Scene Changes?

You just need to get each scene to achieve its purpose, I think. So if one scene is about character A meeting character B, then once you've established that they've met and what their reactions were / what happened, then it's OK to jump through time/space to the next scene that is important to the story - if the next thing that's interesting is that A goes out to dinner, write that, rather than describing how he left B and went on the bus etc etc.

Does that make sense?

I reckon as long as you make the time/place identifiable, the reader will follow however often you jump around...

*scratches head* Why would they not be "okay" to use? It's your story, and honestly, you can put a scene break wherever you darned well please, especially for nano ;) Many published novels might have scenes anywhere from many pages long, to a single line. It all depends on the effect you're trying to achieve and what you're trying to tell.

Title: Breaking Light
Goal: Finishing this novel. (Probably be 100k-120k at this rate.)
Sanity level: Do you even need to ask?

Just wondering ....

What are the most common or preferred ways to denote a scence change within a chapter? Two or three line breaks? A row of asterisks? A fancy horizontal line? Nothing?

How do YOU format a scene change?

I put an asterix in the center then continue on a couple of lines later.

I also share some concerns with Satachan on scene changes because I find that my story feels somewhat disjointed (at least to me while writing). It feels like my scenes aren't flowing. They're separate.

Any advice?

I iz teh Batman. I haz built-in pecs.

2007: Waddle 118K

Is there some way to demonstrate early that all of your storylines are related, or at least to suggest that they will eventually come together?

Dale

2006: Jeremy Comes Home (winner)
2007: Many Happy Returns (winner)
2008: The Three Faces of Magic (tentative title)

It's not that they're different storylines.

It's like... okay...

umm...

Scene 1: Mary and Peter meet at the shop.

Scene 2: Mary has dinner with her family.

Scene 3: Mary gets a bad mark at school.

They all play a part somehow but I can't seem to join 'em up.

I iz teh Batman. I haz built-in pecs.

2007: Waddle 118K

I see.

One thing that helps me is to see if I can arrange events so that, most of the time, something that happens in one scene causes something that happens in the next scene.

For example, suppose Mary gets all mooney-eyed at Peter at the shop. Then in the next scene, her infatuation with Peter might play a role. Maybe Mary's annoying little sister just happens to mention during dinner that she saw Peter kissing a cheerleader last night, and she says this at just the moment when Mary has taken a big mouthful of meatloaf (which happens to be way too hot to put in her mouth anyway). Mary, embarrassed and with a burned mouth, runs to her room and slams the door. All of this leaves Mary so upset that she can't concentrate on her test (and also, during the test Peter is sitting next to that witch of a cheerleader), which is why she gets a bad mark.

So her infatuation in the shop scene causes her reaction to her evil little sister's comments. And her reaction to learning about Peter and the cheerleader causes the bad mark on the test. And so on.

Dale

2006: Jeremy Comes Home (winner)
2007: Many Happy Returns (winner)
2008: The Three Faces of Magic (tentative title)

Raymond Obstfeld, in his book "Crafting Scenes", states that "generally, a scene takes place in one location (though the location might be moving, as with a car train or airplane)".

He also mentions that scene isnt determined by length, but by focus on a specific purpose.

He says a lot more than that, given that the entire book is devoted to scene creation, but in a nutshell that's what helped me the most in deciding what a scene was.

Keep in mind though, that for the purposes of NaNo you don't want to spend too much time on deciding this kind of thing. Just write. Break the scene when and wherever you feel the need. Like if you realize your paragraph is 2 pages long you might want to break just to give your eyes a rest - whether it fits or not. When it's time to edit then you can play around with more accurate scene splits and placements. Besides, afterwards you will have the benefit of knowing the flow (if there is any after 30 days of writing non-stop - lol) of your storyline (again, if there is any) so scene breaks will come a bit easier.

Oh, and P.S....

In my humble opinion (and I have sold oh so many books that makes me an expert....not) it's not a bad thing if two scenes don't 'flow' completely. In fact, you could use a scene to completely change venues and point of view or character focus without there even being a connection at that specific point. With my last year's NaNo my chapters were divided by timeline - so all the events that took place within one given time period became separate scenes. They weren't always immediately connected (focus changes from Mary eating supper, to Joe going to work) but in the bigger picture - the chapter as a whole - they flowed well.

