 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name's Jackie. I'm an aspiring writer and I'm currently working on revising my YA superheros meets the Russian mafia book Powerless for working with a book coach because I have a friend who's doing like a book coach in course and she needs to do a manuscript critique as one of her practicums. So I've been reviewing the book and reviewing my beta read of feedback from last year again and most of the book is okay. The biggest piece of surgery I need to do is completely rewriting three scenes which is split over four chapters. Now at the time of filming this, I've actually already done the first two and it was surprisingly easy. I mean I was, I didn't even need to completely rewrite them actually. For both of them I was just able to add in a little bit more context and motivation. Like one of them, the character just needed an objective, so we knew what she was working towards. The other one I had a suggestion from one of my beta readers about switching what the tension was in that scene because it wasn't really clear. So I did that with both of them and just by sort of giving an objective, switching the tension, switching the focus, I had to do quite a bit of rewriting but I also kept quite a bit of what was originally there. So it was fairly fast work. I got through both of those on the same day. Now I'm looking at the last scene and I've been trying to look at it for a week now and it just has not been going well. So if you are new to discussions about powerless, I'll give you some context. Powerless is a book about Hanna who is a teenage girl from a family of superheroes and she for some reason does not have powers even though her DNA says she should and her father suspects there has been a leak from his lab which she works in and he kicks her out accusing her of being the source of the leak. Even though we get the sense that he doesn't really think it's her, it's just an excuse to get rid of her because she doesn't have powers and she's too expensive. So he kicks her out and gives her the ultimatum. Don't bother coming back until you have powers. So she decides okay, I've got to go out and find powers somehow and this leads her to run into the Russian mafia and chaos ensues. So at one point she ends up getting trapped and tortured by this guy who's trying to make her powers come out. She inadvertently ends up saving the life of the mob boss' granddaughter and because the granddaughter owes Hanna her life she takes her away from the sadistic doctor who's been cutting her up. So that's everything that leads up to this moment. Now this scene is a little bit awkward because it really didn't have anything to do with the main plot but I needed something there. Now what happens in the scene I'm struggling with is Hanna is in Lisa's home. Lisa is the boss' granddaughter and she goes on a mission with them and she is sort of asked to prove her loyalty and this was always meant to be like a bonding moment for them so that the brotherhood fully took her under their wing and thought she was one of them. The thing is from Hanna's point of view she was never one of them. She was just biding her time until she could find a way to go back home to her family. So what happens in the scene after this is she finds some information or materials that she wants to smuggle back to her father. She gets caught and the brotherhood's really pissed off with her because they feel betrayed now because they thought she was on their side. So this is the dynamic we're setting up. We need like this false friendship created in order for there to be a betrayal in the next chapter and then from that point is when they sort of decide to work together but they have everyone has their eyes open at that point. What I originally had was they went on a mission together and Hanna was sort of asked to prove her loyalties and I never really loved it. Like the first time I wrote it, it just felt very boring even though it's like an action scene. The second time I wrote it, which I did in my revisions before it went out to beta readers, I switched some things around. I actually gave Hanna a crisis moment when she needed to decide whether or not to shoot someone but yeah, I still didn't love the scene. So I thought it was time to ask the experts. I'm going back to a bunch of old craft books that I've used in the past to help me with this. In fact, uh, there's one under my laptop as well and this one too. So what I've done is I've gone through all of these and a couple of online methods to see what their advice is on scenes and I'm trying to follow each method to finally crack this scene. One of the challenging things though is that I've realised a lot of craft books don't actually have information on how to do scenes. Like they don't have how to outline them. They have checklists and guidelines that I find they're good for once you already have something going through it and ticking it off to make sure you hit all the criteria. I found that was the case with story engineering and save the cats. I'm going to save those until after I've tried writing the scene to see if it works according to their guidelines. So before that, the first one I've looked at is Susan Dennard's magical cookies method. Now this method is basically for when you're stuck on a scene, you're not excited about it. It feels really dry and dull and boring and just like you're moving