The five patterns below are described by their underlying mechanisms rather than their surface symptoms, so that the remedy follows from the cause. Each ends with a published book that commits the fault and succeeds, because a pattern that is sometimes right must be diagnosed rather than banned. The Reference chapter’s full catalogue adds five further patterns: the one-note scene, the runaway set piece, the meeting to decide, the scene that resolves at its own climax, and the over-polished second-draft scene.
The purposeless scene
Symptom. The scene occupies pages and shifts no value in any domain. It is usually pleasant and often well observed, and it cannot be summarised in the language of consequence.
Mechanism. A satellite has been given a kernel’s resources. The scene exists because it was written, and it was written because the writer needed it: drafting by discovery requires passages that find the story, and those passages are scaffolding rather than narrative. The writer needed to write it; the reader does not need to read it.
Remedy. Run the extraction test in both directions, then work down a ladder of remedies: compress the scene into a paragraph of summary, fuse it with a neighbouring scene that has a job, relocate its one load-bearing sentence into a scene that already exists, and cut it only as a last resort. Most purposeless scenes contain one sentence that matters.
Exception. Chapter 94 of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), “A Squeeze of the Hand”, has Ishmael and his shipmates kneading lumps out of cooling spermaceti until Ishmael finds himself squeezing his companions’ hands in a rhapsody of fellow feeling. No plot value moves, no relationship the novel later uses alters, and Ahab is absent. The chapter is indispensable because in this novel texture is the argument: Moby-Dick is a book about whether the world can be known, and its method is to accumulate ways of attending to one object. Remove the chapter and the book loses its one moment at which Ishmael’s alternative to Ahab’s monomania is felt rather than described.
The redundant scene
Symptom. A second scene establishes what the reader already knows: another demonstration of a cruelty, another quarrel on the same terms, another refusal to answer the same question.
Mechanism. The value shift has already been banked. Once a reader has registered a change of state, the state is changed, and a scene that performs the change again asks the reader to learn something twice, which reads as the book losing confidence.
Remedy. Choose the better-placed of the two scenes, usually the earlier unless the later is better made, and delete the other. Differentiating them does not help: a redundant scene made more interesting is still redundant.
Exception. In chapter 5 of Kafka’s The Trial (1925; translated by Breon Mitchell, 1998), Josef K. opens a lumber-room door in his bank and finds two warders being flogged on account of his own complaint about them. The next evening he opens the same door and finds the same scene unchanged, and shuts it. The repetition is the novel’s argument: in a world where the trial has no stages and the court no address, the discovery that yesterday is still happening is the only kind of discovery available to K.
The expository scene in disguise
Symptom. The scene has the furniture of drama (a room, two people, someone pouring a drink) and exists to deliver information. Characters ask questions whose answers they already know, and one of them explains the situation with unusual fluency.
Mechanism. Information is being supplied rather than transacted. It arrives without cost to the person parting with it, so the scene has no engine and the briefing has been dressed as a scene.
Remedy. Put the information in the hands of someone who does not want to give it, in front of someone who should not hear it. The three components are reluctance, an audience and a cost, and any two usually suffice.
Exception. The Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990) is a long, uninterrupted exposition of a theory of freedom and authority, recited by Ivan to his brother Alyosha in a tavern. It succeeds because the exposition is the crisis: Ivan is not informing Alyosha but trying to break his faith, so the listener is at risk, and the speech exposes the speaker. Alyosha’s silence and his closing kiss are the scene’s events.
The errand scene
Symptom. A character goes somewhere in order to do something, and the going is dramatised: the drive, the queue, the waiting room. The scene’s real content occupies its last fifth.
Mechanism. Transitional material has been mistaken for a scene because it runs continuously into one. Its plot function is to move the character to the next place, which summary does better, so the errand scene is the plainest case of choosing the wrong speed.
Remedy. Use summary (she drove to the shop) or an ellipsis, cutting from the decision to the arrival and letting the reader supply the road. In the household novel, Elena’s drive across town after the doorway is not narrated as a journey at all; what the truck holds is her decision not to telephone her mother, which Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) treats as a sequel.
Exception. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens on an errand, Clarissa walking through London to buy flowers for her party, and the walk fills the novel’s opening pages. The errand is the occasion rather than the subject: what is narrated is a consciousness, and the street supplies the stimuli (a car, an aeroplane writing in the sky, an acquaintance, a memory of Bourton) that let a mind be shown. The value shifts are interior, and the walk is how they are delivered.
The unresisted want
Symptom. The viewpoint character wants something specific and gets it, at no cost, from someone with no reason to refuse. The scene passes the want test and fails the resistance test.
Mechanism. A reader’s engagement with a scene depends on uncertainty about its outcome, and an unresisted want has no outcome to be uncertain about. The scene reads as administration: something is arranged, and the book moves on.
Remedy. Relocate the resistance inside the character, so that the asking costs her something she was not prepared to spend; change what is wanted, so that she comes for the key and leaves wanting to know why he would not look at her; or grant the want and make the granting the disaster, as in Great Expectations.
Exception. Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) follows an English writer who flies to Athens to teach a summer writing course and, in chapter after chapter, listens to the people she meets talk about their lives, their marriages and their work. She asks little, the reader is seldom told what she wants, and almost nothing she wants is opposed. The book holds attention because the engine has been moved to the speakers, each of whom is trying to tell a version of themselves that the telling undermines, and because the narrator’s own situation emerges by inference from what she chooses to hear. The want and the resistance are present, but not in the viewpoint character.
See also: the Reference catalogue of ten patterns; The Transition (Chapter 5), on the drive that becomes a cut.