Last week I got stuck on a chapter in the novel I’m drafting.

Nothing was wrong with it, exactly. Two of my characters had a conversation, and by the end of it they’d worked out that they needed to dig deeper into the case they were investigating, do more research,
and chase a new lead. On paper, the chapter did its job. The story moved forward. Box ticked.

And it was flat as a pancake.

I read it back three times trying to name what was missing, and I couldn’t. The dialogue was fine.
The information landed. The plot advanced. So why did it feel like watching someone fill in a form?

Then I did the thing I always do when a scene won’t come alive: I stopped thinking like a novelist and started thinking like a screenwriter.

Because screenwriting teaches you something prose writers are rarely forced to learn. Screen time is brutally expensive, and a scene that only does one thing gets cut in the edit. In a script, “it moves the story forward”
is not a defence; it’s the bare minimum.

The question a screenwriter is trained to ask is sharper, and far more useful: What else is this scene doing?

When I asked that of my flat little chapter, the answer was: nothing. It was moving the story and nothing else. A single-purpose scene, and single-purpose scenes are precisely the ones readers skim.

The scenes we actually remember, the ones that lodge in us for years, are quietly doing several jobs at once. That’s the whole trick. 

Let me show you what I mean, and because I want these to stick, I’m reaching for film. We hold images far longer and far more strongly than we hold sentences, so a scene you’ve watched is a scene you can feel your way back into. Every example below is from the last ten years, so nobody can mutter “well, that worked in 1972.”

Here are the jobs you can load onto a scene so it stops merely functioning and starts landing.

7 Screen-Tested Tricks to Make Every Scene Do More.

#1. Give It A Second Agenda Underneath The First.

The surface of the scene is one thing. The real scene is what’s happening underneath it, a conversation about X that is secretly about Y.

Watch the opening of Lady Bird. A mother and daughter drive home from a college tour, teary and close over an audiobook.

And within two minutes they’re in a full-blown row about money, ambition and worth, which ends with the daughter throwing herself out of a moving car. 

On the surface: a car journey. Underneath: the entire mother-daughter relationship, the class anxiety that drives the whole film, and a girl reckless enough to hurl herself into the road to win an argument.
The scene doesn’t “just” gets them home. It’s doing four other things while it does.

Your Version: Never let a scene be only its surface errand. Ask what it’s actually about, then write toward that.

#2. Reveal Character Through A Choice, Not A Description.

Don’t tell me who someone is. Put them in a moment where what they DO gives them away.

Parasite opens with the Kim family folding pizza boxes for a pittance and creeping around their flat hunting for a neighbour’s unsecured wi-fi. 

Nobody explains that they’re poor, sharp, proud and endlessly resourceful. We watch them be it. By the end of the scene we know exactly who these people are, and we learned it entirely from behaviour, not a single line of exposition.

Your Version: Wherever you’ve written a paragraph describing a character’s nature, see if you can delete it and let one choice carry the weight instead.

#3. Let The Scene Argue The Theme Without Stating It.

The best scenes dramatise the question your whole story is asking, and, crucially, they do it while getting other work done, so the theme rides on top of a moving plot rather than stopping it dead.

Look at the recital in CODA. Ruby, the only hearing member of a deaf family, sings at her school concert.

The film cuts the sound to silence, dropping us into her parents’ experience of watching their daughter do the one thing they can’t share. Later that night her father asks her to sing again, just for him, and rests his hands on her throat to feel the vibrations he’ll never hear.

Nobody says a single word about what the film is about. But the entire theme is right there in that pair of hands. Love reaching across a gap that can’t be closed, and the same scene turns the father from resisting Ruby’s music to backing it, which is the pivot the whole story swings on. Theme, relationship and plot, all in one wordless beat.

Your Version: Somewhere in your draft, one scene should quietly stage the argument your book is making, while it’s also doing something else. Don’t have a character say the theme. Let an action mean it.

#4. Shift A Relationship – Someone Should Leave Changed.

Two people walk in with one dynamic between them and walk out with another.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick visits his old rival Iceman, now gravely ill and unable to speak, typing his side of the conversation on a screen.

It’s a short scene. Very little “happens.”
But Iceman gives Maverick the one thing he can’t give himself: permission, a push, “It’s time to let go”, and a decades-long relationship completes and closes in a few quiet minutes. Nobody’s in a jet. The plot barely twitches. It’s one of the most-remembered scenes in the film.

Your Version: Mark the scenes where a relationship measurably moves. If you don’t have enough of them, you have a plot but not a story.

#5 – Plant Or Pay Off Something So The Scene Reaches Beyond Itself.

A scene can do work now and work later at the same time, a detail dropped here that detonates a hundred pages on.

Knives Out does this gorgeously. Early on we learn, almost as a throwaway joke, that Marta physically cannot lie without vomiting. It’s a character beat, good for a laugh. 

It’s also the entire engine of the plot, and it pays off again and again right through to the end. One casual scene, quietly doing double duty across time.

Your Version: Comb your early chapters for details you can load, so a later scene lands like a trap you set on purpose

#6. Run Tension Or Subtext Under A Calm Surface.

Keep something unresolved humming beneath the dialogue, even, especially, when the conversation is polite.

The “meet the parents” scenes in Get Out are all smiles and small talk on the surface, and quietly unbearable underneath. 

Every courteous line is doing menacing work; the pleasantness is the threat. You lean in because you can feel something wrong that nobody in the room will name.

Your Version: A scene where everyone’s being nice, and nothing is at stake, is a scene with the tension drained out. Put something under it that neither character will say out loud.

#7. Let The Atmosphere Carry Meaning.

Sometimes the where and the mood do a job all by themselves.

When Paul first steps onto Arrakis in Dune, the scene technically just delivers plot: they’ve arrived.
But the crushing scale, the heat, the sense of a planet that would happily kill you make the setting itself an antagonist.  You don’t merely learn where you are. You feel the place as a force pressing down on the people in it.

Your Version: Ask whether your setting is a backdrop, or whether it’s actively doing something to the characters standing in it.

Back To My Flat Chapter.

So, my two characters are working out that they need to do more research.

Once I stopped asking “does this move the story” and started asking “what else could it do,” the fixes came tumbling out. The same conversation could show me who these two are under pressure.

One of them attacking the dead end like a puzzle to be cracked, the other quietly rattled by it in a way they’d never admit, so the setback revealed character instead of just handing over information (job two). 

And the one that finally made the chapter crackle: it could let the will-they-won’t-they tension surface for the first time, so that underneath two colleagues talking about a case there’s a current neither of them will name.

A beat where they almost, almost close the distance, then don’t, and that near-miss hangs over everything that follows (job three). The plot point stayed exactly the same. I just stopped making it carry the whole scene on its own.

That’s the test, and it’s a beautifully simple one to run on a second draft. Go through scene by scene and jot in the margin every job each one is doing. One job? Cut it, or fold it into its neighbour. Two? Solid. Three or four? Now you’re writing scenes people remember.

A word of warning, because I know some of you will hear “three jobs” as “cram in as much as humanly possible.” Don’t. Five agendas fighting for air makes a scene muddy and airless. Three is a sweet spot, not a scoreboard. The aim isn’t a busy scene; it’s a scene that reads as one smooth, single moment while doing quiet work on several floors at once.

Try This Out: Open your work-in-progress, find the flattest scene in it and ask it the screenwriter’s question: What else are you doing? Then make it answer.

Now it’s YOUR turn – What scene has stuck with you for years, and how many jobs was it doing?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

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