from A to B. It feels like something that needs to be in there, but you don't really want to write it. So this method is all about finding the magical cookies in the scene. So the really exciting things that make you want to write it. And I've done a video on this before, so I'll also include a link to that. But basically you just ask yourself three questions. So the first one is things that make me want to write this story. The second one is I imagine. So once you've thought of all of the things that you want to write in this story, what ideas does that spark? And then what would make me want to write this scene? So for powerless, rather than doing things that make me want to write this story, because I've already written it, I just did why I love this story. So superheroes are fun. I want to expand this universe just to give everyone cool superhero names. I love all the hidden secrets and reveals that keep popping up, even without me meaning them to. I love the idea of using powers in creative ways, which is the case with a couple of Hannah's siblings. And I'm wondering what could the others do that's really unexpected? And I love the brotherhood or the Russian mafia. It makes it all feel a bit grungier and grittier to me. This isn't another polished Marvel movie. And finally, I also love the characters. Like they all have really distinct traits. I love Lisa's sassiness. I love Marlin's snuffiness. I love Maxime being a sociopath and so on. So when I think of all of this, I imagine gritty, alleyway fight scenes, surprising power reveals, shocking revelations, fight scenes with real consequences, Max being a creep and Lisa being a badass. So now that I've got all of that at the front of my mind, what would make me want to write this scene and what came up was an awesome reveal. And one of the things that I never intended with this book, but sort of happened when I was writing it was, I had all of these ideas for the world and the characters and everyone's backstory that I just kept popping up and I kept sprinkling them in there. And some of them, like a lot of them weren't planned either. So when my beta readers read and said, Oh my God, I wasn't expecting this or I love the reveals, it's like, I was surprised to I wasn't planning it. That's why you didn't didn't expect it. So I have an idea for a reveal that I wasn't planning in this book. I was thinking if this ends up being a duology or a trilogy, it would be in book two or three. But it made me wonder, what if I have it in this scene because it is like it's a game changing revelation. It's going, it's one of those ones that it changes everything. So what would make me want to write the scene an awesome reveal? What if instead of planting the seeds for the reveal about now what Susan Dennard says is often when she gets to this step, the scene will spill out of her like she'll start doing an outline and she won't be able to stop. However, sometimes she still has trouble and then she looks at Wikipedia and Pinterest and listens to a Spotify playlist until the inspiration strikes. Now in my case, I love the idea about having a reveal, but I'm not sure how to make it work because the person who can share this information is not actually involved in the mission that is the bulk of this scene. So either we need to add in an extra conversation before they leave or I don't even know how we'd do it. So I was more enthused after doing this, but still quite stuck. The next exercise I looked at was the story genius scene card, which is a page that split into five sections and it's good for getting it, it's getting to the guts of the scene, like what it really means and why it matters. First, you have your alpha point, which is what's happening in the scene. You have those different subplots at effects. And then in this four square grid, the first row is about the plot. So cause is what happens and that's usually what happens in the first part of the scene. So what sets everything up. And then the second part is the effect. So what's the consequence of everything that's just happened? Then in the final row, we have the third rail, which is how Lisa Crom describes like the internal journey that the character goes on. So why it matters. Why does this cause and effect action matter to your protagonist and then the realization? So what do they realize because of what happens in the scene? And finally, we have and so. So I think and so what next? Or if we use her words, note what must happen next as a result of what occurred in this scene. So this is a really high level way of outlining a scene and it really gets you to focus on cause and effect and the character's inner journey. So first you have the scene number, in my case it was scene 16, the alpha point. So it's Hannah's welcome slash initiation into the brotherhood. Then subplots. One is the Arkdam and brotherhood conflict. So we get more background on why Arkdam and the brotherhood hate each other. There's history there. This is what the reveal will be about if I managed to put it in. And then the Hannah trying to get home subplot. So from the beginning, she's on the lookout for anything she can learn or steal from the brotherhood that will get her back into Arkdam's good graces. This isn't actually a subplot. This is like the main plot at this time that for this specific scene, the focus of the scene is the mission. So this is more Hannah's motivation. Cause