3 Things Your Breathe Scenes Should Have

Part 3 in this series on scenes

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

This is the final installment of my three-part series on scene writing. In the first one, we looked at scene basics and key things to include in any scene that will make them do more for you and your story. The second part looked at proactive scenes in which your character or characters are doing something that follows a more or less cause-and-effect structure of goal meets obstacle equals consequence. This third part is where you give your characters a scene to pause, breathe, and resume.

Why Stories Need Breathe Scenes

As a developmental editor, I’ll give you two reasons why interspersing breathe scenes throughout your story is a good idea. The first is that sometimes we forget our characters should be reacting to the things we throw at them, doubting themselves after failures, or celebrating epic successes. Most of those reactions could just be a quick sentence of internal thought or a dialogue exchange. But sometimes actual contemplation or a group discussion is necessary based on what happened in the previous scene. The second reason is that your readers can’t sustain an out of the pot into the cooking fire pace for an entire novel. They need a break from constant tension just as much as your characters.

So what are the three things these types of scenes should have?

1. A Reaction or Pause

Your character doesn’t need to weep at every piece of bad news or failure. In fact, this could lead to you one-upping yourself in your reaction descriptions until your protagonist’s heart is jackhammering against their rib cage, or they can no longer breathe at all by the end of your book. All they need is a moment that follows a key piece of news, a significant win or loss, or the discovery of a clue that challenges what they previously thought.

This reaction or pause doesn’t need to be long. Just long enough to show some genuine emotion or contemplation about the significance of what just happened. This makes it feel like they’re real people and leaves the reader wondering how they would react in a similar situation. What you don’t want is your reader asking, “Wait, are they just going to gloss over that?”

2. New or Existing Problem

Maybe your characters just scored a huge victory. They know it isn’t over but they can’t do anything until the morning. Or they think they’ve won and while they’re raising their glasses and taking in how epic that was, a messenger arrives on a sweat-foamed horse and announces another city is in flames and your characters suddenly realize the dragon they killed was just the baby. Now what?

You get the idea; something has changed with new information, or there is still work to do. They could be licking their wounds after a huge loss, but now they need to figure out what to do next. They have a discussion or debate, whether it’s internal or out in the open in a group. This is a great opportunity to remind the reader what the POV character already knows, what resources they have, what obstacles are still out there, and what the stakes are.

3. Decision Time

You’ve shown the reaction. They’ve debated what to do. Now all they need is a plan. Make the new goal clear and make it flow naturally out of the facts you laid out. This new plan is your goal for the next scene. It should feel like a natural progression built on a moment of character growth.

Breathe scenes don’t need to follow every proactive scene, just the pivotal ones, or if there hasn’t been a break in the tension for a while. And they don’t need to be long. They could cover five sentences while your character tries to fall asleep. Or, you could stretch it out over an entire chapter with a multi-character council in a magical elvish city. Whatever the story needs to keep the reader from falling behind.

Are There Exceptions?

There are always exceptions. But it all goes back to what I think is the most important question you have to answer: what is my purpose for including this scene?

In a comment on my last post on proactive scenes, writer Evie King asked about including scenes that seem to have no story connection, but are still interesting. In one of her stories, she included a summary of something funny that happened to a character and asked about including those seemingly random scenes that give us insight into that character. In response to summarizing instead of showing the funny event in-scene, her readers said this (used with permission of course):

“I'd love to see this whole scene” even if it actually has nothing to do with anything. Those random hangout scenes are often where my highest engagement is and they're my first instinct to cut.

Including this scene would certainly not work as a proactive scene unless the humour came from the character trying to accomplish a goal and failing miserably (by the way, those scenes are awesome to include!). However, this seems like more of a breathe scene. So what would be its purpose?

Certain genres such as Literary Fiction or Romance lend themselves to scenes like this, but they still need a purpose. They can provide character backstory with insight into their motivation, a false belief or flaw, or even show a softer side to a prickly character, allowing your reader to empathize. It may not follow the structure I laid out above, but it still gives the reader a necessary break from the tension, and I would argue, still relates to the story because it relates to your character.

Let me know if this was helpful. I’m always interested in your thoughts.

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I’m not here to give out rules. That first draft makes us all chaotic scribes to some degree. This is why we have beta readers and hire editors. If this helped get you closer to completing that draft, it was worth the read. Share if you think this will help another writer friend. Thanks for reading.