How Do You Know When a Scene Ends

How yous cease a scene determines whether your reader will read another chapter immediately or non. Here are 6 tips for writing scene endings that entice readers to conduct on (with examples):

1. Stop scenes with surprise

When we find stories dull, nosotros might say they were 'predictable'. Unpredictability creates narrative suspense, which is particularly important at the terminate of a scene as it creates frontward momentum leading into your story'due south adjacent events.

Endeavor to come up with ideas for surprising elements that could terminate a scene and jot them downward in bullet points, now. A few examples:

• A man unearths a mysterious, locked box while digging to replant their garden
• A woman arrives at her office 1 evening to stop piece of work for a deadline. Yet she finds her office locked from inside and sees a dimly lit figure rifling through her things
• An elementary schoolhouse pupil receives a completely unexpected birthday nowadays from another kid and wonders what it could be

The above examples show surprising scene endings can be cryptic, menacing, or simply the small, ordinary mysteries that fill a life.

Case of a surprising scene ending: C.Southward. Lewis's The King of beasts, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a much loved portal fantasy classic for younger readers. In the showtime scene of the novel, four siblings are exploring a countryside mansion when the youngest, Lucy, stumbles across a portal to another earth in the back of an antiquarian wardrobe.

She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in amidst the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that information technology was very foolish to close oneself into any wardrobe.

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), p. 12.

Lewis continues with Lucy'south surprise as she finds snow underfoot:

"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" idea Lucy, going still farther in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more than mothballs?" she idea, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold.'

Lewis, p. thirteen.

Lucy explores further and emerges into a snowy wood, where she comes across a faun carrying parcels through the snow. The scene ends with the faun exclaiming 'Goodness gracious me!' at the sight of Lucy.

Thus the initial surprise of the wardrobe containing a world is compounded by the foreign inhabitants Lucy meets there, and the reader is curious about what will happen to Lucy in the following scene.

2. Finish a scene with a situation implying consequences

Crusade and effect, activity and reaction, choice and event – these are the duos that drive stories and keep u.s. hooked.

Ending with a dramatic upshot that has your reader request 'How will this modify things?' or 'What will the consequences of this be?' is a assuming way to go along your story moving.

Information technology would be overkill, perhaps, if yous concluded every scene with shocking dramatics. Yet a petty shock or horror is ofttimes an constructive way to keep your story intriguing.

Consider this example of a scene catastrophe past acclaimed spy thriller author John Le Carré:

Example of a consequential scene ending: John le Carré's The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963)

The opening scene of Le Carré's spy novel shows station caput Alec Leamas anxiously awaiting a double agent at a checkpoint in West Berlin. Although we don't know the full state of affairs yet at this point as readers. All we know is that Leamas is anxiously awaiting someone.

The scene ends with the following sequence of events. Leamas sees a man approaching in the altitude on a wheel – his agent, Karl:

At that moment Karl seemed to hear some sound, sense some danger: he glanced over his shoulder, began to pedal furiously, angle low over the handlebars. There was still the lonely picket on the bridge, and he had turned and was watching Karl.

John le Carré, The Spy who Came in from the Common cold (1963), p. 4.

The scene ends with a shocking turn of events. We know it volition have consequences for Leamas given how anxiously he was awaiting Karl's arrival:

The East German sentry fired, quite carefully, away from them, into his ain sector. The showtime shot seemed to thrust Karl frontwards, the second to pull him back. Somehow he was still moving, still on the cycle, passing the sentry, and the sentinel was all the same shooting at him. Then he sagged, rolled to the ground, and they heard quite clearly the clatter of the bicycle as it fell. Leamas hoped to God he was dead.

Le Carré, p. five.

iii. Cease scenes with suspenseful activeness

Lucy venturing further into the wardrobe (and the woodland world beyond), Karl peddling for his life – the previous examples bear witness how suspenseful activity ending a scene creates intrigue.

The set-up for the end of a scene – for example how Le Carré positions the 'solitary lookout man' on the span – helps to make any surrounding activity suspenseful. Sometimes this is because the reader knows something a character doesn't (the reader knows about the sentry, Karl the agent does not).

Sometimes, the suspense is because reader and character are both venturing into the unknown (we accompany Lucy deeper into the wardrobe, experiencing her surprise, moment to moment).

Situations that create suspenseful activity include those that:

• Require bravery, where there are stakes
• Situations implying danger or menace (for case the checkpoint scene catastrophe from The Spy to a higher place)

The following case from Harper Lee's love To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) contains both the above:

Instance of a suspenseful scene ending: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

In Lee's novel, siblings Jem and Spotter are terrified of their reclusive neighbour Boo Radley. Lee ends her first chapter with a scene where the children dare each other to enter the Radley business firm's grounds and touch the wall:

Jem threw open the gate and sped to the side of the house, slapped information technology with his palm and ran back past united states of america, non waiting to see if his foray was successful. Dill and I followed on his heels. Safely on our porch, panting and out of breath, we looked back.
The onetime house was the same, droopy and sick, only equally we stared downward the street we thought we saw an within shutter move. Flick. A tiny, near invisible movement, and the house was nevertheless.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), p. 21.

Lee's scene ending creates a palpable sense of the children's breathless fright and excitement. The simple act of touching the facade of a house is suffused with a sense of danger. Lee masterfully describes the spooky, almost imperceptible movement they see in the Radley firm's window through the sunset.

The stiff sense of event makes information technology difficult to stop reading there.