what happens? After saving Lisa's life, Hannah is taken home to the Kravchenko household. Mrs. Kravchenko is shocked when she sees Hannah. Then Lisa takes Hannah on a mission to make a rival gang pay for poisoning her and Hannah is asked to prove her loyalty. The consequence? So she's asked to prove her loyalty. What happens? Hannah passes the test and is welcomed into Lisa's group. She further bonds with Mikhail by patching up his injuries. And next, why it matters? So first, Hannah is grateful for a roof over her head having spent the last few days trapped by the brotherhood and being tortured by the doctor. However, while she is grateful, it isn't a real alliance on her side. She sees the temporary partnership with the brotherhood as a way of being able to go home by finding some intel that Arkdam will find valuable. The realization? She starts to realize that the brotherhood aren't the villain she always imagined them to be and she already finds traits she can admire in the group. She wonders whether she can really betray them. And so, what happens then? Ultimately, she isn't ready to switch her loyalties just yet. And when she gets an opportunity to steal materials for Arkdam in the next scene, she takes it. So this exercise I found really helpful because even though I don't have a scene outline yet based on this, it made the motivations become really clear of me because in the current version of the scene, Hannah doesn't set out to like try and steal informational resources from the brotherhood. She really gets the inspiration to do that in the next scene. In this one, she's sort of just biting her time and going along for the ride. So during this exercise, it made me realize that I could actually make Hannah have this goal from the beginning of the interaction with the brotherhood, like as soon as she wakes up and she's in Lisa's house and she's going on this mission. And then that gives her motivation to get them to trust her so she can have more access to information. So that was one thing that was helpful. So that was one thing. The other thing was starting to create the conflict in loyalties. So she starts to see admirable things about the people in the little mini gang, the mini sect of the brotherhood that she's hanging out with. So that means on my side, I need to develop some good things that they do to make her respect or admire them. Method three was then the anatomy of story. So the anatomy of story has a chapter on scenes and dialogue and there are a number of things you need to do in a scene. So the first one is where is the character in their arc? So in my case, Hannah is questioning her loyalty to her father for the first time. Second, what are the problems that need to be solved? She needs to make the brotherhood trust her so that she can have free access to their information. Her strategy? Her strategy is helping with the mission and I thought maybe she like actually volunteers to help because originally she was sort of just dragged along for the ride. So maybe she takes a more active part in order to get them to trust her. Her desire is to find something useful she can bring home to her father to get accepted into the family again. The end point is whether the desire is resolved or not and what I have here is it's not resolved until the next chapter but she solves the problem of getting them to trust her. By the end of this scene they do have some trust for her. The opponent is the brotherhood in this case so they aren't just going to give her their information so she needs to be strategic and the plan is to make them trust her. So Truby talks about having a direct plan and an indirect plan. A direct plan is where the protagonist states what they want and everyone knows it. The indirect plan is where the protagonist pretends to want something but they really want something else. So in this case it's an indirect plan. She is pretending to want to be one of them and to help with the mission. The indirect plan though is she wants them to trust her so she can steal their stuff. The conflict that happens in this scene is Hannah needs to choose whether or not to shoot someone to prove her loyalty. The final item is twist slash reveal and this is when I started questioning what I'd done in the magical cookies exercise about deciding to have this reveal in this chapter because if I do it would be earlier? I don't know like it doesn't actually fit in the main mission so maybe I shouldn't have it at all maybe we'll just hint towards it and have it later after all but for the purposes of what I just discussed here which is the mission and sort of the the surface level action of they're going on a mission to get back at these guys who almost killed Lisa versus the under the surface stuff which is Hannah wants to get their trust so she can learn more about them and send some information back to Artem. There's no real revelation regarding that action and then the fourth method I looked at was Story Grid. So Story Grid is this giant book. I am not a fan of it. I did two videos on it when I went through the full process earlier last year which you can see but one thing I will say in Sean Coyne's favour is here's one of the few people that actually gives you beats to follow in every single scene and those beats are the inciting incident so the thing that sets the scene in motion progressive complication so what goes wrong all makes it more complicated