Trimming the Fat (aka Expendable Scenes) in Your Novel

 

I don’t blame you if you don’t want to read this post. Revisions can be dreadful, overwhelming, confusing and frustrating for many writers and the idea of doing them (or reading about them) may sound as fun and exciting as standing in line at an airport security check point. But revisions have a strange quality, they can also be infinitely satisfying once you figure out what needs to be done and the end result is a stronger manuscript.

One of the reasons why revisions are so difficult is because you must tackle several elements at once: character development, plot progression, pace, prose (to include style, grammar and dialogue), among other monsters. Today, I’m going to focus on what constitutes the structure of your novel: scenes.

Since your novel is basically a sequence of scenes with transitional sentences/paragraphs/thoughts, it's essential to evaluate each and every one of them as both a unit and a part of a whole. My writer friends tease me because I’m ruthless with them (“If I were you, I would delete this scene” is my motto!) But there is a good reason for my callousness. More often than not, a pacing issue is the result of a scene—or several—that aren’t serving an important purpose in your novel. These “problem scenes” are difficult to spot because we often grow so attached to them. (Very often we need someone else to point them out.)  So how do we determine if a scene is important enough to keep or if it’s more problematic than useful?

Here are the five questions I ask myself when evaluating a scene.

1. Is the scene active or reflective?

Ideally, you should have a good balance between active and reflective scenes. Active scenes being the ones where something important happens (an action that moves the story forward), and reflective scenes are those where the character ponders on his situation, informs other characters of his problem or fills the reader with backstory and/or information dumps. In my experience, agents and editors often complain that novels are “too slow.” This problem may be the result of too many introspective scenes or instances where characters engage in ordinary activities. Arguably, you will need more active than reflective scenes to create a good progression, but the balance of active vs. reflective heavily depends on the genre you’re writing (though the consensus seems to be that even in literary fiction there must be enough action to keep the reader’s interest). In genres such as adventure and thrillers, most of your scenes should be active, but in Women’s Fiction, for example, it’s tolerated and even expected to have many introspective scenes to reflect the author’s voice and the character’s personality. Once you figure out if your scene is active or reflective, determine whether or not you have too many of one or the other. Perhaps you have too many reflective scenes in a row and the pace would benefit from moving them around (if it doesn’t affect your sequence of events, of course). The same goes for active scenes. Perhaps it’s time to give your character a coffee break from all the chaos surrounding him!

2. Is the scene repetitive?

Do you have similar scenes throughout your book? In other words, have you used the same setting many times before, have you had similar conversations or too many scenes between the same characters? Perhaps it’s just a matter of condensing two scenes together.

3. Is an entire scene necessary to convey this information?

Sometimes we hold on to a scene because we think that the information shared on a particular line of dialogue is vital but we don’t realize that an entire scene may not be necessary in order to divulge this one, tiny, bit of information. When I’ve recommended my friends to cut scenes that are dragging forever, I try to spot what is important about them and suggested they move this information elsewhere. But what about “show, don’t tell,” you may ask? As you know, “showing” (in this case, enacting a scene) is fundamental for a reader to identify with a character or situation, but not all events are equally interesting or deserve this much attention. It’s your job to determine which events are relevant enough to turn into a scene.

4. What purpose is this scene serving?

It’s important for a writer to understand why a scene deserves to take room in his or her novel. Is the scene in question advancing the story? Enlightening the reader about the character’s past or his quirky personality? Developing a bond or conflict between characters? If you don’t understand the purpose of a scene you’re holding on for dear life, you may have a problem.

5. If I remove this scene, will it affect the flow of my novel?

I may have told you that my first novel started as a telenovela for the Latin American market. As you know, soap operas have tons of characters and last A VERY LONG TIME. Therefore, writers have the luxury of penning what I call “peripheral scenes.” These are scenes where secondary characters catch up with the main action, or where the heroine ponders her decision with friends, or where a subplot between secondary characters develops (but does nothing for the main plot). When I translated my soap opera to English and formatted it as a novel, I had tons of scenes like these (no wonder my novel was over 143,000 words!) In novels, these scenes are sometimes hard to spot because they can be considered “bonding scenes” between characters. A good test is to evaluate if your novel will suffer if you remove a particular scene. From my experience, it probably won’t. Readers are smart and will catch up with the action without you having to over explain how things came to be. If you’re doubting the validity of a scene, you’re probably on to something.

In conclusion, the trick to revisions (especially if you’re going to do them on your own) is to be honest with yourself—which can be difficult considering your emotional attachment to your work. As a critique partner, I have noticed that many writers are very resistant to deleting superfluous scenes. (Sometimes they’re more willing to kill a character than a beloved scene!) I think it has to do with the fact that these scenes become familiar to us and it becomes harder to envision our novels without them. However, many times after the deed is done, writers realize how much better their novel flows and they don’t look back (it’s happened to me several times). It’s rare that after deleting a scene, a writer will bring it back (at least not in its entirety).

What do you think? Do you have an emotional attachment to your scenes or are you ruthless when it comes to evaluating (and getting rid of them)?

Strengthening Your Prose

As writers, we enjoy that moment when we sit down to our computers and let our fingers wander across the keyboard to create that perfect story that we believe is going to be loved by all. But then, after that story or novel is out there and finished that first time through, we're stuck with the daunting task of the big "R" --

REVISION!
Don't you wish you looked
this good when you're
ticked off at your manuscript?

Oh, and what a difficult task it is to bring ourselves back around to that story and realize it's not as perfect as we thought it was when we were in the throes of creating our masterpiece. More often than naught, we tend to have a crazy mess on our hands that at times can sound as random as our thought process. I can vouch for more than one occurrence when I've read through a manuscript and the first thing that came to mind was, "What the heck was I thinking putting that in there?" I'm sure any writer has felt this at one time or another.

Since I'm currently in the midst of finishing up some final revisions on my novel before it goes out on the submission process, I wanted to share a few tips on how to polish up your prose, round it off until it's shiny and glowing all over the page, and perhaps help you out in the process, if not for some of the work you've written in the past, then perhaps for something you plan on writing in the future.

THE TO-BE VERB CAN OCCASIONALLY BE YOUR WORST ENEMY

I say occasionally on this one because the to-be verb tends to come off a little bit like "he said/she said": You don't necessarily see it after a while because our minds have become so conditioned by its use. But, that doesn't mean it wouldn't hurt to put a little more action into your sentences. Readers want to see the action moving along, and if everything comes off in the passive voice, you can really slow your story down. Evaluate your verb use, think about if there's a better way to form some of those sentences, and think about some stronger verbs (but not completely obscure verbs that only jump out at your readers) and finally look at the flow to make sure that what you've changed is really working in your storyline.

AVOID REPETITION

I'm sure we've all heard this more than a time or two, but I was surprised by how often I'd put similar words in sentences following one another. And they can be the most simplest of words, like "but" and "always." Of course there are the extreme cases where you might find you have a penchant for using a strong word quite often. I found out that mine was the word "bob." I know, sounds like a strange one to repeat, but when I did a word search, I had more than one manuscript should have to hold. If you find that an uncommon word is jumping out at you when you read your story, then do a quick search and if there's an over abundance of repetition, start thinking of a replacement or rewording the phrase all together.

PAY ATTENTION TO THOSE PESKY -ING STRUCTURES

You know, the ones we like to call gerunds. For whatever reason, writers are drawn to writing sentences starting in -ing. You'll find them in every book you read. Okay, maybe not every book, because I'm sure there's a big hater of gerunds out there who made sure not to use a single one. The problem with starting a sentence with gerunds is the fact that they often create a sentence filled with impossible actions. Here's a bad example:

• Kissing the dog, Alice spoke to the mailman.

So, I think we can all safely agree that you can't kiss your dog and speak to the mailman all at the same time. Well, I guess you could, but I think that would be awkward and the mailman may never deliver a package directly to your door again. In any case, keep a close eye on how you're starting a sentence.

USING COMPARISONS WHEN THE STORYLINE CALLS FOR IT

I know I've read books where the storyline is bogged down with more comparisons than I care to read. Sometimes the author thinks "like" and "as" are her best friend, but that's when I start rolling my eyes. And you don't want to induce eye-rolling. But that doesn't mean you stay away from comparisons all the time. Sometimes it can help improve the overall length of a scene as well as offer a connection to your reader if you use something that takes a detailed, abstract description and boils it down to a simple idea. And it can help get your point across more quickly.

NARROW DOWN WHAT REALLY NEEDS TO BE IN YOUR SCENE

Taking a scene and creating a long-winded mess or being so sparse with details that your reader has no idea of setting and time can create some bad hang-ups for your manuscript as a whole. As an example, I have one manuscript where I'm describing the few belongings a character is packing away after he quits his job. I don't make a detailed laundry list of every article in his duffle bag, but instead narrow the items down to about three things that speak volumes of what will come later on in the story: A photo of a girl he was once sweet on, a Nazi pin his brother had stolen from a dead soldier and later gave to him as a gift, and the last birthday card his dead father gave him. Each item is important and each one speaks volumes of the people and circumstances surrounding the characters that gave them to him. Put into perspective what you need in a scene and why. Will it strengthen the manuscript? Or will it bog down the scene?

I could probably go on and on with other ways to polish your prose, but that's my short list for now. Let me know if there's something you struggle with, either in your own writing, or in that of something you've read!