backstory — on Captain Ramius (Sean Connery), details of the threat he poses (building the world and conflict), what the consequences of failure might mean, hints about his motives, on and on.

But notice that the scene isn’t lazy. This isn’t just an exposition dump. Here, Jack (Alec Baldwin) encounters his first test as a hero. By watching him deliver all this information, we understand his character better: super-smart, informed. Even more, we see his character: willing to put himself on the line, to stand up to a bully. His thinking is clear under pressure. This will be the guy with the right answers.

Pope in the pool

Another fun way to deal with exposition comes from Save the Cat!. Blake Snyder calls this “the pope in the pool.” This approach adds something entertaining — like the image of the head of the Catholic church floating in a swimming pool — as a distraction so that the audience doesn’t even realize that they’re receiving exposition. It can be fun, as in the following scene from Confess, Fletch.

I like this scene, but if I’m being honest, I feel like the hijinks distracts from the actual content. It kind of works in a murder mystery because we’re supposed to get all the clues yet still be surprised at the end when the detective solves it. But if I actually need the audience to absorb content, I worry that the distraction actually… y’know… distracts.

Has exposition occurred if the audience misses it entirely? Is the Pope catholic if he’s in a swimsuit?

I’ll leave you to decide that one.

Diggin’ it?

These are some of the techniques I use to dig into my scenes and make them work harder for me.

What do you think? Do you have special tools you use to make your scenes work harder? Tell me about them in the comments.

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