and you can have many progressive complications the crisis moment so this is the moment when the protagonist needs to decide whether to do one thing or another whether they take you know one path or another the climax the decision they make and then the resolution what happens as a result so here's where things have started to fall apart because I don't really know how to do it so and despite what I just said about it being good to have this outline I don't I've always struggled to work with this outline so the inciting incident I'm not sure if that happens like the chapter before when Hannah says Lisa's life and therefore gets welcomed into the fold or whether I make it later in this scene where she volunteers to go on the mission with them the thing is if the inciting incident is when she volunteers to go on the mission with them I don't think I can jump straight into it at the beginning of the chapter because I got feedback from two different beta readers saying before the mission things felt too rushed it felt like Lisa's and Hannah's relationship hadn't been developed this was the insta love relationship I mentioned earlier so we need something to happen before then but I'm not sure what but we'll stick with that for now so she volunteers to go on the mission progressive complications I struggled with a little bit I'm like one could be she starts to like the brotherhood even though she's meant to be against them maybe something on the mission goes wrong the crisis moment is easy because that's someone I had in the original which is does she shoot the guy or not in order to get their loyalty the climax is she finds another way to disable him which I think I'll keep like if I keep this at all because I'm also playing with the idea of throwing out the scene but if I keep the scene at all I think I'll keep her disabling him instead because the resolution of that is his fate is almost worse as a result and maybe it would have been better if she killed him rather than trying to spare him so I like that there's this consequence she sort of tried to you know get out of doing what they wanted and things ended up worse despite her best efforts so the thing I really struggled with here is the progressive complications so after that I thought maybe I'll just try like outlining the scene based on what I've already got and my ideas about this new revelation so we have Hannah waking up not knowing where she is sort of trying to remember what happened the night before she leaves the room sees the hall is empty and decides maybe she can investigate and get some information for her father so that decision to start investigating and getting intel is the inciting incident progressive complication is she's caught by Lisa's mother and then it sort of falls apart because I'm like well they have breakfast and she tries to figure out how to get more information but Lisa says they need to go out like is that another complication because she couldn't get more information they go to the the mission takes place in a factory where there's a little bit of a gang war type of thing so complication maybe they're expecting them to come there maybe they shoot one of the people so it's a little bit of a mess and in fact after this I tried just writing it again to see how I would go and I'm not really sure like how to improve it in a concrete way I think everything I did earlier about potentially having this reveal and having um Hannah with this goal of getting information from the beginning and the goal of getting the brotherhood to trust her I think all that's good I just don't know how to execute it so I've already been working on the book for a few hours today I think I'll take a break and maybe come back in a day or two it has now been a week and I've written a new version of this scene I did continue trying to outline it using the story grid methods so inciting incident progressive complications crisis climax and resolution and it didn't really help to be honest and I think maybe it's just the way my brain is wired and I feel like progressive complications need to be a lot bigger or a lot more complicated than what I have in my book because inciting incident crisis climax and resolution were all fine it was just progressive complications where I was getting stuck so I thought with everything I'd already done using magical cookies method using the uh story genius scene cards using the anatomy of story I thought why don't I just try reworking it with what I already have so here are the beats I have in the current version one Hannah wakes up not sure where she's in some sort of luxurious mansion based on the events of the previous night she believes it's connected to the brotherhood so she thinks okay maybe I can do some investigating and find some intelligence that will make my father take me back so we now have character motivation for this part of the book we also have a little bit of tension because there's this she wants to get information and is also trying to make the brotherhood trust her so she gets up leaves her room starts snooping around and then she opens a door and finds an office and thinks perfect I've hit the jackpot here I can find all of the information I need then someone interrupts her so progressive complication she turns around and it's Lisa's mother and Lisa's mother is a little bit weird like this is this is the character who I thought could have a reveal