CHAPTER 13 Structuring the Scene

A Few Possibilities

What I hope is that you, gentle reader, have begun to see that while writing a novel can indeed be all about sitting down, getting in touch with the cosmos, banging out a first chapter, and hoping that you can go on from there, the neophyte novelist can also end up in the hands of her critical mental committee. She can also end up encountering the enormous pressure of not knowing enough about any one element of the story. She can leave herself in a situation of not having a fallback position—i.e., any material that she can read and evaluate for its potential to stimulate more ideas.

Having looked at the many steps you can take to avoid what is commonly called writer’s block but can be more easily expressed as “What the hell do I do now?” our last exploration will be into a few ways that you can structure scenes. This structuring actually takes place in the running plot outline.

You’ll recall that when you create a running plot outline from a step outline that you’ve put into order—addressing causality—you’re writing it in a stream-of-consciousness fashion and in the present tense. This is going to allow you to try out various options for the structure of each scene. Remember that what you’re doing is merely talking to yourself on the page (the page being the computer screen, the yellow tablet, the piece of paper in the typewriter, or whatever else you use in your writing life). This allows you to unlock all the choices you have with regard to bringing a scene to life.

During this talking-to-yourself-on-the-page, you’re able to try out THADs, which you can frequently find in your character analyses. You can also try out dialogue. You can test your choice of point of view. All the time you’re doing this, you can be in touch with your body, feeling for the moment when it tells you that you’re on the right track with the choice you’ve made. When you’ve made the choices and have set upon the course of action that feels right to you, you’ll then be able to mold a scene fully in the plot outline.

There are numerous approaches you can take when structuring a scene. I’m going to look at just three of them. Since I am a child of television and film, I’m a visual writer, and the name I give to my first technique is all about how things look on a television or a motion picture screen.

Thus, the first approach I consider when structuring a scene is what I call the Motion Picture Technique. Essentially, what the writer does with this technique is to go from place, to setting of scene, to action. Using the language of film, the writer uses an establishing shot, then dollies in, then cries “And . . . action!” like a film director.

Here’s an example directly from film, from the opening credits to the first scene of the wildly popular British program Downton Abbey: The establishing shot shows us a huge great house in the distance along with part of a person and part of a dog walking toward it. Any shot of a landmark immediately sets place in the mind of the viewer, be it the Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, London’s Houses of Parliament with Big Ben next to them, or the Golden Gate Bridge. Nothing else is needed to tell the viewer where the ensuing scene is going to take place. In the case of Downton Abbey, we know we’re on an English estate.

When the camera dollies in, we see a specific place within the general setting. In Downton Abbey, we might be in the servants’ hall, the library, the drawing room, etc., and it doesn’t matter if the scene is being filmed in a studio somewhere or in the house itself because the viewer makes the leap and understands where the ensuing drama is happening.

When the action begins, the characters interact. Someone comes into the room to speak to someone who is already there. Or someone comes into the room and begins to do something during which time someone else enters. Or a group of characters are already there in the midst of something. Whatever it is, it’s action and it relates to the story being told.

Here is an example of the Motion Picture Technique being used in Careless in Red. We’ve seen some of this example earlier, but now let’s look at it merely for the particular technique I’ve chosen to use:

LiquidEarth stood on Binner Down, among a collection of other small-manufacturing businesses on the grounds of a long-decommissioned royal air station. This was a relic of World War II, reduced all these decades later to a combination of crumbling buildings, rutted lanes, and masses of brambles. Between the abandoned buildings and along the lanes, the area resembled nothing so much as a rubbish tip. Disused lobster traps and fishing nets formed piles next to lumps of broken concrete; discarded tyres and moulding furniture languished against propane tanks; stained toilets and chipped basins became contrasting elements that fought with wild ivy. There were mattresses, black garbage sacks stuffed with who-knew-what, three-legged chairs, splintered doors, ruined casings from windows. It was a perfect spot to toss a body, Bea Hannaford concluded. No one would find it for a generation.

Even from inside the car, she could smell the place. The damp air offered fires and cow manure from a working dairy farm at the edge of the down. Added to the general unpleasantness of the environment, pooled rainwater that was skimmed by oil slicks sat in craters along the tarmac.

She’d brought Constable McNulty with her, both as navigator and note taker. Based on his comments in Santo Kerne’s bedroom on the previous day, she decided he might prove useful with matters related to surfing, and as a longtime resident of Casvelyn, at least he knew the town.

