Ensure The Purpose of A Scene Is Engaging Your Readers

A great scene makes your reader feel an emotion.

What is a Scene?

A scene is a section of your novel where a character or characters engage in action or dialogue. You can think of a scene as a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Usually, you’ll start a new scene when you change the point of view character, the setting, or the time. You may start a new scene if the scene your working on is too long to fit the structure of your manuscript.

Fictionary will take you through the process of evaluating each scene in your novel.

The Purpose of a Scene

The first question in my post Top 3 Story Editing Questions For Fiction Writers was “What is the purpose of a scene?”

I’d like to share my thoughts in more detail.

The purpose must relate to the overall story. If it’s not driving the story forward, then ask yourself what is the point of including the scene in your novel.

Here are some examples of the way the purpose can drive the story forward. You can choose one of these to define your purpose or come up with your own definitions.

• Build suspense
• Character development
• Character Introduction
• Climax
• Establish mood
• Establish setting
• Inciting Incident
• Intensify Conflict
• Move the story forward
• Plot point 1
• Plot point 2
• Resolution (after climax)

How Purpose Helps With Other Elements Of Fiction

I articulate the purpose of the scene early in my story editing, so I can address other elements of the scene and test if they are in line with the purpose.

Let’s say you fill out the list of objects in a scene. You can weigh the objects against the purpose and see if there is a way to use them to further the purpose. This goes for revelations, tension, conflict, weather, etc. Basically, every scene element can be tested against the scene purpose.

After you whittle down the purpose to a few words, one of three things will happen.

1. You’ve got the purpose nailed, and you understand why this scene is included in your novel.
2. You have a weak purpose, but there is still some value in the scene.
3. You have no idea what the purpose is.

So you’ve got the purpose nailed. Yay! Move on to the next scene.

If the point of the scene is weak, see if you can take what is important in a scene and move it to another scene, then delete the weak scene. You can also enhance the scene to give it a stronger purpose.

If you can’t articulate the purpose of a scene, think about removing the scene.