In a guest post on Writers in the Storm, Janice Hardy offers advice on adding depth to your scenes.
As Hardy wrote her debut novel, The Shifter, she added scenes to make her story more exciting, more mysterious, more tense. However, instead of supporting her story, the new scenes dragged it down. Then she decided to go deep. “It wasn’t until I started drilling down into my themes, my premise, and my scenes that I found the right path to take to fix my ‘needs a little work’ beginning,” Hardy writes.
By going deep, you pull out the good stuff in your story. “It’s digging into the characters’ emotions, their goals, their fears, their hopes and dreams, and then taking advantage of it to make their lives miserable,” Hardy explains. She suggests five ways to go deeper into your scenes:
- Use Subtext to Suggest Things Unsaid. “What a character isn’t saying is often more fascinating than what’s being said,” Hardy writes. Are your characters avoiding a topic? Are they trying to communicate something without saying it outright? Are they saying something without realizing it?
- Drop Hints of Things to Come (or Things Hidden). “Hide clues in plain sight, so when they become important later, readers have already seen them,” Hardy advises. “It’s also a great way to bring your setting and world into the action, and avoid infodumps and heavy descriptive passages.” Drop comments into conversations, hide clues in your setting descriptions, let a character notice something that’s off.
- Use the Setting Instead of Just Walking Through It. “The right setting can change a character’s emotions, which can make them behave differently or make mistakes they ordinarily wouldn’t,” Hardy writes. “If you need to knock a character off-kilter, the right setting could be a way to do it.” Does your setting support your theme or conflict? Does it make a character uncomfortable or put them off-guard? “If your scene could happen anywhere and nothing in it changes, then it’s not serving your story as well as it could,” Hardy adds.
- Embrace All the Senses, Not Just Sight and Hearing. “Don’t forget to look at the whole scene and imagine how a character might experience it,” Hardy writes. “Unusual descriptions from non-typical senses bring originality to the story and the writing.”
- Make Connections to the Rest of the Novel. Your scenes shouldn’t be cut off from the rest of your novel. That might seem like no-duh advice, but beginning writers often add connecting scenes that don’t advance the plot, or portray events without referencing the past or foreshadowing the future. “Maybe that throwaway line could be a clue, or a walk-on character might play a bigger role, or a secret has farther-reaching consequences that expected,” Hardy says. Be sure that your scenes build on what comes before and sets up the next scene and the next.
