The 5 Essentials of a Scene: How to Make Your Scenes Work and Have Readers Itching to Turn The Page

Good scenes are the building blocks of great books. But, too often, writers settle for subjective opinions about what makes a scene "work." They don't know that there are objective criteria for analyzing a scene to ensure it's riveting and fix it if it's not.

We were joined by Story Grid Certified Editors Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez, who talked through the five essential elements you need to write compelling scenes that will have readers itching to turn the page. They also answered some great questions from the ProWritingAid community - this training is well worth a watch.

If you missed the session, you can watch the replay at the top of this post.

Anne Hawley, Developmental Editor

Anne has produced and co-hosted 115 episodes of the Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast, and she trained under Shawn Coyne of Story Grid. Anne has five decades of writing experience and has been a developmental editor since 2015, providing objective, substantive feedback so writers can write better stories and change the world. She is the author of the historical love story Restraint.

Rachelle Ramirez, Developmental Editor

Rachelle trained under Shawn Coyne of Story Grid and has edited award winning and bestselling fiction and nonfiction. She is committed to offering actionable editorial assistance for writers in all phases of their careers. Rachelle attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Masters in Creative Writing Program and has an MA in psychology from Goddard College. She is the author of An Introduction to Genre.

You can learn more about Anne and Rachelle at pagesandplatforms.com.

Make your scenes stand out with your free ProWritingAid account

You've written your scenes and made sure you've got all 5 essential elements in there. But your writing still feels... off. Allow your scenes to shine by writing your manuscript through ProWritingAid.

By editing your writing with ProWritingAid, you can catch sentence-level errors in your text that copyeditors would spend time fixing before you send it off to them. This allows your editor time to focus on integral aspects of your scenes, like plot holes and tone of voice. You'll get a far more insightful report on the content of your scenes from your editors as a reward.

ProWritingAid's Writing Style report highlights areas of your text that copyeditors would tell you to revise, such as: emotional tells, overuse of pronouns, repeated sentence starts, distracting dialogue tags and much more.

Ready to make your manuscript the best it can be?

We host dozens of free trainings for writers - whether you've been writing for years or you're just starting out, there's a training for you! Our past sessions are all available on our Youtube channel, so why not browse our replays now.