usually want to dramatize the most important or interesting parts of
the story, while relying on exposition to get across essential but less
interesting information.Requirements of Scenes
z An individual scene must meet at least two requirements at the same
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must be interesting in its own right. In other words, a writer needs to
balance the scene’s position in the whole story with its own inherent
drama. The way to achieve this balance is to remember that a scene
should be no longer than it needs to be for its purpose within the story
as a whole.
z These two balanced requirements—the intent of the narrative and the
inherent interest of the scene—can vary enormously from one narrative
to another.
o George Pelecanos’s hard-boiled detective novel 7KH&XW is a
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Its young detective, Spero Lucas, occasionally takes time out
from the case he’s working on to have an erotic interlude with
a young woman. Such scenes move at the same brisk pace as
the rest of the book, and they serve to tell us something we
wouldn’t otherwise know about Spero, but because they aren’t
central to the story, they tend to be much shorter and more
expository than the scenes that advance Spero’s investigations.
o In a more expansive narrative, such as 8O\VVHV or 0RE\'LFN,
a scene can go on for pages simply because the author thinks
it is inherently interesting. Melville, for example, devotes long
passages or even whole chapters to describing the work of a
whaling vessel, the natural history of whales, and other topics.
These scenes advance the overall purpose of the book, which
is to evoke a way of life in as much detail as possible, but they
aren’t necessarily concerned with advancing the plot.o And with some books, the point of the novel isn’t the plot at all
but the individual scenes that make up the plot. Even though