How to build a book scene?

Question

I'm having trouble writing scenes. I don't know the structure. How do I describe a scene? Setting and character? Can you recommend books that teach me how to write? Tell me step by step how to do it?

Answer 1

I don’t know the structure. How do I describe a scene? Setting and character?

In my personal bookshelf, there are books that, collectively, contain more than a dozen different writing styles that all have their own scene structures: each have their own tense (some past, some present), person (some 1st, some 2nd, some 3rd), way of describing the setting and the characters (some implicit and brief, some explicit and highly-descriptive), and I like all these books.

That is to say: you can write however you want. Often, the structure is just icing on the cake if it’s truly unique or suited to the story, but by no means is it a requirement that has to be a certain way for a story to be good.

The only constants across all these:

• The reader knows where they are and, generally, can visualize what’s around them, unless they’re not supposed to for mystery reasons. This can be as simple as “a mostly-empty parking lot, with only a few cars scattered here and there and a street lamp flickering by the exit onto the road”.

• The reader knows who/what they’re reading about and can, generally, visualize what they sort of look like and are doing, unless they’re not supposed to. This can be as simple as “the knight crept slowly through the gateway into the inner sanctum, lance in hand”. I didn’t even have to specify a name/backstory/anything for this character; that introduction is sufficient.

• The reader isn’t completely buried under walls of descriptive text. A lot of older romantic-era writing does this, and some people like that, but if you’re trying to write for a more modern-reading audience it’s likely to become boring quickly. I’ve found that often around ten sentences is the most that should be necessary to add all the sufficient details into the description of a setting; generally, this shouldn’t be a huge issue.

Answer 2

Scene is for Screenplays

The concept of a 'scene' is necessary for film and tv production.

Everything that appears on film must be described in the screenplay in terms of Location and Time-of-Day because a screenplay is not published as a work of creative fiction, it is a production document.

The expense of film production, and the need to entertain mass-audiences for the full runtime, forces every scene to count in the movie. Unnecessary scenes will be shed from the production, or cut in the editing room. There is an external pressure to justify every dollar spent at a location, paying actors, and hiring a full union crew.

(Traditional Theater honors scenes as-written in stage plays, but modern theater has been deconstructing rigid and literal concepts of a 'scene' for at least a century.)

a definition

A detailed lecture on what a screenplay 'scene' should be is Do Your Scenes Turn by Robert McKee.

By his definition, every scene must contain a 'story event' that impacts a character's life in a way that is perceptible to the audience. He describes this as a change in some value that is important to his character.

The scene begins with some element 'pre-charged' with importance as the character's personal stakes. The scene is designed so we witness the value change in those stakes – the implication could be positive, negative, or ambiguous but the change itself is the whole point.

McKee says if there is no value-change to the character's stakes then "nothing meaningful happens. The scene has activity—talking about this, doing that—but nothing changes in value. It is a nonevent."

He suggests that bad scenes are the result of forced exposition. Nothing of importance changes value for the characters, but some info or history needs to be said aloud for the benefit of the eavesdropping audience. McKee says a 'disciplined' writer will weave that information into the film elsewhere.

Books do not need 'scenes'

There is no external pressure that forces a novel to be economical with locations, actors, or crew. Readers are not limited to learning about the world through dialog. The story does not need to be compartmentalized into scenes.

Novels have their own conventions of structure: internal monologues, summarizing long stretches of time, prologs..., these structures do not translate well to screenplays.

Most novels I've read have a few power-scenes where the focus is on character dialog, and a specific sequence of actions are related as a specific location and time..., but in general novels are not scene after scene after scene like a screenplay.

However, modern writers often use storytelling conventions from popular media. It is not wrong to write a novel with the structure of a screenplay. It may appeal to mass audiences who are more familiar with TV/film storytelling than books, or it may be a thinly disguised 'novelization' of a story intended to be sold to Hollywood.