The Prologue Checklist

“What’s past is prologue.”

–William Shakespeare, The Tempest

It’s only natural—you’ve got a powerful story to write, so you open with a prologue. It’s your chance to show off a clever idea, it guarantees the tale has a wider scope and maybe an extra viewpoint, and it’s traditional for everything from Lord of the Rings to every other horror movie made. Shakespeare used plenty.

Then you hear it: “I don’t read prologues.”

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

We can hear it from some readers, from bloggers, from agents that sound like they’re willing to slam the door on our best idea and maybe the whole story too. When I started hearing that, it’s hard to say which of my reactions was louder: “D’oh!” or just “That’s not fair…”

Yes, a lot of writers love prologues, and readers too. That might well be the cause of the Prologue Problem: for every marvelous example of the art, it’s easy to find case after case that doesn’t exactly push the writing envelope. And I admit, much as I relish their potential, more than once I’ve felt my eyes moving to skimming speed when I come across the P word.

It’s just too easy, to find ourselves writing a prologue without asking the hard questions it needs. My own latest, The High Road, has seen its prologue go through more than one total rewrite. But, I’m thinking the process comes down to:

#1: Is the prologue idea just a way to ease into writing this story?

Prologues are as natural as “Once upon a time,” especially if we’re still getting a handle on what the story is. Just start with a big picture or a contrasting part, and work our way over to the focus, right? Trouble is, “pre-focused” is exactly what the first pages of a story can’t afford to be.

How often do you revise your first chapter, and your first paragraph, knowing the whole story can be judged by how perfect those are? I’m betting it’s more than a few times—in fact, many authors decide their original Chapter One was a distraction and they’re better starting the story on Two.

[bctt tweet=”#FirstScene paradox: the one bit that you NEED to work is the part you wrote as you learned the story.”]

So ask yourself, could this prologue idea have already done its job, by helping you find some better scenes? Keep this in mind as you ask the next questions. (And if it doesn’t make the cut, “outtake prologues” are prime candidates for a Bonus Scenes section of your author website, so no scene has to be truly abandoned. DVD-makers figured that one out years ago.)

#2: Do you have the PERFECT contrast with the rest of the story?

This is the big one.

The one defining thing that makes a prologue different from a regular chapter is how it isolates part of the story from the rest: a character giving history, a young glimpse of the hero, something. And normally storytelling is about how much each part is integrated with the rest of the tale—so are you sure the best place for this thing is right out there in front, on its own?

Maybe the clearest prologue I know is in Pixar’s Finding Nemo (thanks to Feo Takahari for pointing that out). The bulk of the movie is Marlin struggling to, well, find his lost son, but it’s also him facing his own overprotective ways. And the fastest, clearest, most irresistible way to set that up was to open with a tragedy that gives him a reason to be so worried—and not just setting it on the day the rest of the story begins, but long before then. As a prologue.

Or: horror tales love prologues. Any time the story wants to follow an ordinary person slowly discovering the nastiness, but the writer still wants to make an early promise that the payoff will be worth it, an easy choice is to open with a glimpse of the monster. And a hapless victim, of course.

Fear vs finding confidence. Full-on villain vs slowly-alerted hero. See the pattern here?

A prologue that really pulls its weight zeroes in on the perfect element to contrast with the rest of the story. If that contrast is so vital that it itself should be the first thing you show your reader… so essential that it would cleaner to give that one thing a spotlight moment that shows off how it differs from the flow ahead… if you’re sure of those, you’ve got a prologue.

[bctt tweet=”Use a #prologue only if has the perfect thing to play off the rest of the story, and nothing else.”]

(If not… If it’s only a good piece of contrast but not a perfect one, it’s better off worked into a regular Chapter One or elsewhere. Or if you really want a sense of history or scale first, you could open with a snippet from a history book, news report, or letter, that doesn’t look like a prologue—in fact, you could weave bits of these into the start of every chapter instead of putting them in one place.)

