When is it OK to have a Scene that Doesn't Advance the Plot?

Hi,

As above. There's three main parts to a story. Plot, character and world, and every scene should connect to / advance one of these things. If it doesn't than it probably doesn't belong. But if it does than keep it but assess it according to how it fits your story. What do you want the scene to do? Achieve greater understanding of the MC? Round out the world a bit more? Or push the story along? There's nothing wrong with it doing any of those things. Only if it does none of them.

Cheers, Greg.

 

The reader has to learn something from a scene. It can reveal plot, but it can also reveal character or setting.
Sounds to me a bit like the problem is more with inelegant exposition.

 

As an author you can also come back later, do those scenes and edit them in where they belong. Honestly I've hit against the same sort of thing that you describe and it just sucks all the momentum out of my writing. I've been most successful when I've just leaped in right away and fucked up my character's lives.

 

You are probably right that the ending validates the rest of the scene, or at least it’s attempting to do so. It could be that the rest isn’t validated, and it’s only the ending that works... hard to say. The bigger answer is yes, every scene (chapter) needs to move the plot forward, but the bigger problem is defining what that means. There are different ways of doing so, and they are similar. One is that either questions pertaining to the story must be asked or answered. Another way to look at it is that the plot is something like the Doomsday Clock. Every novel will (or should) have multiple Plot Clocks made up of the internal and external journeys of the characters. If at the end of a scene/chapter all of the Plot Clocks are at the same time as they were at the start of the scene/chapter, you have an issue. Even in an introductory scene, where a character’s external or internal Plot Clock starts at 1.. everything is grand! Singing happy songs! By the end of the scene the clock should move to 2 or beyond. Movement, progression. Static shows weakness.

Now, looking at the scene in question, it would appear that you’ve introduced new characters (Plot Clocks set) and then introduce them to a MC... This will almost automatically move the clocks of both characters in the reader’s mind because they know an author doesn’t slap characters together by coincidence... And it’s better if you make the movement obvious. Now, if their meeting literally ends up meaning nothing, you’ve got an issue, but I doubt that’s likely.

 

Mmm, passages and scenes/chapters are two different things. And of course much depends on definition of “advancing the plot”. I doubt you’ll find many scenes/chapters that do not advance plot/story somehow, even in literary fiction. I do recall one chapter from SoIaF where a character travels... I think it was Arya... the only thing I felt was advanced was her physical position on the planet. It was time passage wasting my reading time far as I could tell... yes, it had Arya ruminating over life, but even that advanced nothing. I’m relying on memory, of course, but it was almost like a sequel for a chapter. And that might’ve been being petty and easily bored, heh heh. When you dig into high end successful genre fiction you’ll find motion, change. And if that change is going to take a while, it’s often foreshadowed, as in Chapter 1 of the Fellowship of the Ring, where right off the bat Tolkien is almost saying “yeah this going to open slow”, but he foreshadows the change with Bilbo not aging and folks saying no good will come of it. Change/advancement should be one the hallmarks of a scene/chapter.

 

I think that's the thing. The scene must engage, interest, entertain even. The information it provides may be peripheral. It may not be strictly necessary to the story. But if it keeps the reader reading, it has done its job. Conversely, a scene full of important information, if it is dull and unwieldy, has not done its job at all.

 

Here’s the thing for me... I see everything as plots and subplots. Character, world? Neah, . Most world and characterization bits are going to move the plot clock on somebody or something, it’s in the nature of things. And when I say move the plot forward, I mean it changes something. This could be the main external plot, the main internal plot, the MC’s internal journey (arc), the MC’s external journey (arc), internal subplot a, b, c, d, etc., external subplot a, b, c, d, etc., the internal or external character arcs of other major players.

I tend to look at this from the POV character of the chapter and what has changed.

A prime example of writing that doesn’t move any plot clock is the prologue to the Fellowship of the Ring... and behold! That’s why they aren’t part of the story, they’re extras.

 

You don't nees to have events that change something. A scene can also reveal something to the audience that will be relevant to future developments. Even if it's background or character exposition. What changes is that the audience knows something they did not before. That's still story progress.

 

If it reveals something that will become relevant... it is change.Character exposition may or may not equal change.

 

It wouldn’t need to advance the main plot, so long as it advances a subplot or character arc... but I haven’t read the original piece in question, so I’ve no idea, LOL. But, my definition is very loose and forgiving.

 

Part of it has to do with the pace and style of your writing. A lot of us will have chapters that are really all about character development, with little or no plot evolution. Character development is just as important as developing the plot. If the readers can’t relate to or sympathize with the characters, then they really won’t care what plot befalls them. Like the red-shirts on the old Star Trek episodes: What? Another one of those died? No tears here. If the entire show was made up of red-shirts, no one would be watching it.

My advice, since it sounds like you’re still in the stages of writing your first draft, is to try not to over-think it. Just finish the complete novel, get all your thoughts and impressions down. Wait until you’re ready to edit the work from start to finish before you decide whether any particular scene was unnecessary or if it needs to be polished and/or expanded. Getting that first draft done is immensely important, no matter how incomplete or rough it may feel.

 

Every scene and hopefully every line has a job to for fill. (advance plot, evoke setting, character and theme) If it's doing none of those it's not worth having. Or if it's only doing one and the next scene is doing the others try and combined the two scenes.

 

I came across an interesting piece of advice from Brandon Mull regarding this. His golden rule for writing is:

Don't bore the reader

As long as you follow that rule, you can get away with almost anything. Of course, you can go overboard by writing lots of interesting but irrelevant scenes. But that would require you to take this to extremes.

Personally, I would simply write the scene (or keep the scene) for now. You can always remove it later. You never know if something that happens in the scene isn't going to be relevant later. I recently wrote a scene at the start of my story where the protagonist walks past a painting depicting some scene. When I wrote it, I simply included the painting to set the scene a bit, thinking I could always take it out or replace it with something more interesting. But as I near the end of the story, I've found that the painting actually foreshadowed some events in a sort of "history repeats itself" kind of way. So it's staying in and it will get polished some more when I rewrite that first scene.