Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 12: Specialized Scene Techniques

If you hit a troublesome plot situation, the answer is nearly always to bend the “classic structure”, not get rid of it.

1. Scene interruption

This is something to do deliberately for specific effect, not randomly for “realism”. Use them to intensify already strong suspense in a crucial scene. Ideally, set a clock going to intensify suspense further.

Most commonly, scene interruptions come from a character emerging from the hidden story. They may demand a brief scene of their own.

The interruption can function as a stimulus to change the motives of a character in the main scene.

A scene within a sequel can be used to bring in backstory, or jar a character loose from being stuck in emotion and unable to think. This can be achieved either with a sympathetic character offering encouragement, or a hostile character offering criticism. Or the interruption may give a clue which enables the thought portion of the sequel to conclude.

If you want to place a sequel at the end of a chapter for dramatic purposes, you can delay it by placing a scene straight after another scene with no time to react until later. Or if the scene-end disaster is so profound that it needs a big decision, but the plot is so pressurized that new events will occur almost at once, you can delay the sequel in order to do it justice.

Sometimes a scene can be started with a goal announced not by the viewpoint character but by another. Tends to be more early in novels (when the main character is more passive) or at major transitions in space, when the viewpoint character is still disoriented.

The viewpoint character’s job in such scenes is to figure out the non-viewpoint character’s goal as clearly as possible. The viewpoint character then opposes the goal, creating conflict and getting the scene moving.

The disaster still strikes the viewpoint character, meaning that the non-viewpoint character generally attains the scene goal. (Antagonists should also generally attain their scene goals, even if they are viewpoint characters, because that’s bad for the protagonist.)

Flashbacks: these are most common in the thought portion of a sequel, while the character reviews story events and possible new actions.

If you have space, you can play flashbacks as full moment-by-moment scenes, eventually returning to the sequel where you left off. The danger of this is making the old events too interesting, so that the transition back is jarring, or bogging down the forward momentum of the story. It’s usually better to summarize.

You can also use a fragment of a past scene, just the critical moment, and summarize the rest.

“All-dialog” scenes are not actually just dialog; they need attributions (he said), internalisation, description, stage action. Otherwise they’re hard to visualise and become too abstract.

An “all-action” scene also needs some internalisation in response to some of the stimuli: repeating the scene goal, orienting the reader to the viewpoint character’s interpretation of what’s happening, what the options are and what the character will try next, showing secondary goals as they develop, conveying the character’s feelings.

Manoeuvres against an unseen opponent: create conflict by lengthening the internalisations, with the viewpoint character considering alternatives and possible disasters, trying to interpret any sensory evidence of what the opponent is doing, and imagining what they might be doing.

Multiple-agenda scenes occur when the hero faces a group of people, who have different agendas. Keep the viewpoint character clinging to the scene goal despite the confusion, and have one antagonist stronger and more vocal than the others, while the secondary antagonists interrupt the main fight at intervals (which is seen by the hero, and possibly the antagonist, as an impediment to resolving the main conflict).

The protagonist can win some of the side conflicts, because this makes the other opponents more determined and increases the impact of the final disaster.

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