Masterclass snapshots: why it helps to construct your novel in scenes

Here is a great post about constructing your novel in scenes. I use Scrivener which is very conducive to using this technique.

Nail Your Novel

Here’s another great discussion from my recent Guardian self-editing masterclass.

What is a scene? And why does it matter to know that?

Those in the know will probably all have their own slightly different way to define a scene, but this is mine. I think of a scene as the smallest unit of a story’s events.

Like a scene in a movie, a scene in a novel will be confined within a location, or a set of characters. But not necessarily. A scene might cover a number of locations, characters and times if it’s a linking sequence, such as a journey or a flashback or a chunk of back story. So I find the most helpful, graspable definition is to think of it as a step in the storyline, or the reader’s understanding.

Why does it help to think about this?

It helps the writer break the book…

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