One other thing: if any point is so vital the reader can’t appreciate the story without it, you can do a prologue but put it in Chapter One as well. If the prologue’s good enough, we can afford to be generous even to the prologue-haters.

#3: Size matters

Readers expect prologues to be small. You might have a marvelous concept for one that’s built like a midsized chapter, but it’s hard to convince the reader you’ve got true laserlike precision to set up a strong chapter when the prologue itself wears the reader out.

[bctt tweet=”If a reader reads your #prologue and takes a break before Chapter One– fail.”]

No, there are no rules about size, but I’ve heard “500 words” mentioned as a good high average. That seems about right; it should mean (at least with many print paperbacks) that the moment the reader turns the page once she’ll see the end on the third page, so she never has to wonder if the prologue is going to take two or ten more page-turns to get the job done. In fact, if you can hone a prologue down to two pages, or one, you can impress the reader even more.

To put it another way, a prologue is no place for just a slice of life. It might have a strong point combined with a slice of life, but you want to make it a thin slice.

(No, you don’t want to do a prologue for flash fiction. The second season of Arrow doesn’t count.)

#4: Are you giving the prologue what it deserves?

A good first scene can make your story; a weak one can certainly sink it. It’s no secret that you want any opening to be the best it can. But prologues have the same need, plus the added burden of convincing reluctant prologue-readers… and they have the sheer power of having such a focused goal.

So if you can make the prologue the best scene you’ve ever written, the rest of the story will thank you. Dig through your whole arsenal of writing tricks, from imagery to irony to a really unique point about the scene’s character, and how you could twist the plot up, down, and sideways just for the sake of showing off.

–And then don’t do all of them! You want to use your best writing judgment too, about the ideal central technique for what the prologue needs and how many more tricks can fit in around it without overstuffing it. (Well, without quite overstuffing it. Like any story’s opening, you still want to blow the reader away.)

Extra tip: if the prologue isn’t about the hero’s younger days or about the villain (and these may be the two best reasons for a prologue), consider killing off its viewpoint character right then. That saves the reader from wondering when he’ll show up again. It does also add to the risk that the reader will decide you’re abandoning the story’s best material, but a good prologue needs to invest the reader in what’s coming rather than just in itself. Besides, you can take a memorable prologue character as a challenge to be positive your hero’s even better.

One Thing

Maybe the best single advice I’ve heard for this comes from another movie: City Slickers. Granted, Jack Palance as Curly the cowboy was talking about how he simplified his whole life, and that’s more than most of us want to use his rule for, but it’s perfect for prologues:

“You know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.”

And the real secret the movie claims is that we all have to find our own One Thing.

(Image credit: Sundayeducation.com)

A prologue works… if you have the right One Thing to make it about, and you keep everything else out of the way, and you make that thing worthy of the spotlight you’ve given it. (Okay, for a prologue it might be fairer to say the One “Thing” is “one contrast” between two elements in it, like a character and just who betrays him, and then how that combination contrasts with the rest of the story.) If you don’t have that one clean combination—if you can’t sum it up in one sentence—your story’s better off going straight to a full-sized Chapter One.

It’s a hard choice. Every character in a story (and ones that aren’t in it yet) might be whispering in your head why they should be the prologue viewpoint, and prologues may still feel too much like the default tool to work your way into the story. But, is this idea the One Contrast that the reader needs as a prologue, or not?

If it still is, you’ve won yourself a rare insight into what makes your story tick. An opportunity like that would be a shame to waste.

Now excuse me here. My own book’s start needs some more trimming… and I’ve got some prologue cynics I’m hoping to blow away.

“And, by that destiny, to perform an act,

Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.”

–William Shakespeare, The Tempest (the whole quote, emphasis mine)

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The Plot-Device Machine – Strength

Welcome to the whole story… or at least a chance to step back from looking at single aspects of writing, like the last two Plot-Device posts did. Now that we’ve explored how characters’ movement and knowledge keep changing how the story works—and the ways each ends up reshaping the tale—it’s time to look at a third aspect and see how they all fit together to build a story. I call this third quarter of the Plot Device, Strength.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

(“Strength? What if my story only has a bit of fighting in it?” comes the voice from the back row.)

