How to Use Scene Breaks to Cut Your Story’s Fat

Avoiding excessive word count is a weighty consideration for any writer, but most particularly in order to keep unnecessary fat from weighing down your stories. Here’s a quick trick for using scene breaks to both cut the fat and make it seem like you’ve cut the fat.

Fat takes many shapes, everything from repetitive dialogue to extraneous characters. But one of the most flagrant areas of fat accumulation is in scene transitions. For example, authors sometimes fall into the trap of dramatizing transitions in lengthy paragraphs that recount the characters’ every step between one room and another.

Not only is this rarely necessary, but it’s also a wasted opportunity for tightening up your narrative.

A Super-Easy Way to Use Scene Breaks to Sharpen Your Narrative

In his breakout fantasy Elantris, Brandon Sanderson offers a great example of how to trim pointless filler bits by utilizing one of a writer’s most useful and invisible tools: (you guessed it!) scene breaks.

Although Sanderson’s book is no lightweight—it weighs in at almost 700 pages—he does a good job of cutting out the boring fat that could easily have doubled his page count. He uses scenes break not only in the obvious places to indicate changes of POV or setting, but also to cut even seemingly innocuous segments, such as his antagonist leaving his quarters to walk downtown:

Weakened as he was, Hrathen could only stand in shock. Iadon dead? Telrii seizing control? How could find days bring about such drastic events?

“Come,” Hrathen said firmly. “You can explain it to me on the way to chapel.”

***

The crowds gathered around as he walked; the captain owned no carriage, and Hrathen didn’t want to bother waiting for one. For the moment, the exhilaration of a plan fulfilled was enough to keep him moving.

The 2 Benefits of Using Snappy Scene Breaks

1. The result Sanderson produces neatly trims the fat from his story.

2. It also contributes to a sense of speed in his pacing. He could easily have written a short sentence that would have brushed over the antagonist’s change of setting, but thanks to the scene break, he indicates the passage of time to the reader in a tight, snappy fashion that keeps his story rolling right along.

This is as quick and easy a writing technique as there is, but the effect on your readers’ perception of your narrative is a powerful one.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! How have you kept your scene breaks snappy? Tell me in the comments!