When to use scene breaks

[cidetraq]

Hello,

I'm writing science fiction short stories and I noticed that I tend to use a lot of scene breaks. Maybe it's because I have many short scenes in the already short story. When do you use a scene break and when don't you? Is it a weakness to use them every time you're switching scenes?

 

[Phyrebrat]

It's a hard one to answer because the scene's job determines how long it should be.

Are the time gaps in between your scenes short or long? If short you can probably combine with use of ###.

Short scenes can give a certain anxious feel to the story which can work for you. But obviously the opposite is true, too.

The unhelpful answer (but truth) is the scene is as long as it needs to be.

pH

 

[Gonk the Insane]

When do you use a scene break and when don't you? Is it a weakness to use them every time you're switching scenes?

Well, I've always thought that a scene break should always be used when switching scenes (unless it's the end of the chapter) - though I'm happy for wiser heads here to correct me. If you're concerned about it though, @cidetraq, one area to look at might be what you define as a scene. Which may be a slippery area - more art than science - but I think in general terms a scene ends when either switching POV (point of view), moving to a different location, skipping a (significant) passage of time (e.g. picking up the story the following morning), or (and apologies this is a bit nebulous) a shift in tone/emphasis in the narrative that marks the section as different to the previous one. There may be others...

The reason I ask about how you define a scene is I remember when I started writing and was trying to wrap my head around when/where scene breaks should occur, and I think I ended up with way more than I needed. I seem to remember I was breaking scenes every time I skipped a period of time, but it's possible to do this within a scene in a sentence or two without needing a break. For example, in a journey-type story, you could break the scene and start the next with, "The next morning Bob rose with the dawn and set off on the road again." But this passage of time could also be incorporated into a scene with something like, "The next day followed the same pattern as the previous: rain, and wind, and an empty road. The day after that was just as dull. Then someone stabbed him*."

Just an idea but one thing to look at might be to see if some of your scenes could actually be one scene that just needs something to bridge them together. Having said that, there's a lot of variation from author to author as to how long a scene can be. Some keep them short and snappy, others (Terry Goodkind and Tad Williams spring to mind) can keep a scene going for seven years**.

It's been a while since I read it, but I think Jack Bickham's book, Scene & Structure, may cover some of this (and even if not, it's still a great book and is definitely worth a read).


*It needed livening up and I just couldn't resist
**Perhaps a slight exaggeration

 

[Cathbad]

It's a hard one to answer because the scene's job determines how long it should be.

Are the time gaps in between your scenes short or long? If short you can probably combine with use of ###.

Short scenes can give a certain anxious feel to the story which can work for you. But obviously the opposite is true, too.

The unhelpful answer (but truth) is the scene is as long as it needs to be.

pH

^^This.

However, I have broken up a long scene into three parts, for two reasons: 1) Other things were happening at the same time, and 2) The result of the scene would have a very strong impact on the storyline.

 

[HareBrain]

I think it makes a difference that the OP says they write short stories. For my taste, I think you should be careful of scene breaks in a short story -- and at the start of a novel, come to that. They can put me off as a reader if they come too early in something I'm trying to get into. Segueing the scene with a new paragraph and a "Five hours later, Henry found himself up to his eyes in lemon curd" for me is probably smoother and easier, even if it is a bit more "narratorial".

 

[cidetraq]

Thanks all. I'm writing bigger scenes for this story than for my previous one, so I'm kind of doing it by location- first they're underground, then at a school, then another place, etc.
Another question- when do I know when my story is too dialogue-heavy? I feel like this one might be, but I'm using dialogue to advance characters, tell the history of the world, so maybe it's OK to use more dialogue?

 

[Cathbad]

Dialogue is good! I've never had a problem reading "too much" dialogue.

 

[tinkerdan]

I use scene breaks a lot.
So much that one reader was annoyed by them.
However part of that was that due to idiosyncrasies with e-books removing scene breaks in formatting and I started including a set of characters--
~.~
something like that to break them up; and that was what was annoying.

As to too much dialogue. Dialogue is good when it's good dialogue.

Be wary of dialogue that is world building and info dumping and try to either balance it out or find another way.
I had some readers annoyed with a block of info that came in dialogue and they suggested that it would have worked better in narrative--some of them were other writers so there is that to consider.