Writing Scenes

Those who have been following my blog would probably know that I firmly belong to the planner school in terms of a writer. This is to say that I outline each scene rather than write them on-the-go. But how does my process look like after that, you might wonder. This is what this post is all about. 

First up, I have to say that my process is not standard across all scenes. I would dearly like to find a template that I can apply to every scene just because I find comfort in routines. But sadly in practice I can never do that. The easiest scenes are pretty much as I’ve outlined. I can easily convert my traditional outlines into a scene with minimal effort. The task itself is like snapping my fingers, just like that. Through personal experience, I feel like I am already past such scenes. My personal grasp on the WIP seems to be strongest in Act 1 and then it progressively slips. 

The next level is where I use what I call pre-writing extensively. There will be large sections where I’m asking myself a bunch of questions about the scene and answering them all in one go. Across consecutive days, I might even go over the same scene several times all in this ‘behind the scenes’. There was this scene where I spent about two weeks on it and I had written 3000+ in total but when I took out all the pre-writing it was a scene of about 500 words.   

For the most difficult scenes, mostly I’m playing doctor to see what’s holding me up. Ever since the last couple of decimal drafts, I’ve started to work with a set dot point on all the scenes that I feel I can’t quite get into. In the first go, they only include 2 dot points:

• What’s the main events in this scene? Since I’m a event-centric person I usually have little difficulty with this and so I naturally use this as my starting point. 
• What do I need to do to advance this scene: This is just a place for me to brainstorm what do I think the issues 

After this, I usually leave this scene for the next round of iteration (to be honest, I stopped even incrementing along my decimal drafts. I’m still on draft 0.83 and I think I was on it last year. What I’m basically doing is going through my rough draft time and again picking out which scenes I still need to work on and then I will give each scene a week or two at most or sometimes just days and then move on at whim. 

Then in the second iteration over the same scene, I might extend the dot point list on the scene with extra dot points including:

• What is its narrative purpose?
• What are the main character goals?
• What is at stake for the character? 
• What are the Conflict/Impediment to Goal?
• What is the Outcome? 
• What is the Reaction? 
• What is the Dilemma?
• What is the Decision? 
• What are the opening and closing emotions in this scene

For those not familiar with it, this is from the GCORDD framework from K.M. Weiland’s Outlining your Novel: Map your Way to Success supplemented with other stuff. This framework basically breaks down each scene into Goal, Conflict, Outcome, Reaction, Dilemma and Decision (not each scene has to have all elements but it’s just the most comprehensive framework of breaking down a scene into elements). 

At one point, I also had a different set of template from Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting where he conceptualies each scene as an interplay between the character and external parties (another person or the environment) in the sense of the external thing thwarting the character’s expectation and the character’s subsequent reaction to such thwarting and it was this framework that finally clicked with me and made me ‘get’ the concept of beats. So for a while I was summarising a scene as a series of dot points like the following:

• Character x expects….
• But this happens….
• So character x does…
• Character x expects…

As you can see, I can keep cycling between the three elements until the end of the scene. 

Now, the problem with this framework is that my mind has to be at a pretty micro level with the character and I am not always able to get in there. So lately, I’ve been using the GCORDD framework. 

And that’s my share on writing scenes today. Feel free to ping me via comments if anything about my methods interests you.