Chapter Twenty-Five

Creating a Lasting Tapestry

Congratulations! Having ventured through Part Two of Writing Blockbuster Plots, you have begun the process of tracking your scenes on the Scene Tracker.

For those of you who protested that this sort of methodical, organized approach to writing is counterproductive to the creative process and therefore not for you, the fact that you are reading this passage says that you chose to face your fear. The reward for doing that which you most resist is always life changing. Congratulations!

Continue to fill in the Scene Tracker one scene at a time until you arrive at the last date, the last action, the final moment of character growth or regression, or the last perfect thematic detail of your story. As you proceed, you may need to refer back to the Scene Tracker explanations. Be patient. In time, and with practice, the elements of scene will become second nature.

If, however, tracking every scene slows you down or becomes too tedious, adapt the techniques I present in any way that best works for you. Remember, this process is intended to support you in your writing.

One writer confessed that using the Scene Tracker was exhausting (emotionally and physically). For her, it was an hour or two of toxic colored-pen fumes and shoulder aches from writing on the wall. But when she was finished and could stand back and look at her chart, she was exhilarated. So many elements of her story— funny episodes, sadness, courage, the craziness of the 1960s—were not revealed until she charted it out and could see the bigger picture. The Scene Tracker enabled her to organize and make some order out of chaos.

Most writers find that tracking each scene on the Scene Tracker is helpful in terms of looking at the elements of scene in detail.

Analyzing the Scene Tracker Form

Sit back and examine your Scene Tracker. See if you can discover the mysteries and gems that you were unable to detect when you were blinded by your words and phrases, paragraphs and pages of narration. The Plot Planner showed you one of the structures of your story: plot at the overall story level. The Scene Tracker shows you another: plot at the scene level.

Search the Scene Tracker for any gaps or holes you can tighten, any leaps you made in the characters’ progress, or any failure that needs to be smoothed out step by step throughout the course of the story. Make notations on the Scene Tracker with sticky notes to remind you to cut that which is not contributing to the whole or to flush out that which you skimmed over the first time around.

Remember that these are merely guidelines. The intent is for you to vary the design in any way that best supports your story. If everyone planned and plotted in exactly the same way, we’d have a bunch of cookie-cutter stories instead of unique works of fiction.

The seven essential elements on the Scene Tracker not only deepen the scenes and the overall story, but the prompts they provide “liberate invention.” Pablo Picasso believed that “forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.” The practice of tracking your scenes provides this sort of restraint, and, in the end, creates overall coherence.

Continue reading for help deciding which scenes to cut, which ones to rework, and which ones to keep. Emotional change and conflict are the two most critical aspects to good fiction and, though they are most commonly missing in the early drafts of a story, it is possible to crank up the tension and conflict and create more emotional change in subsequent drafts.

In every case where you find a blank box under the Change in Emotion Column or the Conflict Column, rethink those scenes.

Once you have your Scene Tracker in shape, if what you find there inspires you to begin one of the several rewrites that are in store for all fiction writers, go for it. At any point you lose your passion for the actual writing, spend some time plotting on your Plot Planner. Good luck!

Using the Plot Planner and Scene Tracker Together

For those of you who examined your Scene Tracker and decided you need to actually re-envision your project, do not despair. The answers are right there in front of you; they are always lurking in our stories. The Plot Planner helps you locate them.

In the Plot Planner section, you learned how to plot your scenes and how to best maximize cause and effect. You learned how to develop a compelling character plotline with lots of emotional changes. You learned how to create exciting and dramatic action full of tension and conflict in your action plotline. And you deepened your understanding of the importance of theme when you studied the thematic plotline.

Now, with both the Scene Tracker and the Plot Planner in front of you, you are ready to use all of the techniques to create a richly detailed and complex tapestry, one with a bold border and a compelling body, a resilient heart, and an expansive spirit. And once this complex fabric is woven with words and images, you might just find yourself holding a blockbuster novel.

Scenes to Cut, Scenes to Keep

Count the number of scenes you have listed. Use that number now in much the same way you did in chapter three to help you determine and test where the beginning quarter of your story ends and the middle begins, and where the middle ends and the final quarter story at the end begins.

Draw a thick black line across your Scene Tracker after the end of the beginning scene or the scene that represents approximately one-quarter of your scene list. Do the same thing after the last scene that represents the middle of your story. In other words, divide your story between the last scene in which the protagonist is preparing for the end and the scene in which she takes her first step toward her final ascent to her goal.

If you’re using printed copies of the Scene Tracker template, bundle and staple together three separate stacks: all the scenes in the first quarter of your story, those that represent the entire middle of your story, and those that constitute the final scenes.

Now evaluate your scenes in each section according to your notations on the Scene Tracker. Your strengths and weaknesses will reveal themselves immediately. This technique also shows the holes in the logic of your story, or where your characters come up shallow and weak, or where the thematic thread breaks.

