How to Write a Scene

A Guide to Creating Conflict and Tension in Every Scene

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use scene objectives to create conflict, tension, and stakes in your story.

The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever received came from my screenwriting professor, Roberto Busó-García. At the beginning of our course, he said to our class, “Dialogue is what characters do to each other.” In western storytelling, each line of dialogue in a story is meant to bring the speaking character closer to their goal. Conflict arises when one character’s completion of a goal orchestrates another character’s failure of their respective goal. This success at the cost of another’s failure is exactly what we mean when we say effective stories create consequences. 

When I was an editor for a literary magazine, the number one reason why I rejected a story was because the story had no consequences. In western storytelling, ideally every single paragraph (especially at the beginning!) brings the protagonist closer to—or further from—the concrete thing they want to win, stop, escape, or retrieve by the end of the story.

In order to create opportunities for the protagonist to make progress toward their goal, we need to create scene objectives for every character in the story.

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Taking a Break

Before we dive into the lesson, I want to note that I will be taking a break from Craft with Kat. I’ve started my revision for Good People, and working on this book will be my main focus for the rest of this year. 

All that said, paid subscriptions will pause on Sunday, August 4th. I will share an update again on December 15th. Between now and then, I may occasionally pop into your inbox with free posts about writing and revision.

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A few weeks ago, I started reading Steve Almond’s craft memoir, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories. The book opens with an account of Almond’s trip to China as a visiting creative writing instructor. He reports that the lesson—and the trip as a whole—was quite the disaster, but one seventh grader in his class stood up and read a flash piece about “the bicycle she had coveted since she was a child.” In the piece, she recounts how much she wanted the “gleaming red machine with silver handlebars and tassels,” how her parents denied her the bike because it would distract from her studies, how she obsessively dreamt of riding the bike each night. Then, one day when no one was around, she rode it all the way to the next town, to the moon, and never came back.

After the student finished reading, Almond writes that there was a “sustained silence, as if [their class] were in church.” This girl’s story is so beautifully compelling because we—as the audience—know exactly what she wants (the bicycle) and we know what this concrete, physical goal represents for her: freedom from her parents, from their expectations of her and her education.

I recently started working on a fantasy novel to heal my writing burn out. Since I read this anecdote in Almond’s book, I’ve been asking myself: How can every single paragraph in my story create the same literal and metaphorical desire?

In other words, I ask myself: what is my protagonist’s bicycle?

As a whole, every scene in effective stories has a bicycle. This bicycle is the scene objective that keeps the tension taut, the conflict compelling, and the reader reading.

How to Write a Scene Objective

In general, an effective goal for a protagonist can be broken down into four types: