What's in a scene

For every novel I analyze in this series, I’ll pick a single scene to examine in detail so we can see how authors use the same set of components to create different effects, depending on the purpose of the scene and their individual styles. My initial step in the analysis is always to categorize every sentence. Here are the categories I defined in Novel Study Book 1:

Choosing a category is a subjective process. Often a sentence or phrase does multiple things at once; I chose the category that seemed to be the primary purpose of the sentence or phrase. The goal is not to find some ideal proportion of components that you should strive to achieve in every scene because I don’t think such a formula exists. Instead the goal is to better understand the effects of the different components and how to wield each one, so you can choose the mixture that is right for the purpose of your specific scene.

Let’s now start our analysis of chapter six of Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods by looking at the data. (Moore doesn’t use chapter numbers; this is Louise’s third POV chapter, and it’s labeled “Two Months Later, August 1975.”)

At 35 percent, interiority is the dominant component of this scene, which isn’t unusual. Four of the other scenes I study, along with the three I examined in Novel Study, have interiority percentages ranging from about a fifth to a third of the scene’s total word count. But we’ll also see a scene that runs much higher—fully half—as well as a couple that fall much lower.

If I’d chosen another chapter, I think the percentage would be even higher; interiority is Moore’s most-used tool in The God of the Woods. It’s important to note that though the novel is a mystery, it is also much longer and more literary than many popular mysteries, as I noted in my post on the opening. For example, Shari Lapena’s 2023 novel Everyone Here Is Lying, which also focuses on the mystery of a missing child, is roughly 84,000 words compared to roughly 119,000 for The God of the Woods. I think the high interiority percentage of this scene works well for Moore’s novel, but might not work as well for a mystery with a more focused plot and faster pacing.

As we saw in my post on the opening, Moore starts the novel in August 1975, just as counselor Louise discovers that camper Barbara is missing from her bunk. After the first chapter, Moore jumps back in time a few months to introduce us to another camper, Tracy, and to Barbara’s mother, Alice, who lives in the big family home on the property. Chapter six is the first moment we return to the August timeline, witnessing the immediate aftermath of Barbara’s disappearance.

Wisely, after all of these set-up chapters, Moore gets us right into the action with the first sentence: “Louise is running.” Conventional writing advice would have you change the present progressive tense to simple present: “Louise runs.” But I think this is a perfect example of when to use present progressive. “Louise is running” feels like a complete sentence; as readers, we also feel like we are dropped onto a treadmill alongside Louise, who is already running, so we need to scramble to catch up.

“Louise runs,” on the other hand, feels incomplete on its own. Where or how or why is she running? Moore wants to keep us in suspense about those questions while she drops in a chunk of interiority that fills in our picture of Louise (see A on the figure below): She feels like running is her “natural state,” and her daily runs are the only times she can escape her worries. Most revealing: “On long runs she thinks of her body as somehow the mother of her brain—or the way a mother should be, anyway. The way other people’s mothers are.” We need to know this crucial bit of information about Louise to understand her past and future actions.

Standard writing advice is to start a scene as close as you can to the main action. And that’s often very good advice, prompting writers to trim off unneeded throat clearing and scene setting they needed in order to settle into the scene. But this bit of writing wisdom can also block writers from seeing other opportunities in a scene. In a case where readers expect to see an action or confrontation, you can actually use that expectation to increase suspense while also delivering something readers don’t expect.

After the bit of interiority about running, Moore finally delivers the where, how, and why: Louise is running “frantically, unseeingly” to the Director’s Cabin to report that Barbara is missing. Along the way we also get a chunk of summary, giving us a list of seven different places Louise has already checked for Barbara (B). Moore could have expanded any one of these settings (the latrines, the beach, the main house . . .) into a short flashback that would have delivered more setting, character, or backstory information. But none of those settings would have delivered the subplot she wants to reveal at this moment.

To set up that subplot, Moore has Louise finally stop running and arrive at the Director’s Cabin. We are naturally very interested in what happens next. How is the director going to react to the news that Barbara is missing? Is Louise going to go through with her plan to lie about where she and Annabel were?

But Moore doesn’t give us the answers right away, allowing the tension to build. As soon as Louise gets to the cabin, she has to make another decision because the director, T.J., doesn’t answer the door. It’s unlocked; “there are no locks at Camp Emerson.” (Thriller and mystery readers will squirrel this detail away as a possible clue.) And here is where we find out something unexpected—a surprise new story question emerges because the relationship between Louise and T.J. is more complex than we’d thought.

Louise decides to enter the cabin and, as she moves through the space, we learn that she “shares a history” with T.J. that she keeps hidden from the other counselors; she once stayed a whole week in this very cabin (backstory chunk C). Louise tiptoes down the hallway and realizes T.J. is showering. The way Louise notices T.J.’s body as she steps out of the shower raises further questions about their relationship. Moore doesn’t answer them here but leverages our curiosity about them to pull us farther into the novel.

Only now, over halfway through the chapter, do we get the conversation we expected to see many paragraphs earlier (dialogue, action, and setting chunk D). Louise delivers the news about Barbara, and T.J. asks the questions we would expect, including one that Louise has prepared for—whether she and Annabel were in the cabin last night. Here’s the payoff for the dramatic irony Moore set up in chapter one, when Louise instructed Annabel to lie about where they both were. Moore heightens the intensity of the moment by bracketing the dialogue with two chunks of interiority that shape how we feel about the lie (E). Louise, we learn, is not “a habitual liar” but she’s sometimes had to lie in order to survive. She respects T.J. and lying to her makes her feel sick—especially since “she has confessed, on several occasions, certain things that she has never told another soul,” another little hint about the relationship between them that further stokes our curiosity about this unexpected subplot. Note that in this use of dramatic irony, readers are allied with Louise because we understand the reasons for her lie.

T.J. appears to accept Louise’s lie and jumps into action, using the camp’s public address system to summon the rest of the counselors to her office (action and dialogue chunk F). We’ve now gotten what we expected from the scene, but Moore has one more surprise left in store. Without preamble or explanation, T.J. asks Louise whether she’s seen her fiancé, John Paul, that week. We don’t know why T.J. asks; nor do we know why Louise once again lies. But we add it to our growing pile of possible clues, wondering if this has something to do with Barbara or the hidden history between Louise and T.J.

We leave the chapter, then, with more and different story questions than we had when we started it, which is exactly what you want at this point in a mystery or thriller. In the next post, we’ll look at how story questions work and see how Moore deploys them in the novel as a whole to keep us reading.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.