4. Finish scenes with a hint of what's to come up

The ending of a scene is often a good point to give readers a hint or proposition of what's to come:

Example of foreshadowing scene endings: J.One thousand. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher'southward Stone

The first chapter in the first book of J.K. Rowling's blast striking Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) ends with the infant Harry being left on his aunt and uncle's doorstep with a letter explaining his situation.

Rowling writes:

Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small mitt closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, non knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time past Mrs. Dursley's scream every bit she opened the front end door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the side by side few weeks beingness prodded and pinched past his cousin Dudley…

J.One thousand. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher'southward Stone (1997), p. xx.

Here, at the end of the scene where Harry is left for the Dursley'southward to find, Rowling gives her reader an inkling that Harry's life in Privet Bulldoze won't be entirely rosy.

Rowling hints that Harry'south cousin will continue to taunt him. She also hints at his unwelcoming reception past his aunt and uncle.

5. Terminate scenes with the tension of arrivals or departures

An inflow – of a graphic symbol, omen, skillful news, bad news – or a departure is a useful manner to create intrigue at the end of a scene.

Many stories build intrigue and excitement via the thought of travel, migration, or quest, from Don Quixote past Cervantes (1 of the earliest novels, in which a human being who has read many romance stories reinvents himself every bit a noble knight and fights windmills that he imagines are giants) to any modernistic-day adventure story.

Consider this example by Nobel-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro:

Ending scenes with arrivals and departures: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Cached Giant

Ishiguro'south The Cached Giant is a subtle meditation on retentiveness and aging set in early Britain. In the first chapter and early scenes, an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, struggle to remember the past. They make it a quarrel with other villagers because they accept a candle (a precious commodity). They decide to exit to visit their son in his village, though they can't remember where information technology is or the way:

Beatrice savage silent, gazing into the space before her, her shoulders swaying gently with her breathing. 'I believe we'll know our way well enough, Axl,' she said eventually. 'Even if we don't yet know his exact hamlet, I'll have travelled to ones nearby often enough with the other women when trading our beloved and tin. I'll know my mode blindfolded to the Great Plain, and the Saxon hamlet across where we've oft rested. Our son's village can only be a fiddling way further, and then we'll find it with petty trouble. And, are we really to go before long?'
'Yes, princess. We'll start preparing today.'

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Cached Giant (2015), p. 28.

Ishiguro uses the scene following the fight over the candle to propel the story towards new horizons. Because his elderly couple cannot recollect exactly where their son lives, it gives their departure a notation of pathos every bit well equally narrative tension. We wonder whether or non they'll exist able to find his hamlet safely.

six. Stop a scene with the consequences of an earlier activeness

Nether the second heading higher up, you read nearly ending scenes with situations of consequence that imply further outcomes. Other scenes might stop with consequences or outcomes themselves.

Ending a scene with a abrupt sense of effect helps to punctuate your narrative with dynamic moments of revelation and further development.

Consider the following example from David Mitchell'southward novel The Os Clocks (which Stephen King chosen 'the best book of 2014'):

Instance of a consequence-revealing scene ending: David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks

In a scene which Mitchell'due south fifteen-year-former protagonist Holly refers to as 'Holly Sykes and the Weird Shit, Part 2', she describes a strange serial of events. In 'Part 1' of 'Holly Sykes and the Weird Shit', Holly has described how a strange woman began actualization to her in her sleep at night.

In Function ii, Holly describes being bullied at schoolhouse:

Then one mean solar day our school's most gifted bully, Susan Hillage, got me as I walked home from school. Her dad was a squaddi in Belfast and, 'cause my mam's Irish gaelic, she knelt on my head and wouldn't permit me go unless I admitted nosotros kept our coal in the bathtub and that we loved the IRA.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014), p. 18

Later, Holly describes how the apparition/woman (named Miss Constantin) appears to her again at night the day she's bullied:

'I'm here because my brilliant, singular child was so unhappy tonight, and I desire to know why.' And so I told her almost Susan Hillage. Miss Constantin said nothing until the stop, when she told me that she despised bullies of all stripes, and did I want her to remedy the situation? I said, yes, please, simply earlier I could ask annihilation else […]'.
Mitchell, p. 18.

Then, at the end of the scene, we discover the upshot of Holly'due south acceptance of Miss Constantin's offering:

The next morn I went to school as usual, and didn't see Susan Hillage. Nobody else did, either. Our headmaster hurried late into school assembly and announced that Susan Hillage had been hitting by a van while she cycled to schoolhouse, that information technology was very serious and we had to pray for her recovery. Hearing all this, I felt numb and cold, then much claret left my caput that the school hall sort of folded upwardly around me, and after, I had no memory fifty-fifty of hitting the floor.
Mitchell, p. 19

Hither we see the consequences at the end of the scene of Holly having accustomed her nightly company'due south offering. It'due south effective too considering it creates mystery – neither Holly nor the reader can exist certain that Miss Constantin really had a paw in Susan's blow – the link is tangential, simply it's at that place. And so information technology seems like a event.

When you read, and yous near the finish of a scene, pause and retrieve nigh what the author is doing. How does the scene end, and how does the writer lure you on further into the story, like Lucy into the snow-filled wardrobe?

Get peer critique in Now Novel'southward online writing groups to write better scenes. Or work 1-on-one with a writing charabanc privately and make better progress in your story.

How Do You Know When a Scene Ends

Source: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/writing-scene-endings/

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