which I've decided not to do here just because it is too early in the story for it it could potentially happen later in this book but I think it would be more fun to like drop it in a later book so for now we've just got this interaction that has like one or two odd lines that I think if you're looking for it will make you think this woman knows more than she should but we don't know what but most of the interaction is not quite thinly veiled threats but it's not it's hard to describe because it's not thinly veiled threats like there aren't threats at all it's basically that you know Lisa might trust you automatically but the rest of us are watching so be careful so that could potentially be another progressive complication so Hannah she has her objective she wants to get she wants to be a spy for her father basically and get him some useful information but she knows she's being watched so she's either going to have to make them trust her or she is going to have to just be more careful in her sleuthing so she doesn't get caught then she goes to have breakfast Lisa mentioned she's going out to do a mission and Hannah volunteers to go with her so this is sort of another inciting incident because she's taking another action that's going to lead to another series of events and I think this is one of the reasons I would struggling with the story grid approach because this scene if you like is over three chapters and it's sort of got like mini scene lets within there so there's that interaction with the mother they go off on the mission and then there's a bit of the mission aftermath so not all of those have all five of those beats I don't think that's a problem but I am very curious about what my book coach is going to say when she reads this so we have like a second inciting incident which is building on the I've got to get them to trust me so Hannah volunteers to go along on the mission they go out to wear a car's waiting and when they open the car the people in the front seats are Mikhail and Dmitri who happen to be the two men who originally captured Hannah and took her to the doctor so that could be a progressive complication even though again this is where the like definition of progressive complications is a little bit difficult because it doesn't lead to anything or any other controversy I think it's more that we're raising the stakes a little bit there's someone else she's not sure if she can trust so it increases the tension so if that's a progressive complication you know big tick for Jackie if not I think it works so she sees um these people who she thinks she can't trust in the car and she needs to rely on them a little bit for this mission because she doesn't she volunteered at the last minute she doesn't really know where they're going on what's going on so I haven't made this explicit maybe I should but her life is in their hands there's a conversation that happens when they're in the car on the way to the mission and we just get another again not necessarily progressive complication but stakes going up again as there's a small conversation about the brotherhood and how once you're in you can never leave so that raises the stakes for Hannah again because she's technically in now she's volunteered for a mission so if she does ultimately want to go back and get back to her family that's going to be more complicated than it was before they get to the factory which is where they're basically going after so I don't know if I mentioned earlier in the video but they're going after like a smaller sub gang in the brotherhood that accidentally poisoned Lisa the night before I didn't actually change the mission at all because I felt like one I wasn't sure I couldn't think of any changes that would make it significantly better and two part of me thinks it works better now that we have the extra motivation and context at the beginning so we have Hannah thinking of herself as a spy and using the information she gains as a way to get back to her family and thinking maybe this is a way I can get back without having to get powers because that was the original condition that was put on her if she ever wanted to go back home so now there's that motivation there I feel like the rest of the scene like there are more stakes now whereas before it was sort of just a random let's go have fun and games with the brotherhood the other thing is that the original scene already had the crisis moment so they storm through the factory shooting everyone and then they find like the leader of this gang who's cowering in his office and Lisa pulls a gun on him and they're like oh who gets to shoot him and she's like Hannah can do it this can be Hannah's opportunity to prove herself so this is the crisis point Hannah needs to make a decision does she execute this guy in cold blood and thereby win some more trust of the brotherhood and potentially get some more freedom when it comes to investigating and finding some information that her father might find useful or does she not kill him because she doesn't really want to kill anyone but if she does that then could she be making enemies of the people within the brotherhood and potentially be sent back to the doctor where she she was being tortured just the night before or worse who knows what else they could do so there's this decision moment if you don't want spoilers for this scene I'll put a timestamp and you can skip ahead she