Sunday Writing Tip: Identify What Changes in Every Scene

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Each week, I’ll offer a tip you can take and apply to your WIP to help improve it. They’ll be easy to do and shouldn’t take long, so they’ll be tips you can do without taking up your Sunday. Though I do reserve the right to offer a good tip now and then that will take longer—but only because it would apply to the entire manuscript.

This week, make sure something changes in every scene.

A red flag for a slow or lackluster story is that the plot never advances. Scenes unfold, but nothing about the events in that scene have any affect on the protagonist or the problem at hand.

Something should change in the scene to show why that scene is there. The change might be the direction of the story, an attitude of a character, a belief, the direction of the plot, the emotional state of the protagonist, the stakes, the goal, the motivation for that goal, an understanding about the world or setting, and so on.

Whatever it is, something is different by the end of the scene than when the scene started. If nothing does, there's a good chance all that scene does is explain, dump, or repeat information.

For more on moving the plot and scenes in your novel, try these articles:

• What Changes in Your Scenes?
• The Question You Need to Ask for Every Scene
• Goals-Motivations-Conflicts: The Engine That Keeps a Story Running
• 6 Tips on Making Similar Scenes Feel Different
• Thoughts On Writing a Scene
• Follow the Leader: Moving From Scene to Scene
• Painting a Scene vs Dramatizing a Scene
• Hey, Still With Me? Poking Dead Scenes With A Stick, Part One
• It's Alive! Poking Dead Scenes With A Stick, Part Two