on Fiction University:

Sometimes the answer to making a scene work is inside the scene itself.

I’ve been struggling with a major turning point chapter revision the past week, and one scene was really giving me a headache. It’s the end of Act Two, and the scene that triggers my protagonist’s Dark Night of the Soul and All Is Lost moments. So yeah, it’s important.

What’s worse, is that I knew how the chapter needed to end (because of those oh-so-critical moments), I just wasn’t sure how to get there based on where the story was after all the new revisions. I had to connect Point A with Point B, mixing the original mystery plot with the new personal subplot I’d added.

This scene depended on my protagonist getting face-to-face with the antagonist’s minion and realizing something world-shattering about himself and the Big Problem of the plot. And after all the revising I’d done, I had no idea why that minion was in the scene now.

-bangs head on keyboard repeatedly-

I began my standard “stuck in a scene” process. I called one of my crit buddies and we talked through it. It helped, but not enough, because while I confirmed that that minion absolutely did indeed need to be there for the whole third act (let alone the novel) to work, and I finally figured out why he was there, I still didn’t know how he’d come face-to-face with my protagonist—which was the entire point of the scene!

So I asked him.

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