Writing Tip #17: The Scene-Level Edit

A writing tip a day every day for 2025

This week, I’m talking about the Six Stages of Self-Editing. I’ve alread covered:
- The Structural Edit
- The Character Edit
- The Worldbuilding Edit

And today is the Scene-Level Edit.

You should feel pretty solidly confident that you have all the scenes you need and they’re in the right order.

But you might not have the right number of scenes. This round of editing is where you make sure every scene is doing more than one thing. There are four things a scene can be doing for your story:
1. Push the plot forward
2. Demonstrate internal character action
3. Demonstrate external character action
4. Explore the setting

If your scene is doing only one of those things, you’re likely to have a very choppy book that, ironically, drags a lot despite having extremely short scenes.

For example, you have pair of characters who need to get from point A to point B, so you need a travel scene. The female main character (FMC) also needs to learn magic. But you want to explore the cool fantastical setting and the history of the war they’re running from, so you need some exposition. And also, they’re falling in love.