Scene Writing: Do you script them?

Last spring, before I realized I was starting these blogs, I sat down with 15 years’s worth of background notes on my fantasy world and organized them. Then I spent the early summer writing down everything pertinent that I’d never written down. I created a digital map and started thinking about scenes. I realized, at some point, that I simply didn’t know enough about scene writing to produce the quality of fiction I’m looking for, so I did some research.

Here are a couple of links I find helpful.

Holly Lisle’s scene creation workshop talks about writing scenes that move a story along, and provides easy-to-follow examples. I’ve picked up more than one trick from Holly Lisle over the years.

Randy Ingermanson explains scene-sequel structure and motivation-reaction units. I had to to read two or three articles to get the info that’s all in this one, so I find it very handy.

As with all advice, it’s important to apply the parts that work to your own writing process and not get hung up on the rest. I don’t use things like this in a formulaic way, but I’ve found the techniques in these two articles extremely helpful, and they’ve improved my scene writing.

I’m thinking I’ll have the social media network far enough along by mid-July to get back to the fiction. Here’s a question for all you writers out there. Have you ever scripted scenes before writing them? I’m thinking of sitting down and scripting about 10 – just basic stuff like location, people present, a summary of conversation/action, and so forth. Then writing them all from the scripts. I’m thinking this might help move that project forward.