by Lisa Jordan, @lisajordan

Back in November, I wrote a post called Your Story Skeleton Part One and shared a simplified overview of the story skeleton. Having a strong story skeleton is important before you begin your rough draft. 

Now I’m going to share how we add muscle to our story skeleton. 

Muscles are essential to allow our bodies to move. They provide force and motion. 

In our stories, our scenes are the muscles that allow our characters to move through the story. 

In order to keep our bodies moving freely and without pain, we need to exercise our muscles—we need to keep them sharp.

Same goes for our scenes. 

When I first started writing seriously about nearly twenty years ago (Umm, where has the time gone?), my scenes were a bit barebones. I always wondered how to add the meat…or the muscle. That’s when I learned about the importance of having layered scenes. 

When I fast draft a scene, it’s mostly dialogue.

While quality dialogue is essential to move the story forward, scenes are more than dialogue. 

So you’ve SEQ’ed your characters, plotted out your story, and wrote the fast draft. 

Now what?

There are several blogs in Learn How to Write a Novel library talking about SHARP scenes, but we’re going to talk about them again because, honestly, the SHARP elements are what adds the muscle to your scenes. 

To refresh your memory, SHARP stands for:

Stakes

Hero/heroine identity

Anchoring

Run

Problem

Let’s begin with Stakes. 

• To figure out what’s at stake in your scene, you need to think about your POV character’s scene goal. What does your character want? What matters to him as he walks on the page? What is he willing to sacrifice to achieve his goal? What will happen if your character doesn’t achieve his goal? Those questions will help you to find your stakes.
• A lot of time I will open with what’s at stake in that scene by sharing what my hero or heroine is feeling the moment they walk on the page—that opening line. 
• In my upcoming novel, The Father He Deserves, the opening line is: Evan hated returning home a failure.

Hero/heroine

• Who is the main POV character in this scene? 
• What does he or she want? 
• Characters need story goals, but they also need scene goals, which help them to work toward that overall story goal. 
  • Maybe your character’s goal is to get to the grocery store. Why? (Motivation) Because they’re out of baby formula and the baby’s hungry and crying. 
  • But remember, we can’t just let them reach their goal. We still need obstacles to create tension. So perhaps there’s an accident and the road is blocked. They take a detour and finally make it to the store, grab the formula, dash to the checkout counter while carrying the crying child only to discover they’ve left their wallet at home. Now you’ve got some tension.
  • When you pit a character’s wants and desires against obstacles, you’re creating emotional tension.

Anchoring

• Anchoring—these are the setting and storyworld details in the scene based on your character’s emotion.
  • Think of the 5 Ws—who, what, where, when, why
  • Then focus in on more specific details using the character’s senses—remember the emotion colors the strong nouns and verbs you’ll be using as well as the adjectives. A character in a bad mood won’t be looking for sunshine and rainbows.

Run

• Run—start your story on the run, meaning begin the scene in the middle of the action. 
  • This doesn’t need to be a car chase or a big explosion. Just make sure something is happening. 

Problem

• Problem—end your scene with a new problem to keep the reader turning the page. 
  • Don’t tie up the scene without adding a new problem for the characters to solve or else you risk episodic writing. 
  • Also, keep asking, “What’s at stake?”

Rachel Hauck says, “Begin your scene five minutes into the story and end it five minutes early.”

Like I said, scenes are the muscles that move your story forward. And you want to keep those muscles sharp. If you don’t exercise them, then your story becomes flabby. So, look at your current WIP. Are your scenes SHARP? If not, then take time to flesh out your scene so you can add the right amount of muscle to your story. 

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Rescuing Her Ranch

A fight for her future…

Might not be the one she thinks.

Returning home after losing her job, Macey Stone agrees to care for the daughter of old friend Cole Crawford. Then she discovers that Cole’s uncle’s company wants to bulldoze her family’s land. Seeing the devoted dad with his child soon has her falling for the enemy. But can she choose between saving Stone River Ranch…and helping the man who’s stolen her heart?

Heart, home, and faith have always been important to Lisa Jordan, so writing stories with those elements come naturally. Represented by Cynthia Ruchti of Books & Such Literary Management, Lisa is an award-winning author for Love Inspired, writing contemporary Christian romances that promise hope and happily ever after. Her latest book, Rescuing Her Ranch, released in January 2023. She is the content manager for Novel Academy, powered by My Book Therapy. Happily married to her own real-life hero for over thirty years, Lisa and her husband have two grown sons. When she isn’t writing, Lisa enjoys quality family time and being creative with words, photos, fibers, and papers. Learn more about her at lisajordanbooks.com.