Scenes, advice, and complexity

“Every scene must cause or lead into the next scene.”

I ran across this particular bit of writing advice recently; it was followed by a couple of tips such as “cut any scene that isn’t caused by the scene immediately before it.”

Wow, that means Ian M. Banks should have cut every other chapter out of Use of Weapons. Which, unsurprisingly, means losing half the story.

Nonlinear fiction is kind of an obvious exception (although the perpetrator of this particular bit of writing advice didn’t allow for any exceptions), but this “rule” also eliminates braided novels (where the three-or-more apparently independent storylines don’t come together until the end), as well as a lot of multiple-viewpoint “bestseller style” books that skip from character to character in widely different locations or situations.

OK, this person gave themselves a bit of an out by saying a scene could “lead into” the next one, rather than sticking to strict causation. Even so, the pronouncement forbids a lot of perfectly workable (and saleable!) techniques and story structures, some of which are both effective and popular. A strict reading would ban all but the most linear storylines – complex plots and subplots, after all, often require scenes that don’t pay off until several scenes or even chapters later.

How do people come up with these notions?

Never mind; I think I know. It’s a combination of overreaction to some fairly common problems, and oversimplification of the recommended fix in an attempt to make it more broadly applicable.

The common problem is the writer who gets distracted by shiny cool bits around the edges of the story, and eventually goes off in so many directions that they lose track of their main story. It shows up quite often in fat, multiple-viewpoint books, where the writer invents a new minor viewpoint character (say, the surfer dude whose ambition is to surf a tsunami) and then gets so intrigued by them that they give the dude a new subplot that starts taking over more and more of the book…and then they invent the dude’s uptight physics professor girlfriend, who is suddenly even more interesting than the surfer dude, and the next thing you know, the writer is talking about wave research and the politics of tsunami-identification in Japan, instead of the murder mystery in New York City that the book is supposed to be about.

Unfortunately, focusing writers on cause-and-effect scenes (or “leading into” the next scene) won’t necessarily solve this problem. It isn’t difficult to come up with a series of causes-and-effects that takes the reader from the detective’s interview with the surfer dude, to the surfer dude’s resulting upset making him head for his girlfriend, who is just about to leave for the research center in Japan…and next thing you know, the only way to get the story back on track is to have the detective start extradition proceedings.

The difficulty here is that there isn’t just one possible problem to solve. From the reader’s perspective, the problem could be that they wanted to read the murder mystery, and the tsunami research in Japan has nothing whatever to do with the murder – it’s just more interesting to the writer. If that’s the problem, cutting the surfer-dude-and-girlfriend parts and putting them in another book is a useful solution.

But possibly the murder mystery does tie in to the tsunami research … it just takes too long to get there. There are several possible fixes for this. The first is to tighten up the word count between the “digression” into tsunami research and the realization (on the part of the reader) that the research is a big factor in the murder. The second is to drop a lot more hints a lot sooner about the tie-in, so the reader knows this will all come back around to the murder eventually.

The third is trickier, because it depends on why the reader thinks it is taking “too long” to get back to the story. A reader who trusts a particular author – who knows or believes that this author won’t pad the middle of the book with totally irrelevant material – will be more willing to wait for the revelation that the research is the motive behind the murder (and when it comes, the revelation will deepen the trust that reader has in that author). A reader who adores the author’s loving descriptions of sunsets on the waves may be having enough fun that they’re willing to put up with delaying the “main story.” But there has to be some factor that pleases the reader enough to keep them reading, even when the material seems to have veered away from what they expected to read.

Unfortunately, “make the reader trust you more” and “give the reader something to really enjoy” are vague; “stay focused on the connection to the main story” and “tighten it up” are general; and none of these recommendations is the kind of pithy, easy-to-remember instruction that brings people back to a blog post or how-to-write book. So someone ends up oversimplifying it all into “Make sure every scene causes or leads into the next scene.”

It’s not horrible advice … for a straightforward, linear story. But not everyone wants to write straightforward, linear stories. Complex stories are spider-webs. Forcing them into a simple cause-and-effect progression destroys the very structure and pattern that makes them work, like trying to unravel a spiderweb into a single straight thread.