STOP Writing Scenes Until You Know the LAMB Method!

Nancy lamb created the lamb method for writing a scene and it is absolutely brilliant she's the author of 44 books so she kind of knows what she's talking about including the one that this method was drawn from called the art and craft of Storytelling there are 10 steps to this method and the last three are the most important so we're going to build up to those number one avoid dead ends so one of the primary goals of a scene is to get your reader excited to read the next scene a dead end scene is basically

when the reader doesn't want to read anymore it doesn't give the reader anything to look forward to so to solve a deadend scene what you need is some kind of forwarding device a forwarding device is basically something that entices the reader to keep reading and here are three examples of forwarding devices one a piece of new information at the end of Game of Thrones book one we get the new information that dragon eggs can actually hatch which means Daenerys just came into some serious power and it also really makes the reader want to get to

the next stage of the story to a decision made but not yet acted upon in The Hunger Games there's this moment where Katniss and Peta decide instead of killing each other they're going to eat the poisonous berries once that decision is made but they haven't yet done it there's this huge tension for the reader and the longer you stay in that tension the more of a forwarding device this is or three a new complication and the D Vinci coach just as langed and thinks he's investigating this you know routine murder he finds his own name

written at the crime scene which makes him both an investigator and a suspect if you end a scene with that information the reader very curious to want to read onward Lamb's second idea for scene creation is two steps forward one step backwards this basically means that every time you have a scene where an obstacle is overcome in your book you have to present a new obstacle because if you solve an obstacle and then don't have another for the character to work on the reader's like eh story's over no tension so look at a novel like

where the cwad sinks by deia Owens Ka ends up succeeding in publishing her nature books and gains recognition for her expertise and she also rekindles a relationship with Tate allowing her to trust and to love again so those are the two steps forward now the step back is When She's accused of Chase's murder if we only had those two solved problems the happy elements we'd be like I don't know where the story is going from here but obviously the new obstacle of proving herself innocent of Chase's murder creates the rest of the story line Lamb's

third step to writing a scene is to maintain credibility so you've probably heard the phrase jump the shark right this is when a television show or a movie or a book completely goes off the rails and you're like I don't even want to continue this now this phrase originated from the American sit calm Happy Days where Fonzi is water skiing and literally jumps over a shark hug gigantic eye rolling from all the viewers like come on really so how do you maintain credibility how do you make the reader believe that what you're telling them in

the story seems like it's plausible well one way to do that is to prepare the reader for things that are going to happen later in stranger things do you remember the very first time that 11 used her powers it wasn't something crazy it wasn't something outlandish it was to stop a fan not exactly groundbreaking psychokinesis but what that does is It prepares us for the like the grandios things that she does later like flipping a van over if we saw her flip over our van first it would make it harder to believe when you have

something surprising happen in a scene you need to lay the foundation forward in previous scene so when we get there we're ready for that crazy event to happen Lamb's fourth step in writing a scene is to create credible motivation so you've probably heard this before where actors go what's my motivation and when Alfred Hitchcock got asked this he used to say your salary but actors are right in this situation because characters need reasons for what they're doing in The Great Gatsby Gatsby's motivation is love love for Daisy and so when he meets her for the

first time after a spell of many years away from her he is super nervous he has the grass cut he has tons of flowers sent he knocks over Nick's clock and he's so nervous he can't stand he takes a walk in the rain before he finally returns without his motivation of being desperately in love with this woman he wouldn't have done any of those things there wouldn't have been any of that nervousness and a second quick technique is sometimes you have disguised motivation motivation that the reader doesn't really understand perhaps until later in Gone Girl

by Jillian Flynn Amy writes in her diary that she's fearful for her life fearful that her husband Nick is going to kill her and so the reader thinks oh her motivation here is fear that's what's driving her actions however spoiler alert we later learned that Amy fabricated these diary entries and made it appear as though Nick wanted a higher life insurance on her in order to frame her husband so the initial motivation was fake and then we learned the true motivation oh it's to frame her husband husband this is actually a really good thing to

think about so take a moment and see if you can remember a story where a character motivations appear to be one thing in the beginning and then switch to something else later if you can think of something comment below Lamb's fifth step to write a scene is honor the law of cause and effect in EM Foresters aspects of the novel he talks about how important cause and effect is for stories take for example something like the king died and then the queen died those are events in sequential order but are they a story he says

the king died and then the queen died of grief now that is a story because we have cause and effect so how does this help you in a scene well the first step is to have a cause in the scene so you can have some kind of effect like in Pride and Prejudice when Mr Darcy proposes he manages to like be very insulting in The Proposal insulting her family insulting her social position so that cause creates an effect of Elizabeth getting furious and rejecting his proposal now that's a pretty standard cause and effect relationship but

