Sorry, just don’t have the time to come up with one of those clever headlines about “65 ways to clean cat whiskers that will leave you amazed.”
How do you fill out a scene?
Yesterday’s post about how to get a high word count summed it up.
Write.
Know where you came from.
Know what the next scene is.
Know what you have to do in this scene. “They buy the boat.”
Okay, the last scene was the decision to buy the boat. There’s got to be some twist or something unexpected or the boat purchase would happen between pages. You’d see the decision to buy the boat, then the next scene they’re stowing ropes on the boat, right? The boat purchase has to move the story. It can’t just be featureless, or we skip on.
“Rise of the Romli”, the first story in my Star Trek series (which may or may not see print because of publisher guidelines) is a case in point. There’s a lot of “Getting the ship ready” scenes. Bleh. Boring.
Or you’d think. I managed to make each scene add to a feeling of frustration and fear. The ships engines don’t work. The phasers don’t work. Shields won’t raise. Photon Torpedoes inoperative. Ship’s computers inoperative. And if they get the ship’s engines working, they still have to carefully tune them, or the entire ship will create a wormhole in space and kill the crew. Or possibly just explode.
And to make things worse, they’ve got a deadline they have to meet – and the Romulans may not let them make it before war is declared.
That’s really not boring.
This is how you flesh out a scene – you deny them what they have to do. Make it difficult. Simple thing like, “activate warp engines” becomes a fear factory. Get it wrong, boom. Get it right but not perfect and crew members will be warped and twisted, sliding halfway through decks and walls before re-solidifying and dying a horrible, agonizing death. Even if you get it right and perfect, nothing else on the ship is working.
Tension, tension, tension. I tried working a rising tension throughout the novel, made difficult because the ship was so huge and powerful. The results required that I ramp up the situation to impossible, to the point of sure death. And I have Scotty telling Lohman “we’re not making it out of this one alive” for exactly that reason.
Know where you’re going. Know where you came from. Know what you need this scene to convey. Move the story forward.
It actually gets very easy to write the scene that way. Oh, and one last thing – make sure you deny the characters what they need as long as possible. The photon torpedoes don’t work until the very end of the first scene. The crew thinks the phasers work until the middle of the battle, then they stop. Shields can only take so much punishment, and during the battles, they always are struggling to keep the shields up.
Follow these simple rules, and it’s really easy to flesh out the scene.