The first paragraph comprises the establishing shot. The details of the place come from my research. I had learned that there was a disused airfield in St. Merryn, Cornwall, because I had an appointment there with a man called Adrian Phillips who owns and operates a business in that location, making surfboards. When I saw the airfield, I knew I would use it in the coming novel because it fairly begged to be used. So I photographed the location as I sought out the surfboard maker’s shop. What appears in the novel, then, came from both my pictures and from the notes I took to record sensory elements.

My choice of point of view was Bea Hannaford’s and the reason for this is simple: Since she has never been to that location (which I moved to the part of Cornwall in which the story is set), she will notice things that would not necessarily be noticed from the viewpoint of someone who goes there often, unless what’s noticed in the POV of someone who goes there often is used to establish that character’s attitude or unless there has been a radical alteration to the place since the POV character was last there.

So we’ve had our establishing shot to allow the reader to see the setting, and now the camera is going to dolly in:

They’d come at LiquidEarth on a circuitous route that had taken them by the town wharf, which formed the northeast edge of the disused Casvelyn Canal. They gained Binner Down from a street called Arundel, off which a lumpy track led past a grime-streaked farmhouse. Behind this, the decommissioned air station lay, and far beyond it in the distance a tumbledown house stood, a mess of a place taken over by a succession of surfers and brought to wrack as a result of their habitation. McNulty seemed philosophical about this. What else could one expect? he seemed to say.

Bea saw soon enough that she was lucky to have him with her, for the businesses on the erstwhile airfield had no addresses affixed to them. They were nearly windowless cinder-block buildings with roofs of galvanised metal overhung with ivy. Cracked concrete ramps led up to heavy steel vehicle doors at the front of each, and the occasional passageway door had been cut into these.

McNulty directed Bea along a track on the far north edge of the airfield. After a spine-damaging jounce for some three hundred yards, he mercifully said, “Here you go, Guv,” and indicated one hut of three that he claimed had once been housing for Wrens. She found that difficult enough to believe, but times had been tough. Compared to eking out an existence on a bomb site in London or Coventry, this had probably seemed like paradise.

When they alighted and did a little chiropractic manoeuvring of their spinal cords, McNulty pointed out how much closer they were at this point to the habitation of the surfers. He called it Binner Down House, and it stood in the distance directly across the down from them. Convenient for the surfers when you thought about it, he noted. If their boards needed repairing, they could just nip across the down and leave them here with Lew Angarrack.

They entered LiquidEarth by means of a door fortified with no less than four locks. Immediately, they were within a small showroom where in racks along two walls long boards and short boards leaned nose up and finless. On a third wall surfing posters hung, featuring waves the size of ocean liners, while along the fourth wall stood a business counter. Within and behind this a display of surfing accouterments were laid out: board bags, leashes, fins. There were no wet suits. Nor were there any T-shirts designed by Santo Kerne.

The place had an eye-stinging smell about it. This turned out to be coming from a dusty room beyond the showroom where a boiler-suited man with a long grey ponytail and large-framed spectacles was carefully pouring a substance from a plastic pail onto the top of a surfboard. This lay across two sawhorses.

After a paragraph that explains to the reader how we got to this moment in the novel, we begin to see more of the location in the second paragraph. This location narrows to one particular cinder-block structure, then narrows even more as the characters enter this structure. Ultimately it narrows to a single room and a single character within that room. We have the place where the scene will occur and a character who will be part of that scene. And now the action begins, and in the running plot outline I’ve already decided that a THAD is in order, one that I chose from having visited the workshop of the actual surfboard maker and having watched him and his assistant in action. Images 28 and 29 were taken during my experiences at the settings depicted.

The gent was slow about what he was doing, perhaps because of the nature of the work, perhaps because of the nature of his disability, his habits, or his age. He was a shaker, Bea saw. Parkinson’s, the drink, whatever.

She said, “Excuse me. Mr. Angarrack?” just as the sound of an electrical tool powered up from behind a closed door to the side.

“Not him,” McNulty said sotto voce behind her. “That’ll be Lew shaping a board in the other room.”

By this, Bea took it to mean that Angarrack was operating whatever tool was making the noise. As she reached her conclusion, the older gentleman turned. He had an antique face, and his specs were held together with wire.

He said, “Sorry. Can’t stop just now,” with a nod at what he was doing. “Come in, though. You the cops?”

