How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method

by Randy Ingermanson

  Too late, the men of the village shout, “Auld!”

  Auld comes out of his trance. He draws back his spear and sprints.

  The tiger leaps in the air, and his roar is like thunder.

  He reaches the peak of his flight.

  He opens his jaws, preparing to make a killing strike on the boy’s neck.

  Heart pounding, Yung waits till the last possible moment.

  He waits.

  He throws.

  The spear enters the tiger’s chest, missing his heart by a millimeter. The tiger is wounded but not killed. Shocked by this unforeseen agony, he loses focus on his prey, snapping his jaws shut on air. Blinded by pain, writhing, twisting, screaming, the tiger crashes onto the boy with five hundred pounds of primal fury.

  Auld races toward the tiger in giant strides. Half a second too late, he throws his spear into the tiger’s heart.

  The tiger collapses in death, burying Yung.

  Every man of the village sucks in his breath. Is the boy dead or alive?

  Auld heaves at the tiger’s corpse. He does not know it yet, but this seals his fate as village headman. In a month, there will be a new man, younger, stronger, bolder. Auld will be sent out to die. But in this moment, all he can think is that he has failed the boy, and how will he face the boy’s mother and father?

  The Tale of the Tiger has been lived a hundred thousand times, but it can have only two endings.

  The hero lives.

  Or the hero dies.

  In the omniscient viewpoint, the reader is outside all the characters, but all of them are perfectly transparent. The reader can know what all of them are thinking and feeling, but the reader can also know things that none of the characters can know. So omniscient viewpoint is not just head-hopping on a grand scale. It’s bigger than that.

  I’ve never been omniscient, but I bet it’s harder than it looks.

  So is using omniscient voice.

  We’ve now covered two of the three questions you have to settle for each scene. You’ve chosen your POV Character. You’ve chosen your viewpoint. Now there’s one final question.

  When Does This Scene Happen?

  You have three choices on how to locate your story in time, and they’re pretty simple:

  Past tense

  Present tense

  Future tense

  Past Tense

  In past tense, you tell the story as if it happened in the past. This is the most common way fiction is written. Here’s an example, written in third person:

  Yung waited till the last possible moment.

  He threw.

  The tiger crashed into Yung, knocking him flat.

  Present Tense

  In present tense, you tell the story as if it’s happening right now. This is becoming a bit more common than it used to be. Here’s an example, again written in third person:

  Yung waits till the last possible moment.

  He throws.

  The tiger crashes into Yung, knocking him flat.

  Future Tense

  In future tense, you tell the story as if it’s something destined to happen in the future. This is rare, because it gives the feeling that the future is predestined, whereas we like to think we have choices. But you can imagine the village story-woman telling Yung how he is to behave if he ever faces the tiger, like this:

  When the tiger begins his leap, you will long to throw your spear, but you will wait.

  When the tiger reaches the peak of his flight, you will think it is too late, but still you will wait.

  When the tiger is almost on you, when his shadow blots out the sun, when you are sure you cannot live, still you will wait.

  You will wait and wait and wait until the last moment.

  When you know that you know that you know that you cannot miss, that is when you will throw.

  You will throw with all your power, a straight line through the tiger’s heart.

  The tiger will crash down on you with a scream more terrible than you ever heard.

  Then you will live or you will die, as the gods decide.

  But you will kill the tiger.

  You will save the village.

  You will live forever in the Tale of the Tiger.

  Is That All There Is to a Character?

  In this chapter, we’ve covered three essential decisions you have to make in every scene:

  Who is your POV Character?

  What is the viewpoint for your POV Character?

  What tense will you use to show that viewpoint?

  You may be thinking that there is much more to be said about Character. What about motivations? What about personal values? What about backstory?

  All of those are important things, and they deserve a whole book, or maybe more than one book. We discussed some of these issues in my book How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method. And I plan to cover some of them in more detail in later books in the Advanced Fiction Writing series.

  But in this book, we are keeping very focused on one central question:

  How do we structure a scene to give our reader a powerful emotional experience?

  We know that the answer is to put a POV Character into a Scene Crucible.

  We now know just enough about POV Characters to do that effectively.

  Notice that we can keep reusing our POV Characters over and over in different scenes. But we’ll need to come up with a new Scene Crucible in every scene. That makes the Scene Crucible quite a bit more complicated than the POV Character.

  For the rest of this book, we’re going to look at the Scene Crucible.

  Let’s get started.

  Chapter Five

  Every Scene Needs a Crucible

  It’s worth summarizing what we’ve said before.

  A scene is a miniature story.

  A story is an account of a Character in a Crucible.

  Therefore a scene is an account of a POV Character in a Scene Crucible.

