WRITING HACKS: HOW TO WRITE BETTER SCENES

I’m a ghostwriter by trade, writing fiction novels for small online publishers so that they can sell the work under their own names and hopefully turn for themselves a profit. And during my time as a ghostwriter, I’ve written somewhere in the vicinity of 150 novels. Some are good, some are bad, most are perfectly adequate.

I don’t bring this up to brag, but to instead exercise a little authority. When it comes to pumping out large bodies of text, particularly in the field of fiction writing, there are few who are as prolific as me — Stephen King, I’m coming for you.

When I write my novels, when I plot my stories, I like to break my chapters up into a series of ‘scenes.’ This is a bi-product of a youth spent as a burgeoning screenwriter, an art form that forces you to write in ‘scenes’ rather than full-flowing narratives. But that doesn’t mean these tricks can’t be applied to novels.

The simple fact is that readers are rather predictable. They like clear stories, relatable characters, and plots that flow rather than stand still and stall on the page. Too often I’ve read chapters and ‘scenes’ that seem to go nowhere, simply there as a means to exposit information so that they can move onto the larger workings of the story.