Subject: What are Your Options for How to End Your Scenes? 🔚

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What are Your Options for How to End Your Scenes? 🔚
(read online or read on...)

December 18, 2020
Oakland, CA

Hi Friend,
In this article, I discuss your options for how to end your scenes.

After you eat a delicious meal, you’re left with a sensation, usually a feeling of pleasant fullness. The resolution of a meal.

At the other end of the spectrum, when you cross the street and a cyclist whizzes by you, barely missing you, and you rush to get to the sidewalk, your heart is pounding. You are grateful to be alive. Maybe a little angry with the adrenaline pumping through you. The resolution of successfully crossing the street.

You have come through a wonderful or challenging experience and now you feel something.

When you share that feeling from your point of view character, that is the resolution. That is the end of your scene.

In a previous article here, I talked about how to craft scene beginnings and setting the stage for your scene.

Today I’ll talk about scene endings, so that you can expand your novel writing tool kit.

(Thanks to Joan for asking this question at our monthly Insider Hour — open to all newsletter and blog subscribers. Go here to sign up.)

How to End Your Scenes

For your scene endings:

* What do they need to be?
* Why do they need to be that way?
* And, what are some of your choices?

Every part of a scene has a function and a corresponding emotional experience for the reader and for your point of view character.

The ending of your scene is a resolution and can take the form of just a sentence or two. Of course it can be longer.

An Overview of Scene Structure

This model is from Shawn Coyne. You see the lesson in our Plan Your Novel course here: 

https://school.bethbarany.com/courses/30daywc/lectures/256684.

1. Inciting incident
2. Progressive complications
3. Crisis
4. Climax
5. Resolution

Leave Them Wanting More

Joan also asked me about chapter endings.

Chapter endings often break in the middle of a scene, usually at the crisis moment, when the point of view character is faced with a choice. Stop there. Make the reader turn the page to the next chapter to discover how the character responds to the difficult choice they faced at the end of the previous chapter.

You have options on how to end your scenes. Play, explore, and let me know how it goes.

Let me know if you have further questions about scene endings and I can address them in a future post.

Happy Editing and Writing!

♥

Have a happy and creative week!

All my best,

Beth

♥
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ABOUT BETH BARANY

Beth Barany is creativity coach for writers, a teacher, workshop facilitator, and speaker,
 who helps fiction writers experience clarity, so that they can write and polish their novels, and proudly publish them to the delight of their readers.

Owner of the Barany School of Fiction, an online training hub, Beth takes great interest in how humans learn, create, and grow, and includes all her students’ life experiences, including the ancestors, into the moment. 

Along with her husband, Ezra Barany, she offers a year-long group program to help novelists edit and publish their novels. See more here.

Want a course to help you prepare to write your novel? Discover the comprehensive Plan Your Novel course here, co-taught with award-winning, bestselling thriller author, Ezra Barany.

Yearning to publish your manuscript, but not sure if it's any good? Schedule a chat with Beth here to explore your next steps.

She's also an award-winning novelist and writes magical tales of romance, adventure, and mystery to empower women and girls to be the heroes in their own lives. 

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beth@bethbarany.com

Barany School of Fiction

Writer's Fun Zone blog


Photo Credit: by c. 2018 Ezra Barany

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