  So there are two Crucibles that we need to constantly keep in mind:

  The Story Crucible

  The Scene Crucible

  The Story Crucible is all the things that conspire to ruin your lead Character’s life for the entire length of your story. The Story Crucible is big. It includes your story world, your lead Character’s whole life history up to this moment, and the life histories of all the other characters in the story.

  And that’s a big danger to you as a writer.

  You will be powerfully tempted to spend a lot of words explaining all the amazing things that make your Story Crucible so terrible for your lead Character.

  Resist the Urge to Explain Your Story Crucible

  Don’t do it. Your reader wants to know what’s happening right here right now. Not what happened yesterday or last year or a thousand years ago. Not what’s happening in the next room or the next city or the next country. All of those may be important parts of your Story Crucible, but don’t tell them.

  Well then, how are you supposed to write your scene? If you can’t explain what the problem is, how are you going to get anywhere?

  The answer is simple. You have a Scene Crucible that is ruining your POV Character’s life right here and right now. Feel free to explain that Scene Crucible in this current scene.

  Don’t tell more than you need.

  Do tell as much as you need to ensure that this scene makes sense.

  If your reader needs to know what year it is, what place it is, what the weather’s like, then tell the reader. Work it right into the scene.

  If your reader needs to know about some law that is causing your POV Character pain in this scene right now, then explain the law.

  If your reader needs to know about the geographical situation your POV Character needs to deal with in this scene right now, then explain the geography.

  If your reader needs to know about some terrible thing that happened in the POV Character’s life that is causing him pain right now, then explain that terrible thing.

 
You may be wondering how you’ll ever be able to explain all that wonderful backstory you worked up and that fantastic story world you created.

  Don’t worry, you’ll get there.

  Remember, the Scene Crucible is going to last for exactly one scene.

  At the end of the scene, your POV Character will break out of the Scene Crucible. He’ll probably get hurt breaking out, but the Scene Crucible will be destroyed. In the next scene, there’ll be a new Scene Crucible.

  Scene by scene, you’ll show your reader a long sequence of Scene Crucibles that will add up in the reader’s mind to the whole Story Crucible. At the end of the story, your reader will know everything she needs to know about the Story Crucible to understand the story.

  And she’ll always get that information just in time.

  The Shape of a Scene

  Over the last few centuries, writers have found two emotively powerful shapes for a scene. Only two. Here they are:

  A Proactive Scene

  A Reactive Scene

  The rest of this book will laser in on these two kinds of scene. We’ll break them apart, learn exactly how they work, and study some examples. By the end of this book, you’ll be an expert on scene structure.

  But first let’s get a quick overview of them.

  What’s a Proactive Scene?

  A Proactive Scene is a scene in which a POV Character begins with a Goal, faces numerous obstacles that create Conflict, and ends (usually) in a Setback. Occasionally, a Proactive Scene ends in a Victory, but this is rare. We’ll see later why you usually want to end with a Setback, and why you have to occasionally end in Victory.

  In a nutshell, a Proactive Scene is

  Goal

  Conflict

  Setback (or Victory)

  What’s a Reactive Scene?

  A Reactive Scene is a recovery scene that follows a Proactive Scene. The POV Character begins with an emotional Reaction to the Setback from a previous scene. She considers numerous options in a Dilemma, and she ends with a Decision.

  In a nutshell, a Reactive Scene is

  Reaction

  Dilemma

  Decision

  And for each of these kinds of scene, we have a Scene Crucible.

  The Shape of a Scene Crucible

  Your scene happens in a dangerous place, at a dangerous time, in dangerous circumstances. If you don’t have danger in your scene, then your scene is not pulling its weight and you need to fix it or kill it. Fixing it means adding in danger. Killing it means throwing it away.

  The dangerous parts of the scene are what we mean by your Scene Crucible.

  Let’s look at the two types of scene. What’s the danger in each?

  The Danger in a Proactive Scene

  In a Proactive Scene, your POV Character has a Goal that she desperately wants to achieve by the end of the scene.

  The danger is that she might not achieve her Goal.

  So the Scene Crucible in this case is everything that is blocking your POV Character from reaching her Goal. The story world. The other characters. The POV Character’s own weaknesses. Everything that keeps her from reaching her Goal.

  The Danger in a Reactive Scene

  In a Reactive Scene, your POV Character is reeling from the shock of a Setback in some previous scene.

  The danger is that she might give up and quit the story.

  So the Scene Crucible in this case is everything that is pushing your POV Character to quit. Depression. Fear. Guilt. Other characters. Lack of options. Everything that says there is no way forward, no new Goal to push for in the next scene.