What I’ve done in structuring the scene is merely to go from a wide shot to a narrower shot, from larger to smaller, from general to specific. Another way of saying this is that I’ve gone from the general landscape to the specific setting to action within the specific setting.

A second technique of structure concentrates more on the THAD being used than on the setting in which the THAD is placed. Consider this partial scene:

On the south side of the building, a loading dock bore pallets of goods in the process of being removed from an enormous articulated lorry. Bea expected to find Will Mendick here, but the answer to another question pointed her over to a collection of wheelie bins at the far end of the dock. There, she saw a young man stowing discarded vegetables and other items into a black rubbish bag. This, apparently, was Will Mendick, committing the act of subversion for which Santo Kerne had created his T-shirt. He was fighting off the gulls to do it, though. Above and around him, they flapped their wings. They soared near him occasionally, apparently trying to frighten him off their patch, like extras in Hitchcock’s film.

Mendick looked at Bea’s identification carefully when she produced it. He was tall and ruddy, and he grew immediately ruddier when he saw the cops had come to call. Definitely the skin of a guilty man, Bea thought.

The young man glanced from Bea to Havers and back to Bea, and his expression suggested that neither woman fitted his notions of what a cop should look like. “I’m on a break,” he told them, as if concerned that they were there to monitor his employment hours.

“That’s fine with us,” Bea informed him. “We can talk while you . . . do whatever it is you’re doing.”

“D’you know how much food is wasted in this country?” he asked her sharply.

“Rather a lot, I expect.”

“That’s an understatement. Try tonnes of it. Tonnes. A sell-by date passes and out it’s chucked. It’s a crime, it is.”

“Good of you, then, to put it to use.”

“I eat it.” He sounded defensive.

“I sorted that,” Bea told him.

“You have to, I wager,” Barbara Havers noted pleasantly. “Bit tough for it to make it all the way to the Sudan before it rots, moulds, hardens, or whatevers. Costs you next to nothing as well, so it has that in its favour, too.”

Mendick eyed her as if evaluating her level of disrespect. Her face showed nothing. He appeared to take the decision to ignore any judgement they might make about his activity. He said, “You want to talk to me. So talk to me.”

“You knew Santo Kerne. Well enough for him to design a T-shirt for you, from what we’ve learned.”

“If you know that, then you’ll also know that this is a small town and most people here knew Santo Kerne. I hope you’re talking to them as well.”

“We’ll get to the rest of his associates eventually,” Bea replied. “Just now it’s you we’re interested in. Tell us about Conrad Nelson. He’s operating from a wheelchair these days, the way I hear it.”

Mendick had a few spots on his face, near his mouth, and these turned the colour of raspberries. He went back to sorting through the supermarket’s discards. He chose some bruised apples and followed them with a collection of limp courgettes. He said, “I did my time for that.”

“Which we know,” Bea assured him. “But what we don’t know is how it happened and why.”

“It’s nothing to do with your investigation.”

“It’s assault with intent,” Bea told him. “It’s grave bodily injury. It’s a stretch inside at the pleasure of you-know-who. When someone’s got details like that in his background, Mr. Mendick, we like to know about them. Especially if he’s an associate—close or otherwise—of someone who ends up murdered.”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.

“You’re destroying your lungs and everyone else’s,” Mendick told her. “That’s a disgusting habit.”

“While wheelie-bin diving is what?” Havers asked.

“Not letting something go to waste.”

“Damn. I wish I shared your nobility of character. Reckon you lost sight of it—that noble part of you—when you bashed that bloke in Plymouth, eh?”

“I said I did my stretch.”

“We understand you told the judge it had to do with drink,” Bea said. “D’you still have a problem with that? Is it still leading you to go off the nut? That was your claim, I’ve been told.”

“I don’t drink any longer, so it’s not leading me anywhere.” He looked into the wheelie bin, spied something he apparently wanted, and dug down to bring forth a packet of fig bars. He stowed this in the bag and went on with his search. He ripped open and tossed a loaf of apparently stale bread onto the tarmac for the gulls. They went after it greedily. “I do AA if it’s anything to you,” he added. “And I haven’t had a drink since I came out.”

The scene continues as Bea Hannaford and Barbara Havers go on with their questions and Will goes on with his dumpster diving. Will Mendick’s character analysis establishes him as a freegan, so it was a simple matter to draw this quality from his analysis and decide what a freegan might be doing when encountered by the police. Hence, the THAD. The scene is from Bea Hannaford’s POV, so the attitude is toned down from what it would be had I written it from Sergeant Havers’s viewpoint.