ultimately decides she doesn't want to kill him she like knocks him unconscious using a special technique and at this point it's almost like okay crisis averted Lisa gives her a bit of a lecture but that's it and then they tie up this guy put him in the back of the car and take him out to the harbour where Hannah realises they're taking him to the doctor so the same person she just escaped from the night before who had her strapped to an operating table and was torturing her for days on end and she is not okay with this and Lisa basically says well it was your choice you had the opportunity to kill him we need to punish him in some way like he did almost he almost killed me that's not acceptable we need to keep the smaller gangs under control so you can still kill him if you want but it's he's either dead or he's going to the doctor there's no other option we need a punishment that is going to keep all of the smaller gangs in line so it gives a little bit more context for Lisa's character because she's like she's ruthless or uncompromising almost she is tough but she's very fair she has very she has very strict morals and very strict guidelines that she follows and they might not be what we would conventionally consider to be you know good but she has this very clear moral standard and she follows and she's very fair and uncompromising with that and Hannah is seeing that for the first time um Hannah is also realizing for the first time that her actions and decisions do have consequences and this guy is being sent to this lab to be a lab rat because of the decision she made so there's sort of a progressive complication in there where she thought it was resolved and it turns out it's not like this guy isn't just going into prison cell he's going to be tortured or experimented on in some way by this man that carifies her and this was something that I got some feedback from one of my beta readers on which was she didn't really understand why this was happening like if they wanted him dead why wouldn't they just kill him so I wanted to bring something in there like Hannah is responsible for this turn of events she didn't want to kill him no one else is going to take that responsibility from her like no one else is going to step in and shoot him it's like you don't want to kill him okay this is the this is the result of that decision this happens to him instead in terms of the story grid method though it's I don't know if it works because we have like the resolution of the scene which is she makes the decision not to kill him and the aftermath is he gets taken to the doctor but I don't know if technically we should continue raising the stakes after this um so it's a little yeah story grid and I don't really match that well so we have this interaction the guy gets taken to um to the doctor Hannah bonds with Mikhail who's one of the penchmen if you like and then they discover that they got some loot from the factory so there's some cash there's some weapons everyone gets a little bit of cash to celebrate and that's going to lead into the next scene what's interesting for me is after going through this process where I've tried what four different methods so far to rework this scene I haven't significantly changed it I don't feel like and this this reminds me a little bit of when I was like in business for myself and writing books and one of the things that sometimes came up was the topic of innovation and I don't remember the exact language but there are basically different categories of innovation and one of them is like incremental innovation where you're building on or improving something that already exists and then there's like transformative innovation something that's completely new and an example might be the invention of the automobile there was nothing like that to begin with creating that was completely transformative we went from horses and carriages to having cars incremental might be improving fuel efficiency and longevity and adding bluetooth and all of the small um things that have made cars much better than they used to be a hundred years ago the thing is what we've got today it doesn't better but it performs the same function as this machine that was created you know over a hundred years ago so the innovations since then have been incremental and I feel like that's what's happening with this scene in that each time I've looked at this book I've thought it needs work I wanted to change it and every time I feel like I've needed a complete rewrite I feel like there's needed to be some transformative innovation that would completely replace what's there and every time I've looked at it I haven't been able to think of anything so I've sort of just incrementally improved it so version one that I did at the end of 2019 was really just they were going off on a mission and I was going along for the ride and it was literally in because Save the Cat was one of the plotting methods I used as a section called Fun and Games so this was sort of what I penciled in there she goes on a mission with the mafia that's the Fun and Games part of the book so there was this scene but it didn't really mean anything then the next version which I worked on I think last July and August in 2020 which was the version that I sent to the beta readers this is where I had Lisa like physically putting the gun in Hannah's hand and wrapping Hannah's fingers around it and forcing her to