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Topic : Re: I wrote a scene that the majority of my readers loved. How do I get back to that place while writing my new book? I wrote a scene that I put my heart and soul into. It was received well - selfpublishingguru.com

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There's no straightforward approach to anything involving writing, so it's going to take time and effort regardless of how you end up considering the matter. That said, by my experiences, there are two primary writing approaches by which someone can create a memorable scene:

With the first approach you develop the scene naturally, as an outcome of a narrative's natural flow. This utilizes your ability to think dynamically, adapt to situations, and fluidly incorporate your experiences into an emerging narrative.

You can train your ability to think dynamically by doing keyword association writing sessions.
This is a training method [and at times, story origination method] where you just write down whatever random words come to head for X minutes, typically at least long enough to fill one full column on a page, and then challenge yourself to form a narrative or scene based off the keywords in question. It may also be possible to find websites that randomly generate words for such a purpose, if you want to approach it from a different angle.

You can train your ability to adapt to situations by engaging in writing groups, tabletop storytelling/roleplaying sessions, or any sort of freestyle writing or language based competitive engagement.

You can train your ability to fluidly incorporate experiences by studying the various distinct narrative sources you may come across [eg, daily life, literature, films], and keeping a journal wherein you note down the most useful information you can pull from those experiences.

The intent of this isn't to create a reference journal, but to develop your skill at extracting those elements of a narrative which are profound, appealingly distinct, or otherwise engaging. Perhaps more importantly, working through such a process allows you to determine why the elements in question are so compelling, allowing you to better work such key factors into your own writing.

The second approach to creating a memorable scene is, simply, to create a memorable scene. That is to say, you don't create a memorable scene as an outcome of a narrative, you shape a narrative around premade memorable scenes. While the previous method was more about training your skills in improvisation and unconcious absorption, this method is all about developing your skills in calculated narrative design.

First, determine what kind of scene you want to build around. This can, at first, be as vague as possible, such as "romance involving pirates". Then, try narrowing that scene down, and then try narrowing it down some more. Do this all while trying to figure out how the scene can present itself as being distinguished from typical narrative scenes.

Focus on that scene, hold that scene in your head, go to sleep thinking about it.
Relate that scene against experiences you encounter, and deliberately consider how your scene could be better shaped in regards to making its appeal match up to the compelling elements of the experiences you are encountering.

If you ever get stuck on a scene, switch your focus to "what scenes would relate well to this kind of scene". You may be surprised, and find your entire narrative shifting to focus around a secondary scene, and may even end up dropping the first scene altogether.

If you come across a flash of genius, and come across a new "perfect scene" idea, focus your efforts around it, instead. Don't be afraid to set unworkable concepts aside- the ones with potential may be useful for future stories, and the ones without potential are best dropped as soon as possible.

While the first approach was based around developing a narrative as part of a flow, this approach is better suited for those who find it easier to treat narrative flow as the glue between key scenes. Even though you may drop some, even many scenes by the end, this approach allows you to construct clear "bookmarks" in your narrative process, which then allows narrative connections to create themselves, smoothly, as a byproduct of relating the developed scenes against one another.

Take a general concept like "World of horses.. with great stampedes". Develop a scene like "A young tribal boy rides a golden stallion into the sunset". Develop another scene, like "a witch doctor engages in a tribal ritual to ward of beasts".
You can then conceive of the fact that perhaps horses are not considered tamable in this world, and that the boy is riding off because he is shunned by his tribe due to having been the first to tame a horse. You can then work out what steps are necessary between the second scene and the first, for them to lead to one another.

Of course, those aren't what I'd consider "memorable scenes", but the process is nevertheless fundamentally based in the manner of that example. And, of course, forming basic scenes into memorable ones is a part of the process, as is deciding that a scene isn't memorable, just narratively relevant. Or perhaps not relevant at all.

In short, even if you don't use the processes described here, my recommendation here is that you first consider if your writing style is better supported by a narrative flow approach, a scene-oriented approach, or a mixture of the two.
Or perhaps even something a bit more off the beaten path, such as reverse-narration flow, where you start with the end and determine how the narrative got to that point by working backwards.

Consider what writing approaches you want to go with, based off your understanding of what style of narrative development works best for you. Of course, even after focusing yourself on one of the approaches, the others shouldn't be dismissed entirely; Switching to the other approach on occasion may help break through writer's block, thanks to the switch in perspective.

As far as creating emotional impact in scenes, that comes naturally as a part of developing a narrative or developing scenes, as an outcome of one's investment in the characters and story development, and by one's ability to attentively incorporate life experiences into their writing. There's no shortcut to that, aside from developing the skills related to writing (be that through the processes I described, or through others which may be more agreeable to your cognitive process).

I will note this: As others have commented, you don't ever want to get hung up on recreating a past scene, because then you're no longer building a narrative based on flow or carefully constructed scenes, you're instead attempting to frankenstein a piece from one narrative into another.

In other words, you'll be limiting your new narrative to the scope of your old one, while also denying yourself access to the other narrative elements that made the scene in question so memorable the first time around. Well, unless your aim is to rehash the same story over and over (and, in fairness, that does work for some); In that case, you've a lot more freedom to reuse broader swaths of your previous narrative.

Moreover, such limitation will inherently restrict the adaptability of your creative process, as you'll be dedicating too much of your mental energy on trying to shoehorn edits into a premade work. Unless you've talent in redevelopment of existing works or in creating scenes of a specific format, the various downsides of such imitation makes it something which is best avoided.


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