The revelations Bea makes about Will Mendick’s past in the course of the scene also come from his character analysis: The reader learns he has an anger problem and has committed assault and done time because of it. Also contained later in the scene is a dramatic question raised in Bea’s mind when she refers to the fact that he’s lying about something, as evidenced—to her way of thinking—in the colour of his skin, which flames more and more as he speaks.

Interspersing dialogue with the THAD in this scene serves the dual purpose of illuminating Will Mendick’s character and avoiding a stretch of he said/she said. Additionally, it allows suspicions about him to build in the reader’s mind as well as in the mind of the detectives interviewing him.

Sound versus Sight is another technique I use in writing a scene. Using this model, the scene I’m writing begins immediately with dialogue. This dialogue might comprise a single declaration, question, or exclamation made by a character or it might comprise a section of conversation between two or more characters, which goes on a bit. The dialogue pauses at a natural point, and then I indicate what the setting is or, perhaps, what the situation surrounding the conversation is. Having done that, I return to the dialogue and the crafting of the rest of the scene. The following is what Sound versus Sight looks like when it moves from the planning stage in the running plot outline to the actual scene:

“More than anything else, it’s a question of balance,” was the declaration that Alan used to conclude. “You see that, don’t you, darling?”

Kerra’s hackles stood stiffly. Darling was too much. There was no darling. She was no darling. She thought she’d made that clear to Alan, but the bloody man refused to believe it.

They stood before the glass-fronted notice board in the entry area of the former hotel. Your Instructors was the purpose of their discussion. The imbalance between male and female instructors was Alan’s point. In charge of hiring all of the instructors, Kerra had allowed the balance to swing to females. This was not good for several reasons, according to Alan. For marketing purposes, they needed an equal number of men and women offering instruction in the various activities and, if possible and what was highly desirable, they needed more male than female. They needed the males to be nicely built and good looking because, first of all, such men could serve as a feature to bring unmarried females to Adventures Unlimited and, second of all, Alan intended to use them in a video. He’d lined up a crew from Plymouth to take video footage, by the way, so whatever instructors Kerra came up with also needed to be onboard within three weeks. Or, he supposed—thinking aloud—perhaps they could actually use actors . . . no, stuntmen . . . yes, stuntmen could be very good in making the video, actually. The initial outlay would be higher because stuntmen no doubt had some sort of scale upon which they were paid, but it wouldn’t take as long to film them because they’d be professionals, so the final cost would likely not be as high. So . . .

He was absolutely maddening. Kerra wanted to argue with him, and she had been arguing, but he’d matched her point for point.

He said, “The publicity from that Mail on Sunday article helped us enormously, but that was seven months back, and we’re going to need to do more if we’re to begin heading in the direction of the black. We won’t be in the black of course, not this year and probably not next, but the point is, we have to chip away at debt. So everyone has to consider how best to get us out of the red.”

Red did it for her. Red held her between wanting to run and wanting to argue. She said, “I’m not refusing to hire men, Alan, if that’s what you’re implying. I can hardly be blamed if they’re not applying in droves to work here.”

“It’s not a question of blame,” he reassured her. “But, to be honest, I do wonder how aggressive you’re being in trying to recruit them.”

Not aggressive at all. She couldn’t be. But what was the point in telling him that?

She said, with the greatest courtesy she could manage, “Very well. I’ll start with the Watchman. How much can we spend on an advertisement for instructors?”

“Oh, we’ll need a much wider net than that,” Alan said, affably. “I doubt an ad in the Watchman would do us much good at all. We need to go national: advertisements placed in specialised magazines, at least one for each sport.” He studied the notice board where the pictures of the instructors were posted. Then he looked at Kerra. “You do see my point, don’t you, Kerra? We must consider them as an attraction. They’re more than merely instructors. They’re a reason to come to Adventures Unlimited. Like social directors on a cruise line.”

Here we see the speaker—Alan, boyfriend to Kerra Kerne and, like her, an employee of Ben Kerne’s project Adventures Unlimited—making a simple declaration, followed by a question. We have Kerra’s reaction to it, so we know at once we’re in her point of view. We also have a taste of her attitude toward the entire subject of hiring more men. Additionally, a dramatic question is implied: Why isn’t Kerra—whose job it is to staff the hotel and to hire the instructors for various athletic activities—hiring more men? The word red tells us something about her fears, but it will be only later that we completely understand why she’s reacting as she does.

