In terms of what’s going on in a scene you can break it down into three main areas:
1. What happened ‘Before’.
2. What’s happening ‘Now’.
3. What’s going to happen ‘Later’.
The most important for a reader is no.2, the ‘Now’. That's where readers experience the story—what's in front of them.
And it's important to make sure each scene is engaging the reader through what's happening on the page, what characters are doing, as well as the implications for events in the past and future.
‘Before’ and ‘Later’ are certainly going to play a major role in how you construct and develop a scene, with things like tension and anticipation.
What happened ‘Before’ provides motivation for why we’re here and what the characters decide to do. Sometimes, ‘Before’ is a long time ago, beyond the scope of the story, and gets filled in by backstory. Other times, ‘Before’ is kept a mystery and revealed later in the story.
Both those techniques (backstory and revelation) are standard methods for writing fiction, but both have their drawbacks. It's very easy to get so wrapped up in explaining stuff that the story ends up stalling.
In most stories what a character is doing ‘Now’ has been set up in the previous scene. In order to make the reader want to find out what happens in this chapter, the reasons are explained in the one before. You can raise the stakes, complicate the issue, establish the problem. In doing so the reader comes to the current chapter full of anticipation.
However, if things are at a high enough anxiety level, you can sometimes forget to make the current scene interesting in its own right.
If, for example, Susan goes over to Mike’s place for coffee, but the real reason she’s going is because she suspects he’s the guy that ten years ago kidnapped and murdered her sister, and she wants to find proof, then you can see that the date is not what it seems. She’s going to have to play-act the flirty girl all the while looking for evidence and also, if it turns out she’s right, get out alive.
So, high stakes, danger, tension.
But let’s say she goes over there, he goes in the kitchen to make the coffee and she quickly goes through his drawers and cupboards and finds nothing.
Even though the entry into the scene was ramped up and full of all the elements you would want in this kind of scenario, the actual scene that develops is a let down.
And this is also true of scenes where the set-up isn’t quite so extreme. You don’t have to have murder, robbery or an asteroid about hit the Earth to get hearts racing. Whatever the reason from ‘Before’ that’s got your character to ‘Now’, those motivations need to be built on and extended.
If your character decides to pursue their course in a causal ‘let’s see what happens’ manner, or if things conveniently work out in their favour, it will read as lacklustre no matter how high the stakes.
In terms of how ‘Later’ affects writing, this can also lead to a flat, uninteresting ‘Now’ scene.
In some cases, things happen in the current scene that don’t seem particularly important, but they pay-off big later on in the story. But just because there’s a big twist or stunning reveal later, doesn’t mean you can afford to have a narratively unengaging scene now.
Often the problem is that because the writer knows how crucial the scene where Jane washes her hands with Dove soap is going to be in the final chapter (where the poison in the soap is revealed), they consider it full of importance. But the reader isn't aware of any of that. The reader just gets a page and a half of soapy hands.
Even though setting things up to be paid-off later is another perfectly acceptable and useful technique, a scene that’s just that—all set-up—isn’t going to be very interesting to read.
In cases where too much emphasis is put on what’s gone one before and after, it’s the middle scene that ends up losing out. The ‘Now’ scene is necessary and needs to be there, but it also needs to have engaging action of its own.
One thing to look out for is a character's emotional state at the beginning and end of each scene. Are they the same at their outro as they were at their intro? If they are, can you change it so they experience something that actually affects them? She was up but now she’s down; she was sure, but now not so much; she was scared, now she’s angry.
If a character's emotions change as we're reading about them, that means something happened. Doesn't matter how big or small it was, that's all you need to make a scene interesting in the 'Now'.
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