  How You Know When a Scene Is Broken

  A scene is broken when you can’t say what its Scene Crucible is.

  Remember, every scene must be a miniature story.

  Every story is a Character in a Crucible.

  If you have no Scene Crucible, then your scene is not a story, and therefore your scene is broken.

  Later in this book, we’ll look at exactly how you fix a broken scene. That can take a bit of work. But for right now, the important thing is to know when a scene is broken.

  You can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broken.

  You might want to think for a moment about the scene you’re working on right now.

  Who’s the POV Character for that scene?

  What’s the Scene Crucible?

  Is your scene working, or is it broken?

  If it’s working, then you have a good chance of delivering a powerful emotional experience, which is your main job as a storyteller.

  In the next chapter, we’ll look at how that works. How does a Proactive Scene deliver a powerful emotional experience? What’s the psychology of it?

  Part Two

  Proactive Scenes

  Chapter Six

  The Psychology of a Proactive Scene

  In a Proactive Scene, you’re going to be working with your reader’s brain to create a powerful emotional experience in your reader. Each part of the Proactive Scene is designed to punch certain emotive buttons.

  Remember, there are three parts to a Proactive Scene:

  Goal

  Conflict

  Setback (usually) or Victory (occasionally)

  Let’s look at each of these to understand why they’re essential.

  Why a Proactive Scene Needs a Goal

  All humans are in a real-life Crucible most of the time. That’s just what life is—constant struggle. When you’re in a Crucible, the easy way to deal with your troubles is to not deal with them. To curl up and ignore your fears. Or to numb the fears with chemicals. Or to run from the danger.

  But most of us don’t admire people who take the easy way out. We admire people who face the danger. And more—they attack the danger.

  We admire people who are proactive. We want to be proactive. We want to, but we often fail, because the proactive way is the hard way.

  The proactive approach to the Crucible starts with making a Goal and then going all in to attack all obstacles.

  When you give a likable POV Character a Goal for a Proactive Scene, you immediately punch several emotive buttons in your reader:

  “I admire that POV Character for tackling the danger head on. She’s brave!”

  “I want to live inside that POV Character’s skin for this scene and learn to face my own dangers.”

  “I am rooting for that POV Character to reach her Goal. Because I like her.”

  When you give an unlikable POV Character a Goal for a Proactive Scene, you punch several different emotive buttons:

  “I dislike that POV Character for tackling danger this way, or for creating danger for the person I like. She’s awful!”

  “I’m going to live inside that POV Character’s skin for this scene and learn how not to live my life.”

  “I’m rooting against that POV Character. I want her to fail. Because I hate her.”

  Why a Proactive Scene Needs Conflict

  Conflict means resistance to your POV Character’s quest to achieve his Goal. Every human faces Conflict in their life. Good things don’t come easy. If you want to achieve a Goal, you have to work for it. You have to get creative. You have to stay strong, and keep on staying strong.

  In short, you need to develop emotional muscle. And that’s what Story does. It builds emotional muscle. And it creates emotional muscle memory. Those are two different things. Muscle is the strength to do the right thing. Muscle memory is the ingrained ability to remember what the right thing is.

  Muscle builds up when it faces resistance.

  When you make a likable POV Character face Conflict in a Proactive Scene, you immediately punch several emotive buttons in your reader:

  “I’m afraid for that POV Character. She’s going into danger. She might fail.”

  “I admire that POV Character for persisting through this long Conflict. She doesn’t quit! Neither will I.”

  “My heart rate is up and I feel alive in this moment. This is great!”

>   When you make an unlikable POV Character face Conflict in a Proactive Scene, you punch a somewhat different mix of emotive buttons:

  “I’m afraid that POV Character is going to succeed and make things even worse for a person I like. I can’t bear to watch, but I can’t bear not to. She might succeed!”

  “I resent that POV Character for persisting in creating Conflict for a person I like. She’s not quitting, but neither is the person I like.”

  “My heart rate is up and I feel alive in this moment. This is great!”

  Why a Proactive Scene Usually Needs a Setback

  A scene is a miniature story. That means it needs to come to an end—with a resolution. The resolution can be a win, or it can be a loss.

  When it’s a loss for a likable POV Character or a win for an unlikable POV Character, we call that a Setback.

  Setbacks are good. Your goal is to build emotional muscle memory in your reader. And I’m told that muscle builds up quickest when you exercise it to the point of failure.

  When you end with a Setback in a Proactive Scene, you immediately punch these emotive buttons in your reader:

  “Ouch, that hurts!”

  “I can’t believe that’s the end of the scene. I hope that’s not the end of the larger story. Please, oh please, oh please, let there be more to this story.”