When I’m constructing a scene like this—or any scene, really—I have various options for inclusion. I can choose to use a THAD, as I did with Will Mendick searching for food past its sell-by date behind the supermarket. I can create action that’s related to the place where the characters are, such as—had I wished to use it—the Gloucester Old Spot owned by Aldara at the cider farm being thrown a basket of bruised apples to gobble down. I can demonstrate a character’s state of mind through a moment of reflection on her part. I can advance the story through a character’s inner speculation about something related to the plot or subplot. I can lay down or answer dramatic questions. I can display a character’s attitude through her actions, reactions, words, and thoughts. All of these are tools to be used. While they might elongate a scene, they also reflect aspects of the story I’m telling and hence are a vital part of what I try to do when I create a crime novel.

I call the next structure Present-Past-Present. To create this type of scene, I begin the action in the real time in which it’s going to play out. While I’m writing the opening of the scene in real time, I’m waiting to feel the logical point at which I can stop, back up, and deal with how-did-we-get-to-this-moment. Let’s look at the example in parts.

Lynley didn’t approach the cottage at once because he saw immediately that there was probably going to be no point. She didn’t appear to be at home. Either that or she’d parked her Vauxhall in the larger of the two outbuildings that stood on her property in Polcare Cove. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel of his hired Ford, and he considered what his next move ought to be. Reporting what he knew to DI Hannaford seemed to top the list, but he didn’t feel settled with that decision. Instead, he wanted to give Daidre Trahair an opportunity to explain herself.

Despite what Barbara Havers might have thought once they parted at the Salthouse Inn, Lynley had taken her comments to heart. He was in a precarious position, and he knew it although he hated to admit or even think about it. He wanted desperately to escape the black pit in which he’d been floundering for weeks upon weeks, and he felt inclined to clutch just about any life rope that would get him out of there. The long walk along the South-West Coastal Path hadn’t provided that escape as he’d hoped it would. So he had to admit that perhaps Daidre Trahair’s company in conjunction with the kindness in her eyes had beguiled him into overlooking details that would otherwise have demanded acknowledgement.

When this scene begins, we’re immediately with Lynley at the cottage in the present time of the novel. We also learn what has taken him there: what Barbara Havers said to him earlier. He’s reflecting on this as he sits there staring at Daidre’s cottage, and his thoughts lead logically to his conclusion that he might be overlooking some things about her that he wouldn’t overlook were the person to whom the details applied not Daidre Trahair. The last sentence of that paragraph takes us ineluctably to a consideration of those details, which he’s gathered in a previous moment in the novel, one that the reader has no clue about yet:

He’d come upon another of those details upon Havers’s departure earlier that morning. Neither pigheaded nor blind when it came down to it, he’d placed another phone call to the zoo in Bristol. This time, however, instead of enquiring about Dr. Trahair, he enquired about the primate keepers. By the time he wended his way through what seemed like half a dozen employees and departments, he was fairly certain what the news would be. There was no Paul the primate keeper at the zoo. Indeed, the primates were kept by a team of women, headed by someone called Mimsie Vance, to whom Lynley did not need to speak.

Another lie chalked up against her, another black mark that needed confrontation.

What he reckoned he ought to do was lay his cards on the table for the vet. He, after all, was the person to whom Daidre Trahair had spoken about Paul the primate keeper and his terminally ill father. Perhaps, he thought, he had misinterpreted or misunderstood what Daidre had said. Certainly, she deserved the chance to clarify. Didn’t anyone in her position deserve as much?

That section puts us back in the past, as indicated by the use of the past perfect he’d come in the first sentence. But note that what I’ve created isn’t a flashback because it’s not a fully rendered scene. It is merely laying out for the reader what led up to the moment during which Lynley finds himself at Daidre’s cottage. Once that’s been established, the scene goes back to present (or real) time in the book:

He got out of the Ford and approached Daidre’s cottage. He knocked on the blue front door and waited. As he expected, the vet was not at home. But he went to the outbuildings just to make sure.

The larger one was empty of everything, as it would have to be for a car to be accommodated within its narrow confines. It was also largely unfinished inside and the presence of cobwebs and a thick coating of dust indicated that no one used it often. There were tyre tracks across the floor of the building, though. Lynley squatted and examined these. Several cars, he saw, had parked here. It was something to note, although he wasn’t sure what he ought to make of the information.

