In critiquing stories for critters.org, I regularly see stories by beginning writers that do not have scene breaks in appropriate places, or use no scene breaks at all. Often, these stories read like an enormous run-on sentence. They remind me of following someone around with a video camera that's always on. Today's tip is about the importance of breaking a story up into scenes.

First, some basic mechanics. If you look at a published work of fiction, you'll notice that there are nearly always breaks in the text between scenes. These are usually shown by a single blank line, although some publishers use decorative embellishments, large initial capitals, or other ways of marking a break stronger than a paragraph.

In preparing a manuscript, most writers indicate a scene break with a single "#" character, centered, on a line by itself. In the old days of manual typesetting, this was a code to tell the typesetter to insert a blank line of type. Some writers use asterisks, or three characters instead of one, or don't bother to center the break characters. If the market you are submitting to does not require a certain form, any of these variations is fine.

What do scene breaks do for a story? They

• help eliminate uninteresting transitions,
• create a sense of pace,
• emphasize dramatic moments, and
  
• make the story more inviting to read.

Beginning writers tend to describe everything that happens to the main character (the video camera thing).Suppose the story's main character, Jack, has a fight with his girlfriend, storms out of her apartment, buys a bottle of whisky, goes home, gets drunk, and contemplates suicide. This could be written as one long narrative, so that we see Jack going down the stairs, Jack getting in his car, Jack turning onto Washington Street, Jack noticing the liquor store, Jack parking his car, — you get the idea.

But most of this "action" is just boring, routine stuff. It doesn't move the plot forward or tell us something new about the character. The story is much improved if you leave the fight at its peak moment (over-the-top verbal abuse, kicking over the furniture, whatever) and use a scene break to cut to Jack at home with a half-empty bottle of whisky in front of him and morbid thoughts on his mind. What happened in between can be inferred with no loss.

Note, however, that if you "cut" like this without using an actual scene break, the reader will be baffled. (I thought they were fighting? Where did the whisky come from? What happened?) The scene break is what tells the reader you've jumped ahead. It's necessary.

A story divided into scenes has a sense of pace, like a good movie or TV show. You're ticking off scenes, passing landmarks, moving forward. Experienced writers use this to regulate the sense of motion in a book or story. Short, snappy scenes give the feel of plunging quickly ahead. Longer scenes slow the action down and give readers (and the characters) a chance to mull things over.

Like the last line of a paragraph or the last page of a book, the last paragraph of a scene is a "power spot". It will stand out in the reader's attention. This means you can use the end of a scene to emphasize a dramatic moment in your story. It can be a peak of conflict (as in the example I used earlier), an unexpected revelation, or something else you want to draw the reader's attention to. Sometimes important moments can get lost in a sea of text. The scene break ensures that the reader notices them.

Although I love to read, I can be intimidated by long, unbroken stretches of text that go on for pages. If I'm thinking of getting up to go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, or open the window, I'll look ahead to find the next scene break in a story: Ah, just a page and a half more—let me finish this scene. I also appreciate scene breaks when I have just a few minutes to read, and know I won't be finishing the whole story or chapter. What often happens when I read "just one more scene" is that the scene ends on a strong, dramatic hook, and so I want to keep going. It's like the scene in ET when Elliot leads ET into his bedroom with a trail of Reese's Pieces. You can lure your reader to finish your story by using scenes in just this way.

There are some situations where a scene break is almost obligatory. Ignore these at your peril:

1. When you change the point of view or viewpoint character.
2. When you change location.
3. When you leap ahead (or back) in time.

You can change scene when none of these apply, too. This will usually be because something happens that sends the character off in a whole different direction. In our example, if Jack and his girlfriend are having a fight, and in the midst of it she has a seizure and collapses, a scene break would be effective to highlight her collapse, with the following scene showing Jack's reactions to this turn of events.

I won't go into detail about how to write an effective scene. That's a whole other topic, and I'm not entirely comfortable with giving cookie-cutter advice on the subject. However, I think most good scenes bring the reader into strong identification with the scene's viewpoint character, focus on a single note of tension or conflict, and culminate with some irreversible plot development. Particularly in a short story, every scene should propel the plot and deepen the character.

A final word on writing a scene: Beginners sometimes think each scene needs to begin with a description: the furnishings of the room, the weather, the character's appearance. This is usually a bad idea. If I put a story down to go to the bathroom, and come back to find myself stuck in an interior decorator's notebook, I may just stop then and there. It's much better to pull the reader right into the main character's desires and actions, and work the description into the scene later, as needed.