Knowing when to use your tools and why

For context, one my students in The Academy was asking a few questions about how she should be approaching her scene writing:

“…I’m completely on board with the idea that a scene should be interesting, draw the reader forward, progress the plot, reveal/change character, etc. But I’ve been told so many things about how to write a scene that I don’t know how to sort through what actually helps a scene, vs. what makes a scene gradable. I want to write strong scenes but in some of the classes I’ve taken, it felt more like checking all the boxes to persuade the grader rather than creating an immersive experience, but there are so many different ideas about what constitutes a 'good' scene and they tend to get jumbled in my head. 

For instance: 

• If the scene protagonist always needs to make a decision, how do I know for certain who the scene protagonist is or should be? 

• Does that need to be explicit to the reader? What if the scene protagonist gets revealed later in the scene? 

• And since the scene protagonist needs to make a decision, we have to craft some sort of dilemma, or options for them to act on but what if that action is by instinct? For example, Dorothy runs to save Toto without pausing for some huge internal debate, and if she did, I’d close the book, because a character who hesitates to save her pet is not someone I care to spend time with.

• Is it okay to hide the stakes? In some classes I’ve taken, it felt like stake-building was more about proving I know how to do it but then reading the end product was just tedious. Does a scene fail if the details building toward the final decision aren’t telegraphed from the beginning?"

To answer my student’s question I wrote an article length response that I’d like to share with you because I believe it will not only help clarify how we should approach writing our scenes, but also how I believe we should approach every tool within our writer’s toolkit. 

Here was my answer:

I love this question. This discussion is so important because all of us have been through a whole lot of various writing trainings, and when we get inundated with tools, it’s easy to, ironically, lose the plot of what we’re even doing or why we’re doing it. What follows is basically an essay on the topic. I hope you enjoy 😂

First: I think it’s important to establish why are we even doing any of this? We write stories to enjoy and to be enjoyed. That’s it. What enjoyment looks like, and how you do it (whether it’s through the exploration of deep themes, creating a heartbreaking cathartic experience, or just a damn good time), is a part of your unique craft as an author and what you want to create.

But everything we do is to facilitate that.

Now before we can do that, we have to know what we’re even trying to communicate. That’s why we ignore the existence of some other reader for the first two drafts. We don’t fully know what we’re trying to tell another person, so we stay in conversation with ourselves and the story (and writing buddies as needed 🙃). But, once we know that, then we start to ask: How can I communicate this in a way that someone else would understand? How can I provoke in them the joy or fear or heartbreak that this story inspired in me?

And that’s what tools are for. We don’t use tools because they determine Objectively Good Art and we’re all trying desperately to get an A+. I say that as an obsessive, A+ chasing student. We use them to help us communicate effectively with the reader. And perhaps to troubleshoot when something feels off, like if we read a scene in our book and we think it’s boring.

One of the problems with tools is that they are often built to answer common problems. It is indeed quite common to have protagonists who don’t do anything for almost the entire story, but instead, watch other, more interesting people do the interesting things. It’s common for the stakes to be so vague that the All is Lost feels more like melodrama. When this happens, it means that the story we’re trying to tell isn’t quite coming across to someone who isn’t us, that the protagonist who is alive to us isn’t alive to the reader, or the stakes that feel so important in our minds aren’t registering with the reader. So we use tools to help bring our vision to life for another. We own the tools and use them accordingly, the tools do not own us.

And that’s just the introduction! Now to the questions.

1.) Who the hell is the protagonist and should the reader recognize them? (Obviously paraphrased 😝)

Who a scene’s protagonist is is for you more than anything. It helps you maintain the “camera” to focus on the right things in the scene, which helps you communicate what’s important in the scene effectively (or even mislead the reader. Focus their attention on the main action of the scene while planting some clues for something else).

In general, you want the scene protagonist to be the story’s protagonist. This matters because you don’t want the reader to be confused about who the story is about, or again, to have your protagonist as essentially just a camera filming the action of other, cooler people.

If you have multiple POVs, most commonly, the scene’s POV character is the scene’s protagonist. The only reason who the protagonist is matters (and unless they’re a reader who’s also a writer, a reader is almost never asking, “Who is this scene’s protagonist?!”) is so the reader knows and understands who they’re following. This is about clarity more than anything. When you’re in another character’s POV, you’re putting the camera’s focus on them, and how they’re interacting with the events that follow, so, generally, their decisions are going to be the most important to the reader because that’s where their attention is focused. Occasionally, you may experiment with having a different scene protagonist than your POV character. That’s okay in moderation, but again, the reason we stay aware of that choice is for clear communication with the reader.

Lastly, I’ll add that a scene can only really fail if it doesn’t accomplish what you intended it to do. That’s the only litmus test. If it turns out someone else in the scene is pulling the strings in a more significant way, and the reader is surprised by what happens, then you’ve succeeded in your endeavor from that perspective (again, I’d imagine that goal is more about surprising the reader rather than them saying, “Whoa, I didn’t expect so-and-so to be the protagonist of this scene!” because that’s not something they think about unless they’re confused about who the story is about). Again, the tools are to help us accomplish our goal for the scene or story.

2.) Decisions, dilemmas, and stake-building doldrums. Or: “A character who hesitates to save her pet is not someone I care to spend time with.”

While we do want our protagonists to be making decisions, those decisions aren’t limited to questions that require deep internal contemplation. In fact, oftentimes, our characters aren’t given the benefit of time to consider the complexities of the situation.

This comes back to “tools are often created to solve specific problems.” The reason we talk about building stakes in scenes or giving protagonists dilemmas is because of a common problem of either: a.) inactive protagonist, b.) obvious right choice and obvious wrong choice (the choice therefore having very little meaning), or c.) no apparent stakes, and therefore no apparent meaning, to either decision.

Same as with the protagonist, readers aren’t sitting there with their copy of Robert McKee’s Story, finger on page 303, asking, “WhAt’S tHe CrIsIs?” They’re asking: what is the character going to do next? And you want them to care about that answer, the way the character does, the way you do. You want them to feel the impact of whatever the character is doing in the scene, and that’s why we use tools like making sure that why that decision matters comes across.

Honestly, you can get away with scenes without a clear crisis as long as it’s interesting, as long as there are decisions within the scene that feel like they matter in some way (like how characters interact with each other, for example. Just from memory, I’m quite sure that there are scenes in The Fox Wife that don’t have clear crises, but the events, the interactions, and the fallout of those interactions are interesting. So as a reader, I don’t care. I’m not asking that question because I’m engaged with the story). We use tools like the crisis so that the reader is having as much fun experiencing the story on paper as we experienced in it our head, or feels the weight of the action of the story as much as we do.

But, to your point about “hidden stakes,” stakes are best communicated subtly. Readers are smart. They pick up on subtle cues, on the way a character behaves, on how a character talks about a thing. They also generally remember the story previously, and don’t need details rehashed in their face all the time. The harder you try to communicate the stakes to the reader, to MAKE SURE THEY GET IT, the more likely you are to antagonize them more than anything else. And anyway, the reader, again, isn’t going to say, “This story didn’t feel like it had any stakes.” Not usually. They’ll say something like, “I lost interest.”

And this goes to the point about the “automatic” decision, the protagonist acting from their values. Dorothy carries Toto around everywhere. We know she likes the dog. And then we know she really likes the dog when she chooses to risk harm to herself to save the dog. Just because it was an immediate choice doesn’t mean it didn’t matter, or didn’t have stakes. Think about trauma responses, like a Fawn response. A character reaching to grovel immediately rather than stand up for themselves tells us a lot about that character, even if they didn’t think, “HUM. Should I play nice and get through this experience, OOOORRRRRRR should I risk my safety but protect my dignity by standing up for myself?”

To reiterate, the reason we even think in terms of tools like this is to help us communicate our vision to the reader. When I do a diagnostic on a manuscript, I don’t build a list of All the Ways You Didn’t Abide by The Tools. I start with the question: “What were you trying to do with this story? What did you want this story’s experience to be?” And then we use the appropriate tools to help the writer bring what’s in their head onto the page so someone else can experience and enjoy it.