The smaller building was a garden shed. There were tools within it, all of them well used, testifying to Daidre’s attempts to create something gardenlike out of her little plot of land, no matter its proximity to the sea.

He was studying these for want of studying something when he heard the sound of a car driving up, its tyres crunching on the pebbles along the verge. He was blocking her driveway, so he left the garden shed to move his vehicle out of her way. But he saw it wasn’t Daidre Trahair who’d arrived. Rather it was DI Hannaford. Barbara Havers was with her.

Here we’re back to real time and we see what Lynley is doing in real time. So I’ve started us out at the cottage, backed up to explain how we arrived at this point, created a bridge to the information from the past that Lynley has gleaned and been affected by, and then moved the scene forward. Then Havers and Hannaford arrive, and the scene moves on:

Lynley felt dispirited at the sight of them. He had rather hoped Havers would have said nothing to Bea Hannaford about what she’d uncovered in Falmouth although he’d known how unlikely that was. Barbara was nothing if not a pit bull when it came to an investigation. She’d run over her grandmother with an articulated lorry if she was on the trail of something relevant. The fact that Daidre Trahair’s past wasn’t relevant would not occur to her because anything odd, contradictory, quirky, or suspicious needed to be tracked down and examined from every angle, and Barbara Havers was just the cop to do it.

Their eyes met as she got out of the car, and he tried to keep the disappointment from his face. She paused to shake a cigarette out of a packet of Players. She turned her back to the breeze, sheltering a plastic lighter from the wind.

Bea Hannaford approached him. “She’s not here?”

He shook his head.

“Sure about that, are you?” Hannaford peered at him intently.

“I didn’t look in through the windows,” he replied. “But I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t answer the door if she were at home.”

“I can. And how’re we coming along with our investigation into the good doctor? You’ve spent enough time with her so far. I expect you’ve something to report.”

Lynley looked to Havers, feeling a curious rush of gratitude towards his former partner. He also felt the shame of having misjudged her, and he saw how much the last months had altered him. Havers remained largely expressionless, but she lifted one eyebrow. She was, he saw, putting the ball squarely into his court and he could do with it what he would. For now.

The scene continues. It’s full of conflict and tension because once Hannaford leaves, Havers gets down to the crux of the matter with Lynley: Daidre Trahair has lied to them regarding any number of topics and the fact that Lynley hasn’t grilled her about her lies or, what’s worse, even reported her lies to Hannaford suggests to Barbara that Lynley’s conclusions about Daidre are suspect, having been influenced by what he’s been through. The shooting death of his pregnant wife and the agonizing decision he had to make to turn off her life support weigh so heavily on him that he cannot hope to think clearly, not yet. So there is suspicion between them; there is distrust; there is misunderstanding; there is emotional risk. Thus, the scene ends up being not just about how-we-got-to-this-moment but also about Lynley’s uncertainty regarding his feelings for Daidre Trahair, Havers’s concern about how his feelings in general might be clouding his vision, and Hannaford’s concern that Lynley keeps failing to do what she has instructed him to do. In addition to this, there is misdirection for the reader. And finally, there is also the revelation—unknown to the first-time reader of a Lynley novel—that Lynley had to make the decision to take his wife off life support.

Using this Present-Past-Present structure also allowed me to telescope a scene through quick summary. I’m not presenting a fully realized scene in which Lynley talks to people at Bristol Zoo. But I’m giving the reader necessary information all the same. That’s how this particular structure works.

There are other ways of structuring scenes as well. The only limits to the ways in which a scene is structured are the limitations within the writer’s mind. The purpose of the running plot outline is to give yourself an opportunity to play with various scene constructions so that you can see which of them best serves the purpose of the scene you’re creating.

In making your choice of construction or in playing with various types in a search for the one that feels right, you merely have to keep in mind:

The point of view from which the scene will be rendered

The details that the POV character would notice

Whether a THAD will be effective in the scene and your choice of THAD

The need for conflict, tension, agendas, and attitude

What information—played out in the scene—will serve the story best

Optional Exercise 1

Choose one of the techniques of structuring a scene presented in this chapter. Create a scene featuring two characters and include the elements mentioned in the final paragraph of this chapter.

Optional Exercise 2

Using the scene you’ve just created, now alter the POV character so that an entirely different attitude is revealed.