5 Essential Questions to Fix Boring Scenes

What happens in your scenes? Do they even matter to your book? Do they move the story forward and keep your readers engaged? Or are they . . . boring?

In order for a scene to earn its place in your story, something needs to happen. It needs a story event, a single event that contributes to the larger plot.

The thing is, it’s really easy to write scenes—thousands of words!—where nothing ever happens.

A group of friends go to a restaurant and have a pleasant conversation. A woman sits in her favorite chair, sipping tea and thinking.

These are normal things we do in everyday life. (And when we do them, we really enjoy them! They’re quite lovely, aren’t they?)

But in stories, “scenes” like these will bore your readers to tears . . . unless something interesting happens. Conflict arises. Something changes.

So I’ll ask you again: What happens in your scenes?

Not sure? Not to worry. In this episode, I’m sharing five essential questions to help you figure out what happens in a scene—and why it matters to your story.

These questions are deceptively simple. They won’t take long to answer. But they’ll give you so much invaluable insight into how and why your story is working—or where it’s not working, and how you can fix it.

Plus, I’ll show you how to answer them using an example scene: the first scene of UNDER THE WHISPERING DOOR by T. J. Klune. Read the first scene for free here. (And if you love it, read the whole book—it's a good one!)

Ready to answer all these questions for your scenes and make every page of your book un-put-down-able? Download the Scene Analysis Worksheet at alicesudlow.com/sceneworksheet.

And if you'd like expert feedback on your scenes, plus personalized strategies for how to make them even better, I'd love to help. Send me a note at alice@alicesudlow.com and tell me about your book!

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Ep. 8: What Is a Scene? The Ultimate Guide to Write and Edit Amazing Scenes
• The opening scene of UNDER THE WHISPERING DOOR by T. J. Klune
• The Scene Analysis Worksheet: alicesudlow.com/sceneworksheet

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And if you're enjoying the podcast, would you mind leaving a rating and review? That helps more listeners find the podcast. And it helps me know what's helpful to you so I can create more episodes you'll love!

