SCENE WRITING - Terrible Writing Advice

TWA Scene Writing Scene 1 ACTION! Learn to write scenes like a pro. From pacing, setting, tone, and establishing a conflict, TWA will go out of its way to show you why all of those things don’t matter and that every writer should just wing it and expect the best results!

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
01:17 Forgetting to Set the Scene
02:07 Concrete Details in Description
02:35 Forgetting to Populate the Scene
03:11 Way too Common Settings
03:56 Talking Heads
04:29 Scenes Need to Pull Double or Triple Duty
05:33 POV in Scenes
06:10 Pacing Issues in Scenes
07:14 Scene Transitions
08:28 Tone Issues in Scenes
09:33 Moving Scenes
09:54 Conflict Issues in Scenes
11:45 Murder Your Darlings
12:40 Conclusion
13:47 Sponsorship Wars - COMMUNISM... IN SPACE!!!!
18:43- Outro


SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

CREDITS

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

[UXMetalVTuber]

The best way to write a scene is to not have any idea on your mind! Just brainlessly copy from the most basic movie scene you can find!

[RaikoTheMC]

JP bringing up fanfiction more often makes me think he's been reading more of it

[Gaia_Gaistar]

>write scifi
>set in a bar or at a campfire
I've subverted your expectations, I am a genius.

[Mrhellslayerz]

I've always wanted to see how to make people do stupid things without the audience finding out it's stupid

[PantherCat]

Some personal advice that worked for me on the “murder your darlings” advice, because I both agree with it and don’t like it: once you realize a scene you like has to go because no amount of modification could make it have a purpose, first, think about why you like that scene so much, second take whatever element it is and look through out your story where you could fit that element in a different scene, those who plan their stories more might have an easier time while discovery writers like me might want to keep a digital notepad somewhere and paste it until you find somewhere it works. But if even that element can’t fit anywhere you might still have to murder your darlings, although it will be a much lower rate.

An example might be you have a coffee shop scene, it does nothing in anyway but you like how your one character reacts to the taste of coffee, you take that bit and you see an opportunity to place it in the meeting room scene that is a useful scene where it could make sense still having your character drink coffee and have that reaction, and you’d probably add just like… a couple of lines of the result of this move.


This advice comes from because a. You’re a writer and that usually means you enjoy stories in general, so if you can make something you like work you should just for your own enjoyment, and B. Doing this gives opportunities where you could find out you make the story flow better just by adding that element, like my coffee shop idea, maybe you needed a conflict where your character needs their boss to give them a disappointed look to establish who the boss is like, and you might add that element from the coffee shop and think “oh wait, this could work WAY better if had him reacting to the character’s reaction to coffee than what I had planned previously.” And you make the scene better for it, which wouldn’t happened if you didn’t add that element from the cut scene in there.

[thanatoast]

I will say that Fanfiction writers can mostly get away with not describing the scene because, presumably, the reader is already a fan of the original work, and thus they probably know that the room would look like already.

[cghoselle]

Its been 10 years. My aspirations of writing video game stories are rotted away. I am now a glorified handyman. I still love watching terrible writing advice. As long as you make videos I can still dream.

[WaitWhat-zwin]

Imagine if J.P. made a bunch of parody books based around the "lessons" in these videos called like The Best Fantasy Story Ever, Best Romance Story Ever, etc, and all of the stuff that isn't the actual story is just him stroking his ego and telling everyone that there will never be a better book than this

[biscuitboi]

The obvious way to scene write is to be so vividly descriptive as possible about every minuet detail from the room to the characters mole under their left eye. Clarification is great! Therefore clarifying for three pages about a room’s dusty carpet while adding no progression to the narrative will be sure to neither bore the reader while not confusing them as to what to keep track of!

[dudewhatthewhat]

5:10
THIS! This image right here.
Some fanfics will be so well written, you genuinely forget about all the “fanfic is bad” stereotypes. Then some incredibly weird and/or highly sexual happens, and you are suddenly reminded just how fanfic it is. Not cause it’s bad, but because there is no way this would get past a publisher without major edits.

[guntherhermann]

Man if only webcomics had taken off more. Those guys figured out the "Characters talking in a white void" problem long ago. They just had the characters talk in a colored gradient! Or hell, the really GOOD ones had the characters talking in front of a stock photo of a Game Stop/shopping mall/etc just hit with the blur tool in GIMP!

[rhiannonbamford]

About weird POV switches in scenes, I distinctly remember one chapter of My Immortal has the first-person POV abruptly change between Ebony and Draco without warning, but not before switching that same POV to a secret third character who is apparently also in the hallway but is never acknowledged by the narrative. I thought I had finally gone insane at that point.
Edit: Towards the end the narration also contains the line 'You put on my clothes', implying that you the reader are secretly Ebony in some unholy way.

[leoblessinger]

The best tip for writing scenes is you should constantly switch between perspectives, characters, settings and conflicts on a whim and without setup,


And remember, it is the audiences responsibility to read it write. Any criticism is just them reading it wrong

[anthonyackerman]

You forget the most important thing when writing a scene...



Put those settings into a love triangle
(Ex. Men's Bathroom X Women's Bathroom X Truckstop Bathroom)

[sirshauniv]

Always make sure to include as many scenes as possible to get as much exposition to the audience as possible. Don't worry if they start falling asleep, I'm sure even more exposition scenes will wake them up.

[purplehaze]

"Instead, just blame the beta reader for reading it wrong and get into a huge argument! That's way more productive than just fixing the stupid scene."
He dipped his toe into "TAKING CRITICISM - Terrible Writing Advice" territory for a moment there, didn't he?

[unicorntomboy]

Brandon Sanderson once said something about describing environments, regarding using the spectrum of abstraction. You always want to go into the concrete, tangible details about a place first, before going into the more nebulous abstract stuff, in order to ground the reader into the scene properly.

It is something I am trying to do in my own book I am working on, set in a dark fantasy setting with a gothic aesthetic.

JP should do a video on establishing character introductions at some point. First impressions about a character matters, especially if its your main protagonist, and doing a great establishing character moment is important. In my own novel I am working on, i introduce my protagonist, a pre-teen elven girl, wishing upon a star and preying to be gods during a full moon night. I also introduce the protagonist's love interest using the balcony rundevuz trope too.

Edit: In regards to dialogue, Brandon Sanderson also once said that you want to break up your dialogue between two or more characters with action beats in order to ground the characters back into the setting, otherwise you end up with 'white room syndrome" or talking head syndrome.

[OrbitalfilmsAU]

The thing about screenwriting that's stressful is mostly you are taught (or at least I was) to avoid detailing sets, describing acting, or going too detailed with action (since the production designer, cinematographer, director and stunt coordinators are responsible for working that stuff out). I try to keep those in mind and make notes on a separate document (plus I like storyboarding).

[Tail_sez]

1:30 As an avid reader of fanfic who used to read (maybe too much) published literature as a kid, I can confirm. This is my number one pet peeve when reading fanfic, and the main reason why I don't bother finishing many of the stories I click into---the author states that the characters are in, say, a library, but they never bother to describe the library. Even if the setting has been shown in canon before, I still like to see it through the eyes of the character, and see what they focus on most to show who they are as a person.

[little_wintry]

I never murder my darlings. I put them in the Playroom (AKA, a separate google doc where all my favorite scenes with no purpose go to hang out)