What Great Novels Do in EVERY Scene (And Yours Should too) | Writing Advice

Novelists give a lot of attention to the structure and plot of the overall story, but have you considered this at the scene level?

[bennobenny]

I watched Silence of the Lamb recently, and I noticed this technic being used - every scene felt like a mini story leading to the next one.

[joshuam]

a fun fact the book you were talking about was a total flop in its own time and the writer never recovered writing career and now it is a classic funny how that works

[rociomiranda]

Moby Whale is an exquisite epic of mythological cosmic proportions, poetic, powerful. There is no book to touch it in the world. I wish I could tell Melville he didn't fail.

[tehufn]

This is an interesting technique, and helps me explain what was so engaging in my first manuscript that my second novel's early draft lacked. I saw my first novel as a lot more episodic, but I think this is a better way to put it and it might help my edit.

That said, I don't think every single scene or chapter needs to be written this way, nor should it. A lot of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is made up of chapters that could be described as fragments of a scene. It's the prose and emotion that holds engagement.

That said, Anna Karenina has plenty of scenes that follow this video's idea and have their own complete emotional story arc. I'm going to have to keep an eye out for scene-level story arcs in my future reading.

[andreasboe]

Great episode. I will watch it a second time now.

[haraldcarlsten]

Great view on writing. The relevance bit. But there is also this with melody, sound and the intrinsic poetry of the words. I think that is lost a lot in today's fiction. Especially in genre fiction but also in higher fiction.

[sarahalbert]

I love your humour! Your videos brighten my day. Especially when I'm having a day where everything I write seems terrible 😁

[nevilleattkins]

Nobody reads books, so if your plot only exists at the level of the book, then it doesn't have a plot at all. This is the effect of reading Morte D'arthur, its got plot stuck up high, the scenes, particularly the battle scenes are one damned thing after another. What do people read? scenes, hopefully one after another but just because you've read the first scene, there is NO reason that the reader will keep reading, its not TV or cinema, so the author must not assume that they can take the readers continued interest for granted and relegate the story to some kind of meta arc comprised of beats, instead each scene should have everything in it. There is reason why there is no Mody Dick 2 or The Triall (this time it's personal) or Ulysees - the next day (really enjoying these). Because at every moment everything is at stake, nothing assumed or if it is its to disastrous effect (see the whole of Thomas Hardy) . In short novels are fractal like in composition. How do I know this? One scene of a Thomas Hardy novel provided enough material for a whole my MA dissertation.

[TedMattos]

Now I want to create a short story of a contractor who struggles getting some masonry to work due to one piece.
The contractor: Ismael, the piece of masonry: Moby Brick.

[clickbaitcabaret]

Melville's on my short list of must read classics.

[MrNoucfeanor]

Moby wood was great!

Your info is greatly informative. Thank you!

[DreamsOfFire]

Great video! Although the start gave me trauma flashbacks to the time I called the nooood model (his name was Moby) for our figure drawing class the full name of that book by accident. 😅

[frankhainke]

So it should be fractal. Well, this is something Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and others did as well.

[GrandTeuton]

What could make it one's favourite scene? A jar of pickles? A hand plane? One never knows.

[tamjg]

Hi Carl, do you also do professional beta reading or developmental editing?