I'd also recommend that you explore trying to come up with unusual or surprising effects effects maybe that the reader couldn't foresee Lamb's step number six is to keep your eye on the goal so no scene is created in isolation right it's part of a whole and therefore you should examine how this scene contributes and points toward the very end of your book basically every single scene you should ask yourself this question how does this scene get the reader closer to the ending if you can remove the scene and the story still works then at least

consider maybe you should delete it or revise it so it is contributing in some way now of course there are exceptions right there are scenes that are primarily about character building and those are really valuable there are scenes which are designed for comedic effect and you don't want to get rid of those but most scenes probably will be building toward the climax and the ending of your story Lamb's seventh step is a wonderful one it is to remind the reader of the central conflict the central conflict in your book shouldn't be dropped you know for

a chapter or two and you think oh I wouldn't do that but as an editor I read books all the time where I'm like M I think you lost sight of like the overall Arc of the story here and it just happens for a chapter or two but that can be really disorienting for the reader one of the central conflicts in Breaking Bad is whether Walter White is doing all this meth selling for his family which is what he says or whether he's doing it really for power and his own ego and there's a scene

in the episode ozy mandas where after a shootout Walter White is rolling this barrel full of money through the desert and he passes by a pair of khaki pants that he actually took off in the very first episode of the entire show I think that scene beautifully illustrates the whole Arc of Walter White's Journey from when he did have good intentions and was like trying to do something to help others and then shifted all the way into this power hungry drug kingpin who is really lost his moral compass the pancer who he used to be

rolling a be full of money is where he's ended up the eighth step in Nancy Lamb's method to writing a scene is to conjure up interesting obstacles A good rule of thumb is to refrain from solving obstacles as soon as you present them for instance if you have an obstacle in a scene you don't fix it by the end of that scene you fix it maybe the next scene or two scenes from then what that does is it keeps the tension now what we're not talking about here is story wide obstacles when Bill Murray is

stuck in the same exact day in ground hod day that's an obstacle that he has to go through the entire story to finally solve no we're talking more about scene level obstacles minor obstacles in the whole course of the story for instance in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins we have Katniss who's suffering from dehydration that's the obstacle she's searching for water she's struggling to find water she knows there must be water because all the game makers wouldn't let everyone die of dehydration cuz that would be not very exciting and then honch sends a present

which contain a nothing now here we have a bit of a puzzle right and so the solution to this obstacle is Katniss figuring out this is a clue it's a clue that I must be close to water because he sent nothing now this is an interesting obstacle because when you think of The Hunger Games you think of people trying to kill each other you don't think that you know water is going to be a problem but not only is the obstacle interesting the solution is also interesting the solution as like a kind of puzzle that

Katniss has to figure out is kind of an ingenious way to have her solve this obstacle so now we're getting to the last two steps and these are the most important ones number n raise the stakes so a common problem when writers are writing scenes is that they start with decent Stakes but then they never ratchet them up to the next level your goal in writing a scene is to keep on thinking how can I make this scene more weighty more dangerous more consequential for an example of this let's go back to Gone Girl by

Jillian Flynn the scene starts already with pretty high stakes Amy is discovering that her husband Nick is cheating on her with a much younger woman and you're probably thinking how do you raise the stakes from there that is already a bombshell well the stakes get raised when Amy reveal RS that the move that Nick uses on his younger girlfriend is he takes two fingers and gently brushes them against her lips and Amy says he used that exact same move on me so it's kind of like this double betrayal like not only is he cheating on

her he's using the same seduction techniques on this new girl oh dagger straight to the heart right there and the last and most important step in writing a scene is number 10 simplify your scenes players so count up how many characters you have in a scene and then try to trim it down a little bit just you know cut maybe one or two off if you're really resistant to doing that then consider this trick have one character be unnamed rather than giving them a name for instance if they're buying food from somewhere instead of like

naming the waitress instead just have that waitress be unnamed it makes it feel like for the re there's fewer characters in the scene because they know they only have to pay attention to characters who actually have a name now the reason why this is very important for scene writing is because readers spend a lot of time figuring out you know who scene is this like what's important in this scene what should I pay attention to and if you have like a bunch of different characters doing a whole bunch of different things sometimes it's difficult for

the reader to figure out like what's going on here and this isn't something that just beginning Writers Do Right the most famous writers you know also do this JK ring actually had a character named pyrites whose name means Fool's go he was a servant of Voldemort and he was going to meet with Sirius in front of The Potter's House but JK ring just decided to simplify the storyline and just do away with him if you can streamline your scene by cutting a character it's often a good idea to do it all right my dog Roxy

is going to be in the end of this video where I remind you to like subscribe and leave a comment thanks bye