A scene needs:
- Interpersonal Conflict
Conflict can be between the hero and the villain, or the hero and an ally or friend. In a love story it can be a fight between lovers.
- Internal Conflict
A character may have self-doubt, guilty, worry, desire, fear, greed — any number of these things may be motivating the character and pushing them forward. Whether they are self-aware of it or not is up to you as the writer. Perhaps the character is aware that she is greedy, but cannot control her greed.
- External Conflict
This is the plot event or situation that ties the characters and conflict to a single location. A bomb is ticking in the hero’s apartment and the characters race to diffuse it before it takes out half the apartment building.
- Symbolism
Symbolism is one of the writer’s most powerful tools. It is often referred to as theme or sub-theme, but symbolism is the ultimate tool for expressing a story’s theme. Like plotting, it can often be tricky for a writer to pull off. Here are several ways to express symbolism:
- A Meaningful Location
A conflict between a teacher and a student reaches its climax in the principal’s office. A troubled romance may find its greatest conflict at the street curb where the protagonist catches their lover with someone else in the backseat of a car. Symbolically, the car may represent ‘mobility’ for the partner who is cheating and such symbolism should be expressed within the scene itself.
Meaningful locations can also be famous landmarks. Dan Brown likes to use these in his stories, like the Louvre or religious locations such as churches, plazas featuring famous statues, compounds within the Vatican, etc.
- Events
Events can serve as a symbolic background for a story or scene. A thriller set against the backdrop of the Kennedy assassination? Civil War romance? How do historical or even commonplace events set the tone for the story or a specific scene?
On a local level, perhaps something in a previous scene has set the tone for the current scene. If in scene one, the hero is brought into his boss’s office and fired from his job, and scene two is the hero going home to his family, obviously this isn’t an ordinary day coming home from work. The way the protagonist greets his family or interacts with them upon arriving home is going to be entirely different, and ultimately dependent on the events of the scene before.
- Actions of the Characters
Symbolism can also be expressed through actions of the character. I remember my high school psychology class teacher making us watch a TV movie called The Burning Bed, about a woman living with an abusive husband.
She is passive, and an enabler. When her husband beats her, she refuses to fight back or do anything about it. She is in denial, and refuses to react to her own mistreatment. In the climax of the story, she murders her husband by setting him on fire while he sleeps.
The way in which she murders her husband is symbolic, for the fire represents the repressed rage and hurt she felt from being abused. It had been pent up all that time, never once expressed, only to be released in a final act of fury and defiance. Fire becomes a meaningful symbolic expression of the character’s internal conflict.
Another way to look at it is the protagonist’s internal conflict (rage over abuse) has been transformed into external conflict — murder by fire, which also happens to be the finale of her interpersonal conflict with her husband.
- A Logical Reason to Exist
Every scene needs a logical reason to exist. Good plotting is the only way to solve this. Let’s use our Meaningful Location example where the protagonist catches their lover with another person in the backseat of a car parked by the curb. It is not enough for the backseat of a car to be a symbolic location for a cheating spouse. Both the cheating spouse and the protagonist need to have good reasons for being there.
How did the protagonist happen to be on the street outside the car where the tryst is happening?
Why did they choose to walk down that particular street?
Is the street outside the protagonist’s home? Work or office?
Why was the protagonist there? Were they on their way home from work? On the way to meet a friend at a bar? Why were they meeting a friend at a bar? A shoulder to cry on? To get the weight of relationship problems off her chest?
The Logical Reason To Exist is solved by answering: Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why.
I have tried to create a comprehensive list of ingredients every scene needs. To me these are the most difficult elements of writing, and the greatest creative challenges. Without them, writing is just a bunch of meaningless words on paper. When we struggle with writing, we are often not struggling with words; We are struggling with ideas. More importantly, we struggle with the relationship between different ideas as expressed in this checklist.
Who, what, when, where, how, and why are not always easy questions to answer.
So far as I can tell, these are the primary ingredients of a scene. Are there other ingredients? Is there something missing you think belongs on this checklist? Do you use any or all of these in your scenes?
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