make the decision about whether to shoot or not so having that there does make it a much better scene because it's good for Hannah's character development it means she's more of an active participant in the mission rather than just tagging along but it still wasn't working and now what I've got is still like a lot of the same beats so in the original she was in the mansion she went on a mission they ended up taking the guy to the doctor to be tortured and then afterwards in the next scene they go and celebrate that arc is still the same but what's been added this time is there's this motivation around okay maybe she can be sort of a spy and that can help her achieve her goal of getting back home which has been her motivation for the book so far and I feel like each of these changes has made it better I'm just not sure if it's good enough because the changes are incremental not transformative but now that I've got a draft I thought it was the perfect time to look at the last two methods which are save the cat and story engineering because both of these ones have advice on chapters but they're more checklists rather than outlining or brainstorming type guides and for me a checklist is much better to go through once you've done something as opposed to before you start doing something so I thought I would quickly run through each of these checklists and see if the current version of this scene addresses all of the points they list I've now taken a quick look at story engineering and save the cat so my memory was a little bit off I realized after going through them because story engineering does have a scene specific checklist save the cat has more of a checklist for your book to diagnose what things are broken so that one didn't go as well but for story engineering the first point was what is the mission for the scene so every scene should move the story forward in some way in my case Hanna thinks of another possible way to get home which is with intelligence on the brotherhood and this sets up a new goal for her to make them trust her how does this move the story forward this is a new goal that will take kind of from now until the midpoint does it require foreshadowing slash setup so I think this would be better with more foreshadowing around the brotherhood and making them feel a bit more ominous so that's something I can potentially integrate earlier in the book now the next thing is what's the latest moment you can enter the scene and the idea of this is to cut all of the filler and fluff and setting the scene in exposition that might happen before the action gets started and I'm not sure what to do here because in the last version of the book which went to my beta readers I originally started with a flash forward to when Hanna has drawn the gun on the guy so here's on his knees waiting to be killed she has the gun pointed at him she's sort of looking at Lisa and the others going oh my god what do I do how did I get here and then we go back to the beginning when she wakes up in the brotherhood mansion and we go through the day until we get to the same point and I had mixed feedback on that one of my beta readers said I'm so here for this I love this another one said look after the last scene where she's sort of just gotten out of a sticky situation of being tortured this felt really jarring to jump straight ahead I don't know how he got here I'm already invested so I don't really need almost a cheap trick like this to keep me engaged so I'd rather just continue chronologically so in the current version I've just done it chronologically but now that I've been through this checklist and I've seen this I'm wondering do I go and have that flash forward again because that is the latest moment in the scene that is the most high tension moment in the scene having said that I also have a convention in this book where we do incorporate flashbacks regularly to build the relationship between Hanna and her sister Maria so every few chapters there's a flashback to some meaningful moment between the sisters over the last few years that could also be a challenge because I don't know if having a flash forward in this book where flashbacks of the established convention will work so I think I'm just going to leave it chronological for now but I am going to do a comment for my book coach to say this is the section I told you about that I was worried about let me know your thoughts the next point does this scene have its own tension stakes and flow and it's in the book it's compared to like would this scene work as a short story you know so does it have its own tension stakes and flow rather than relying on those in the broader story around it and I think yes it does this is a complete it is a complete scene there are things at stake in this specific scene rather than just being at stake in the wider story what is the reader experiencing I think there's tension around what Hanna will do I think there's tension around what the brotherhood's going to do whether they're trustworthy whether they're going to turn on her and I also think the reader is getting to know Lisa better the next point was around is there anticipation around what's going to happen in the scene or is it a surprise and I don't really think it's either at the moment which isn't a good thing so I feel like in the original way I did it with the flash forward and then flashback then there was anticipation because