....er....rather, they flowed as well as any NaNo material ever could before the first revision... LOL!

Okay. I'll stop now!

If you're writing from the third-person omniscient, the feeling that your scenes are disjointed can't really be helped on the first draft. The important thing to keep in mind is for each scene to DO something. Don't switch to a character just because it's his turn in line, and then go on for five pages about how he sat there and felt sorry for himself because he had nothing more interested to do and X_female_character looked at him funny.
The second draft really helps for this POV; your scenes felt disjointed initially because you had a bigger story in mind. Now you know where it goes, and how precisely it gets there, so you can blend it all together much more effectively.
If you really want to tighten it up, take a scene and write it as a script. Then go back and turn that script into prose. It'll be much tighter and flow a lot faster; just watch out for big stretches of dialogue punctuated by 'he sighed'.

"I'd advise you not to shoot my messengers. THEY'VE been advised to shoot back."

I scene change frequently, and they don't tend to be very long. I'm also a shameless POV jumper. I hate writing a scene change that has *gasp* the SAME character as the previous scene! I usually have at least 2, preferably 3 different threads on the go that I hop between for each change. That does make spotting them very easy, as in one scene Flora's in the pub and in the next one Issa's in the Council chamber.
Formating wise, I find a line break usually does the trick.

2008: Devon Davies' Destiny
2007: Cold Spell - won! (finished at 96,406)
2006: The Diabolist's Debt - failed
2005: Technomancer - won! (finished at 99,323)

Well, what I normally do when I want a scene change, I finish up the scene I was working on, ex: Tom just met Harry and they are saying goodbye, then I either paragraph break it, which is double space the paragraph apart from where the next scene of the story will be, or if your whole story is breaks like that between paragraphs, I usually go for the ~*~ in the middle of the page for my breaks and onto the next scene. If you want more examples look at fictional books for help.

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"I don't care about breeding. A sword doesn't need a fine lineage, it just needs to be sharp" ~ Luca Blight

Just my two cents/experience but P.L.E.A.S.E. DO NOT put a horizontal line! It WILL haunt you later! I did that, and now they REFUSE to come out! Literally, I can't make it come out, all I can do is move all of my story above the line to get it at the end of the document. (If anyone knows how I can get it out I'd be VERY grateful).

[IMG]http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/9154/mybanner49037b14251b6tv8.jpg[/IMG]
NaNo #: 2
Nervous l

Marisa, if you don't mind losing any other formatting like bold, italics, centering, different font sizes etc, then you can try copy-pasting all your text into a notepad, open a brand new word proecessing file, then selecting all your text from the notepad file, copy and paste it into the new WP file.

Actually, try Wordpad first, that might work to get rid of the horizontal lines, but keep your formatting.

I've had that happen - usually in Open Office (Gawd I love hating that program!!!). Once in a while it works if I highlight from the very end of the last sentance before the line, all the way down to the first word after the line and then delete.

Mostly it doesn't, though.

So I think I'm missing something. But you can try that if you haven't already.

Also, for some reason my program automatically changes the "3 asterisks in a row" to the horizontal line. VERYYY infuriating!

I know - not really any help. >.<

i use * * * or ~*~*~*~*~*~ or something like that

monbade

Your scenes can be as long or as short as necessary. From several pages to a single line, I've done about all.

For scene breaks, it's really up to your style. I usually either go with just a line break between paragraphs or I go with asterisk-five spaces-asterisk-five spaces-asterisk (* * *). Just so people recognize that there's a shift there, whatever works. Usually, however, it's best to open after scene changes with some sort of time or place identifier. So something like:

"I left her while she was still asleep - still wearing my oversized T-shirt and her lacy panties - perhaps dreaming of times when things were better between us.

* * *

I was sitting in the park when I'm sure the first of the autumn leaves fell into the lake. Etc. Etc. Etc."

You can go with a hard break, but then in the next scene you identify a new time and place - in this example, early autumn in the park near the lake.

Procrastination: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

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