A skill that defines a good writer is the ability to know which scenes to keep and which ones to kill. By creating a Scene Tracker and a plotline for your story, you can better select those scenes that best advance the story you’ve been chosen to write and those scenes that, in the interests of the story, should be reduced to summary or—dare I say it?—cut completely.

Likely you’ve noticed that I wrote, “the story you’ve been chosen to write.” Before you roll your eyes and dismiss this line as an “out there” concept, I would like you to take a moment to consider the reason I have included such a seemingly preposterous idea.

When writers honor a story as something beyond ourselves, we put distance between our egos and that which the story needs. In other words, rather than falling in love with certain passages, sentences, characters, or plot twists that we’ve spent hours laboring over, we can appreciate those aspects purely for the sake of the story.

A good writer knows that the success of a certain passage, sentence, character, or plot twist doesn’t depend on the beauty of the writing or the cleverness in the plotting or the depth of the characters, although these things are important and sometimes even captivate the reader. A good writer knows that each line and element in each scene belongs there because it has a definite purpose in the overall scheme of things.

Writers who are detached from the stories they write seem better able to finish a short story, memoir, piece of creative nonfiction, or full-length novel with fewer rewrites.

Make your scenes work for you by incorporating a strand of each plotline into every scene. Pretend there are three doors in every scene, one for dramatic action, one for character emotional development, and one for thematic significance. Open each door, one by one.

• Door 1: Where is the tension?
• Door 2: What aspect of the character is developed in this scene?
• Door 3: How has the theme of the story been advanced?

A good scene progresses the dramatic action, the character emotional development, or the thematic significance. The truly great scenes do all of it at once. To continue in that vein, any scene that does not accomplish at least two of these key functions at once does not belong in the story. With your Scene Tracker in hand, evaluate your story honestly. Where are the holes in the logic of your story? Where are your characters portrayed as shallow and weak? Where does the thematic thread break? If you cut the scenes with no tension and the scenes with no emotional change, is the story better off without them? Yes? Then for the sake of the story, you know what you need to do. What if you combine a couple of insignificant scenes into one great one? Or you might summarize the action in these weaker scenes in a sentence or two. If you see yourself as the steward of the story, you will yield to its flow and do what is right. If you see yourself as the creator, then you will resist eliminating any scenes, period. The choice is yours.

If you choose to do what is right for the story, and ultimately what is right for your readers, you might feel the urge to weep over all the time and effort you have just lost by cutting scenes from the story. When you are finished moaning and wailing over the unfairness of it all, dry your eyes. You have made the choice to be a good writer and to put your story first. The story and your readers will thank you.

The ability to view the narrative as a separate entity, apart from ourselves, allows us to more effortlessly cut those scenes that don’t add to the strength of the story. This skill saves us time and heartache, and ultimately makes us better writers.

Getting Closer to the Character

People love to read stories to peek into other people’s lives, even if the other people are mere characters in a book or movie.

One of my client’s stories was filled with dramatic action. It was exciting and left me anxious to hear what happened next. The writer masterfully provided more and more compelling action—the wife mysteriously goes missing and the husband nearly gets killed—and he did so seamlessly through consistent cause and effect. The dramatic action plotline rose quickly and effectively.

Still, during our plot consultation, amid all the intrigue and mystery, suspense and fear, the characters became cardboard action figures who allowed the dramatic action to happen to them. The more exciting the action, the more the characters were ignored and the less I found out about how the characters, especially the protagonist, were affected by the dramatic action. Without the help of the character to draw me nearer, I found myself separating further from the story.

The writer and I discussed the importance of goal setting, both at the scene level and at the overall story level. The better a writer is at establishing concrete goals for his characters, the easier it is for him to keep track of the effects on the character as she succeeds and fails in achieving her goals.

Even by the end of our time together, I never found out why the protagonist is missing when her husband is nearly killed. Why? Because the writer didn't know either. The author never opened the critical door into the character on a deep, personal level and thus robbed future readers from the intimate bond of knowing.

The writer used the protagonist to advance the dramatic action plotline but ignored the character emotional development plotline almost completely.

Still, he had done the hard part. The story was written. The dramatic action propelled the story in fast and exciting ways. Once I pointed out that the characters needed to be affected by that action, he easily opened the necessary doors. By attending to what is behind each door, the writer’s chances improve for bringing satisfaction to future fans by knowing the character even better than the character knows herself.

Test Your Final Product

Once you have plotted your scenes on a Plot Planner and analyzed each one for the seven essential elements, it is time to test your final product before sending off your manuscript to seek publication.

• Does every detail, every word, every sentence, and every connection have thematic relevance to the meaning of the overall story?
• Does every summary lead to the action that follows?
• Does every scene detail contribute to the thematic significance and make the dramatic action and the character emotional development more believable?
• Is every action meaningful, and does it advance the plot?
• Does every scene contribute to the whole?
• Is the conflict rising throughout the story?
• Have you provided adequate suspense and excitement to keep your reader engaged all the way to the end of your story?
• Is your core conflict resolved at the climax of your story?

If you find you are able to answer yes to every question, then go for it. Shout it from the highest hill—you’re finished!