we see like the climactic moment of the scene so there's anticipation with like oh my god how do we get there what goes wrong whereas now it's sort of just moseying on through the day until we get to that point and because there aren't any big reveals in here I don't feel like there are surprises either however I don't know if it's necessary because we have just come from like a sequence of fairly high octane scenes before this so maybe it's nice to slow down for a bit before we get into the next mission so again this is something where I need external feedback because I'm really not sure anymore the next point is how you're demonstrating character in the scene so I feel like I'm doing a lot of it with thoughts and dialogue and that has been a much more common pattern in this revision of the book because I was very much showing in the previous drafts and very much just relying on the action and assuming that readers would know what was going on in the character's head because of the actions they were taking and again here I got mixed feedback from the beta readers like there was one reader in particular who thought no everything's clear I understand the thought process this seemed completely logical for where she's come from and then I had another beta reader who was like so I don't really know what she wants or why she's doing this so I have tried to make that more explicit but because I've tried to make it more explicit and we're spending a bit more time in Hannah's head going through her thought process I do feel like I'm telling a lot more rather than showing and I don't know if that's a bad thing because you're supposed to show not tell so again let's see what the book coach thinks and then we get into a bunch of sort of yes no questions so is the scene efficient does it drive gracefully and fluidly towards its payoff moment or does it mark time needlessly I think yes and no I think once we sort of get into the mission then it moves quite swiftly I think before that with the time in Lisa's house and the drive maybe it's a little bit slow but again it's also nice to have a slow moment after the previous chapters does the mission of the scene stick close to the linear spine of the storyline so that's basically is it part of the main plot or is it a tangent and I think now that there's that objective of Hannah's of getting intel and making herself trusted by the brotherhood it is much closer to the main storyline whereas previously I was sort of just marking time until the next scene and that was one of the things that wasn't working about it so if anything's gone right about this revision it's definitely adding in that motivation does it end with a cut and thrust so this is like does the scene end on a moment where the reader will want more and because this is split into three chapters there are sort of three endings here the first one is Hannah volunteers to go on the mission so I think yes that's at least I hope yes um readers will be intrigued about what it is and what's going to happen the next one ends at the moment where she's been handed the gun and told to make the decision so that's definitely yes and then the final one Lisa says it's time to celebrate because she's finished her first successful mission so that one doesn't have the same level of intrigue but does set context and lead into the next scene which is another one of the things that Larry Brooks talks about so I think yes it's doing that and then finally does your scene open with something clever poignant surprising or intrinsically interesting and this again I'm not sure because it begins with her waking up and trying to figure out where she is and pieced together the events of the night before but again I don't know if we need to immediately have something shocking or surprising or interesting because like we have just had six chapters of something of pure adrenaline and running and torture and so on so sometimes I think it's nice to have a little bit of a break again this is something where external feedback will hopefully help so that's the story engineering checklist I think for the most part everything's okay the only real thing that's up in the air is whether I have that flash forward because that'll address a couple of the points that I think I'm currently not addressing this is editing Jackie so I mentioned earlier that when I took a closer look at Save the Cat the checklist type of thing was really to diagnose the entire book rather than just a scene or a chapter and because of that even though I tried to do the exercise on this scene it didn't really work and when I went through the footage for that it was really just a lot of babbling about how it worked for the book but didn't really apply to the scene so I've decided to cut that so we're going to jump straight ahead to the outro so that was my attempt to use all of these craft methods specifically to improve one scene I'd love to hear from you what do you do when you feel like your story as a whole is working but you just can't crack one specific scene what are the techniques and tricks you do to help get it working the way you want please let me know in the comments below because clearly I have not cracked this process yet if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up please subscribe comment hit the notification bell and do everything that will keep the gods of youtube happy and I will see you next time bye