By Heather Sellers
I have found the rule of three to be incredibly helpful when I’m building scenes.
There are just three parts to a powerful scene—the set-up, the climax, and the payoff. Without careful attention to purpose at each turn, scenes can get meandering and flabby.
Set-up: Powerful scenes start with the problem already in motion. Avoid background, “throat-clearing,” and description. Begin with the two main characters already at odds on a clear issue. They each want something and they are each blocked from getting that thing. Set up that problem by showing it. Celeste Ng increases the tension in her novel Everything I Never Told you by using a full-blown scene to render the increasingly dangerous attraction between a teacher and his student:
“You shouldn’t be here,” Louisa says again. It’s not a question. With her other hand, she touches the small of his back, and he can feel her warmth through his shirt.
In the hands of an inexperienced writer, we might see the same scene begin like this:
He walked up the stairs and passed all the doors of all the apartments. He was wearing his brown shoes. He heard televisions from behind the doors. The light in the hallway was harsh. Which one was hers again? He checked his phone. Hmm. 3C. He continued down the hallway. When he found 3C, finally, he paused for a moment before knocking. He knocked three times. He didn’t hear anything.
Climax: The problem must get worse after the set-up, as shown through action. That sense of forward motion is what makes a great scene memorable and unputdownable. Things could start off very terrible, but if they stay very terrible, at the same level of intensity, reader interest will flag. Think in terms of bad to worse to catastrophic. Celeste Ng again:
She unlocks the door…and leads him straight to the bedroom.
Payoff: The scene has to have a purpose, a point, a turn. There has to be an outcome—a deliverable. Think punchline—but it’s often not funny. And that deliverable must not be a tidy solution to the problem at hand. They win this round, but now have an even larger problem on their hands. Or, they’ve lost this round. Either way, a powerful scene’s end shows things getting worse. This can mean “more complicated” or “more difficult to solve” or just plain “more awful.” At scene’s end, the character must have a clear new problem which requires a new course of action.
In Everything I Never Told You, James, a husband, father, and professor, grieves the death of his daughter. To assuage his pain, he accepts a lunch invitation from his student—at her apartment. They go to bed. The outcome is that it works. He sleeps, for the first time since his daughter drowned. The payoff? His wife does not sleep. Grief-stricken, she’s now also heart-broken that her husband has, for the first time, not come home:
Now, still slicked to Louisa with sweat, he sleeps soundly for the first time in days, a dreamless sleep: his mind, for the moment, goes blissfully blank.
At home, in their bedroom, Marilyn [his wife] too wills her mind to go blank, but nothing happens. He will have to face her. Things are so much worse than they were at the beginning of the scene.
Consider dividing your scene into these three sections or “beats.” In the first beat, the gauntlet is thrown down. Then, one of the characters raises the stakes with words or action. The bottom falls out. Things can’t get worse. What is the new problem? That’s the payoff. One, two, three.
The Sketch Approach
Scenes are visual. They take place on a stage set of your making. I storyboard scenes before I go to the page, which prevents me from doing all that writing, where it feels productive to craft all this action and dialogue, but where really, nothing is happening story-wise.
I create a rough sketch for the setting to see clearly where my scene is. I look for drama in the setting itself, details that will increase the tension: irritating sounds in the background, someone important anxiously waiting across town, terribly distracting wallpaper, a grotesque cat (and I ignore the rest). My sketch is quick. The purpose is to hone my ability to see where the heat is. Then, I sketch the characters in. Where are they in relationship to each other?
Lastly, I plot out the three phases of the scene, placing the action on the sketch. Where and what is the set-up for this scene, dramatically? What is the worst possible thing that can happen next? Where are the characters in the end—how has their position changed?
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Readers want great stories. Not everything can go in scene—we also need the tools of narration, summary, and summary scenes. With fantastic narration, you might not need any scenes at all. Or if you are gifted with the ability to render the most riveting aspects of your story in pitch-perfect, ultra-well-observed summary, you may not need real-time scenes. Save scenes for crucial moments of change, those moments where things shift, in a significant, meaningful way, for your characters.
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Ready to focus deeply on scenes? Join Heather Sellers for a CRAFT TALKS webinar TOMORROW, July 3 at 2PM Eastern. Recipes for Scenes: Crafting Powerful, Memorable Moments that Move Your Story ($25). Find out more/register now.
Author of eleven books, Heather Sellers directs the MFA program at the University of South Florida, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in micro memoir and flash fiction. Her most recent book is How to Make Poems: Form and Technique.
