Don’t Abuse Scene Breaks

This week, my daughter Lisa Shiel (an author, editor, and book designer) posted the following Twitter update:

Yes, you can have too many scene breaks in a novel. More is not better. Creating a dizzying pace of scene changes can cause motion sickness!

She was in the midst of converting a client’s book file to a Kindle format. The book, as you might have guessed, is all-but-overwhelmed by rampant scene breaks — with some scenes as short as two sentences.

I sometimes wonder if this is the result of authors drawing too much from poorly directed movies and too little from well-written books. Unless your goal is to write a book that can be made into a movie script with little more than text reformatting, you should spend some time contemplating what constitutes a scene.

Movies produced over the past couple decades tend to use the MTV approach to directing and editing — just one short scene followed by a quick cutaway to the next short scene, then repeat for the next two hours. What this does is prevent the viewer from truly identifying with any characters and, sometimes, even grasping what the movie is trying to communicate. If you don’t think movies have changed radically in this regard just watch a few of the classic old movies (by old I mean pre-1960) and then compare them to the box office successes of today.

The same comparisons, unfortunately, can be made between older classics and many novels by many neophyte novelists today. You should not learn the craft of good fiction writing from the movies. Instead, study novels written by the best writers in your chosen genre. The best novels almost always give you a chance to identify and emphasize with the main character(s).

All of which leads back to the whiplash scene break syndrome Lisa tweeted about.

Remember that the purpose of a scene in a novel is to lay out what happens over a defined period of time in a specific place. If you jump to a different location, you probably need a new scene. If you jump forward or back in time, without writing any connecting action, you probably need a new scene.

In many novels, each chapter is a complete scene, and each scene begins a new chapter. However, sometimes you need to skip quickly forward in place or time (or insert a flashback) without including the connecting events or adding some bridge text to make the move. The usual way of doing that is with a scene break, which is typically indicated by a blank line or two or the insertion of a glyph or glyphs (e.g., a few special characters centered on a line between the two paragraphs).

If each scene is fairly long with very different clock, calendar, or map settings, you might want to start a new chapter. There’s nothing wrong with short chapters, either all of them or just an occasional one.

Another common use of the scene break is to allow a third-person narrative to switch point of view from one character to another, sometimes even describing the same events from the other POV. For more on this, see Avoid Mid-Scene Point-of-View Shifts.

If you find yourself writing a really short scene before jumping to another scene, consider an alternative. You might find it simpler, and more enjoyable for the reader, to take a sentence or two to describe (either in narrative or through dialogue) what happened. Then just continue with the current scene or move on the the next — longer, we hope — scene…or chapter.

An abundance of rapid-fire scenes might work well in an action-packed movie that lasts 90 minutes or so. It rarely works as well in a novel that requires hours to read. Take the time to evaluate each scene and determine if it is long enough to be meaningful or if it should be eliminated, rewritten, or worked into the previous and/or following scene (or chapter).

You certainly don’t want your readers to suffer from mental whiplash or motion sickness, right?