Transcript

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Alice Sudlow 0:00

This might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but I still want you to ask this question of your scenes because it is possible for a scene to not really have anything literally happening on the page. If the scene is a character thinks. That's just not very interesting. We need them to think while washing dishes or catching a flight or talking with a coworker or something. Even if the main point of the scene is that a character changes their mind about something or realizes something important, we need literal action on the page to create an interesting context for those thoughts. Welcome to your next draft. Right now we're in a series on scenes. What scenes are, how they work, how to edit them, and make sure that your readers love each and everyone in your book. And so today I'm going to share with you. Five questions that will help you figure out what's really going on in your scenes and determine whether your scenes are working or not. These questions are deceptively simple, but if you really put them to use, they can be transformative. They can help you figure out why a scene is important in your book, what it's really contributing to the overall plot, why it's working. or they can show you why a scene just doesn't fit in your book, no matter how much you love it. This is a great companion episode to last week's episode. What is a scene, the Ultimate Guide to Write and Edit Amazing Scenes? So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, you'll definitely want to check it out after this one. And in fact, if you got the free download from that episode, the scene analysis worksheet, then you've already gotten a sneak peek at the questions that I'm going to share today. But I want to help you figure out how to answer them Well, because like I said, they're deceptively simple. You could fill them out super fast, but if you sit with them for a while, if you really think about a scene carefully and you ponder each question, you can get so much great insight into a story. So that's what I'm going to do in this episode. I'll really dig into each question and show you how to get the most editing insight out of it, and I'm going to show you how each of these questions works with an example. We'll revisit the same scene that we analyzed in episode eight. What is a scene? We'll be working with the opening scene of Under The Whispering Door by TJ Klune. You can read that scene for free by going to Amazon and finding the book and clicking look inside. And I have a link straight there in the show notes, so it's really easy to find. I highly recommend reading through that scene because it's going to be really helpful to you to see how this analysis works if you have the context of that scene. But if you're driving or you're otherwise away from your phone, don't worry. I'm going to start us off with a synopsis, so I've got you covered. Alright, ready to explore these five really powerful questions. Let's dive in. First up, the synopsis of our scene. This is chapter one of Under The Whispering Door, and it begins with this opening line. Patricia was crying. Wallace Price hated it when people cried. Gradually we learned that Patricia and Wallace are in Wallace's office. He's a partner at a law firm, and Patricia has been a paralegal at the firm for 10 years. She's upset because a lot of terrible things have been happening in her life lately. Her husband was laid off, her son is getting married, and she's on the hook to fund half the wedding. Her daughter is attending business school on a scholarship from the law firm, and she appreciates Wallace calling her in because he's seen her struggling and he really cares. But in reality, he's called her there to fire her because she made one mistake recently. Which he then does, despite everything that she's laid out about how badly she needs and how much she loves this job, and she takes it very poorly. She's horrified, she's shocked. She doesn't believe it. She gets angry. She kicks, she screams. Wallace calls security and has her physically removed from the building and then he goes back to his office. Relieved to have dealt with the problem and resolving to hire better in the future. So that's a quick summary of this scene. Now let's examine our five questions and use them to figure out what's really going on here. Question one. What's literally happening on the page? This is a really important starting point. Something has to be literally happening on the page. The characters must be doing something. It could be anything. Going to a restaurant and getting dinner, taking a class, riding the train, putting a baby to bed. This might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but I still want you to ask this question of your scenes because it is possible for a scene to not really have anything literally happening on the page. If the scene is a character thinks. That's just not very interesting. We need them to think while washing dishes or catching a flight or talking with a coworker or something. Even if the main point of the scene is that a character changes their mind about something or realizes something important, we need literal action on the page to create an interesting context for those thoughts. So that's a pitfall you might see in this. Nothing really happens in the literal action on the page, but most of the time this question will probably be pretty easy to answer In our scene from under the whispering door, Wallace and Patricia are having a meeting in Wallace's office. That's the literal action on the page, A work meeting. So that's question one. Now for the second question, what tactic are the characters using to get what they want? Alright, so this question kind of has two. There's the thing that the character wants and the tactic, the strategy that they're using to get it. In every scene. Your protagonist needs a goal. The thing that they're trying to get or accomplish. This is what drives story characters pursuing goals. So they have their book long goal, but within each scene they have a small specific goal that they're trying to accomplish, something that they want from the characters or the world around them in the next five minutes or 20 minutes or two hours. And in each scene, they're going to use some kind of tactic to get it, some kind of approach or strategy. So with this question, we're going beyond the literal action on the page, the meeting between Wallace and Patricia. We're thinking about these characters, psyches, the things that are driving and motivating them, the unspoken meaning behind their actions. We're thinking about the angle they're working, the thing they're trying to accomplish. Now Wallace is the protagonist of this story, so his tactic is what really matters to this question. But just to give you more context, I'll answer this question for both Wallace and Patricia. What tactic is Patricia using to get what she wants? Patricia is laying out all her personal problems in intimate detail with effusive gratitude for the support and empathy that she believes that Wallace is showing her. And what tactic is Wallace using to get what he wants? Wallace is trying to cut off Patricia's monologue so he can fire her. We see several lines like, ah, an opening, speaking of hiring, or, I don't know if this is appropriate, especially when you. Wallace tries over and over to break in, but Patricia is almost impossible to interrupt. So there you have it, what the characters want and what they're doing to try to get it. Now for question three, what values change for one or more characters? I've said it before and I'll say it again. Stories are all about change, which means that scenes are also about change. So to answer this question, you're going to look for all the things that change in the scene from the beginning of the scene to the end. In other words, you're going to look for the things that are different at the end than they are at the beginning. If you listened to the last episode, you heard me talk a lot about value shifts. That's the stuff of this question. What value changes in the scene? Remember, in this context, value is a little bit like a state of being. Here are some examples of values that can change good or evil, rich or poor, healthy or sick, alive or dead, right or wrong, safe or unsafe. These changes can be surface level. Someone was inside and now they're outside. Someone lost their jacket and then they found their jacket. They were hungry, and now they're full. They were racing to the airport and now they're on the plane. Or these changes can be internal. Someone was happy and now they're sad. Someone was confident and now they're unsure. Someone wanted to go to the zoo and now they don't want to go to the zoo. It's likely that several changes are happening both on the surface, the external action, and inside of your characters at the same time. For most scenes that work, you could probably list many different changes that happen within the scene. The one caveat I want to make here, the one limiting factor that I'll place on the changes that you identify is that the goal is to look for changes that span the whole scene. That means the scene starts one way and it ends a different way. You're not looking for a change that happens briefly in the middle of the scene. For instance, in our scene with Wallace and Patricia, Maybe a third of the way through his assistant peeks into his office and lets him know that he has another call on the line. This doesn't actually happen in the scene if you're reading along and getting confused, but as an example, let's pretend it does. Sure. In that case, in the span of a page, the assistant is in the room and then she's gone. Again. Technically that's a change, but it's not a change that spans the whole scene. If you look at the scene from the beginning to the end, you see that at the beginning, the assistant is not in the room and at the end she's not in the room. It's not a full scene change. It's just a little blip in a moment. So when you're answering this question, think about the scene as a whole. Think about the first several pages of the scene and how they're different from the last few paragraphs of the scene. And write down every change you can think of. We'll sort through them in the next question. Here are some changes that I see in this scene between Wallace and Patricia. If you listened to episode eight of the podcast where I talked about the value shift in this scene, this is going to sound very familiar. First off, there's together to alone when the scene opens. Wallace and Patricia are sitting in his office together. By the end Wallace is alone. Employed to fired at the beginning of the scene. Patricia is an employee at Wallace's Law Firm. By the end, she's out of a job loved to hated at the beginning, Patricia is overwhelmed with gratitude for Wallace's apparent kindness and care to her. By the end, she's cursing his cruelty. And presumed heartless to proven heartless. Patricia tells Wallace in the early part of the scene that she always knew he was a good and kind person, even though everyone else in the law firm thinks he's a ruthless jerk. Which is to say everyone, but Patricia presumes, he's heartless. When he fires her, Patricia realizes that everyone was right about him. All along, he is proven heartless. Notice that the first two changes are about the literal action in the scene together to alone and employed to fired. And the second two changes are about the internal changes happening within the characters. Loved to hated and presumed heartless to proven heartless. There are usually multiple things happening in stories at once and on several levels. I find that the fun lies in sifting through what's happening on the surface to figure out what's really going on. I've had so many epiphanies at this stage where this question has helped me realize what a scene is actually about. Sure, on the surface it might look like one thing, but in reality it's about something else. In fact, I had an epiphany like that as I dug into this scene, but I'm not going to spoil it until the next question. Question four, what is the most important change in this scene? Yes, a lot of things can change in a scene, but only one of those is the most important change. Only one of those is directly and critically related to your one central plot. Which means your task in this question is to review the changes that you listed and choose the one change that is most important to the larger plot of the whole book. Of course that's predicated on an assumption that you know, the larger plot of the whole book. In this case I do. This is a story about Wallace who dies immediately after the scene realizing that he really just wasn't a great person in his life and he'd like to be better in his death. So with that knowledge, I'll go back to the changes we listed out together to alone employed to fired, loved to hated, presumed heartless to proven heartless. And of those, I'm going to pick the one that most contributes to that overall plot. This is where those epiphanies get fun, because on the surface it looks like this scene is about Wallace firing Patricia. But if you dig deeper, this scene is really about showing us how terrible Wallace is. We've got to introduce a really horrible character so he can go on a redemption arc throughout this book, which means the actual most important change here, the one that's most relevant to the longer story, is that Wallace goes from presumed heartless to proven heartless. We discover that. Yep. He is just as trash of a human as everyone except Patricia expected. And now that we know the most important change, we're ready for the fifth and final question. What is the story event? This is where you put it all together. To answer this question, you're going to write one single sentence that combines the literal action. The character's tactics and the most important change. Essentially, you're going to describe the whole scene in one sentence based on all your answers to the previous questions. And yes, this will be just one sentence. It won't be a 50 word run on sentence. It'll be a single pithy sentence that sums up the whole scene. And yes, this is a challenge, and yes, it takes practice. Here's the sentence that I wrote for this scene. When Wallace calls Patricia to his office, she thinks he means to comfort her, but he fires her instead proving he's as heartless as people say. There you go, literal action. Wallace and Patricia called into his office tactics. Patricia thinks he's going to comfort her, but he actually fires. And change. He proves he's as heartless as everyone says. I could have skipped that whole synopsis that I gave you at the beginning of this episode and read you just that one sentence and you would know everything you needed to know about the scene. That's it right there. The whole event that this scene contributes to the larger story. So those are the five questions to help you figure out what's really going on in a scene. Here they are again. What's literally happening on the page. What tactic are the characters using to get what they want? What values change for one or more characters? What is the most important change in the scene? And finally, to put it all together, what's the story event? Those five questions will help you identify what the most important thing happening in a scene is, or they'll illuminate when nothing important is happening. And you have space to revise can't find a value shift a change in the scene from beginning to end. Can't figure out what your character's goal is or what tactic they're using to get it. Those are indicators that there's space to edit. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is really the stuff of a future episode where I'm going to take everything I've talked about in this episode and episode eight, and show you how I use all these questions to edit scenes and give writers feedback on their scenes. So get excited for that. Be sure to follow the podcast to catch that episode, cause it's gonna be a really, really good one. And in fact, I'm also considering editing some scenes, real scenes from writers who are currently in the editing process live on the podcast. So if that's something you'd be interested in, if you'd like to hear my feedback on your scene live on the podcast, then let me know. I think that could be a lot of fun. For now though, I'm going to wrap up this episode with a free download, the scene analysis worksheet. It includes all five questions we walked through in this episode, plus the scene element questions that I covered in the last episode. If you got it in the last episode, this will be the same thing. You don't have to pick it up twice, but if you haven't picked it up yet, you'll definitely want to grab it now so you can do the same analysis on your own scenes. You can get that download at alicesudlow.com slash scene worksheet, and I also want to give you an assignment to do right. I want you to open up your manuscript and I want you to look at the first scene, and I want you to answer all five questions for that scene. It's okay if that's a little difficult to do at first. It's perfectly fine to have clear answers for some and not really know what to write for others. This kind of analysis is a skill that comes with practice and you're going to get better at it over time, but it's going to be such a helpful tool for you in your self editing process. It will help you understand why each and every scene in your book has earned its place and is worth reading, and it will show you where there are still some things to refine, so go to alicesudlow.com/scene worksheet, download that worksheet and fill it out for your first scene. I can't wait for you to discover how really incredibly helpful this tool can be. for your editing.