I’ll admit it, I’ve never had a perfect name for this one. That’s because it takes in every component in the story world that doesn’t fall into the other three groups.

“Strength” could be any tool or resource characters use to make a change in the story, and whatever’s in the story that gives them that opening. A hammer can break down a door, or nails can put it back up—or it could be someone having the muscle to smash that door, or how fast someone’s tiring from the room being on fire, or the fact that there’s a door there to smash and not just another stretch of wall. It does usually means physical “things,” but there’s also room for some abstract power in the grouping; if our hero’s goal is to write an unforgettable song, “strength” might be inspiration, time to work on it, and probably years of study or experience so he’s ready to write.

But the reason I group all these together is to tease out the other Plot Device aspects separate from them, and let them work in the ways we covered in the other posts. Our musician may test out and “learn” which chords work for his song, but that still works better as working through the songwriting’s Strength on its own terms. Meanwhile if part of the process is hearing one musical style and remembering it’s the way he always wanted to sing, that might open up things like:

Since he only has to hear that sound again once, it’s Knowledge—and like we’ve seen, it can have a whole investigation to track it down, or a theme-friendly depth of learning what kind of musician he’d rather be.
If he has to go to a hundred clubs before he hears it, that’s Movement’s way of spreading the story out, and giving him a chance to stumble into friends and enemies on the way.

Or there’s Motive—but that’s for the next post. Combining these two with Strengths is fun enough.

Finding Strength factors can be trickier than it looks, with so much weighing into it. My rule of thumb is:

[bctt tweet=”Everything characters deal with is a lock; some just have keys that are harder to get. http://bit.ly/DevicesStr”]

The “locks”: look on all sides for what makes anything a weak link, or ready to change. Small-scale example: look left and right and all through the building for where there might be a door someone can try to open. (Are there windows? Or are the doors so reinforced it’s easier to smash the wall?)
1. Don’t forget, what’s changing on its own: from tides coming in and batteries dimming, to politics changing as whole generations fade away. Or, what times are they just not there (or some rare thing is) and that changes the mix?

The “keys”: what tools, resources, skills, possible allies, and so on are out there that can change one of those—enable it, fix it, whatever you need?
1. Yes, those keys might need components to build them, or bargaining chips to get someone involved, that break a simple process down into more scenes. We’ve all seen stories plotted like that, but they make sense if you don’t take them for granted.

Plan B, C… You’ll always come up with a few locks and keys that might work, and some that would have worked if the conditions weren’t forbidding them, and probably a few that sound beyond crazy. Any of those are good for that moment when our hero shows he’s trying to think of everything—or of course if you have any time for Things To Go Wrong.
The other guys, and forces. Remember to check all the above for how every other character (like the villain) is busy looking for their own shot at their own goals, and how all characters have changes around them even if nobody’s taking advantage of them. The hero has to sleep too, and if our villain knows where…
Strong enough? Once those Strengths start to come together, you can write two ways: You can run a fight, surgery, or any other scene with the classic suspense of whether they’ll actually win. Or you can keep all the tension on the plot twists just before that, on just who’ll get the right tool or enemy attack there in time. (But then, I like to have the outcome hanging on skill and then keep changing the rules…)

Again, this the purely Strength side of it. You might have the perfect “key” that our hero just doesn’t Know about, or can’t Move out to get. Because it’s that combination, taking those Strength points and pacing them out with Knowledge and Movement (and all the smaller cycles within those) that really starts to look like a story. In fact it starts to look like a treasure map, but one that does justice to the complications you’d have trying to follow it.

The Treasure Map of Oz

Time to see how these work together. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s goal is simple: getting home. The Strength to do that turns out to be in her magic shoes (silver or ruby, depending on your choice of media) and her love of family to make them work. But that’s the Plan B, since there’s also the Wizard—

(There’s that back-row voice again: “Her goal is getting home? Doesn’t that make all of this Movement?” Well yes, it could be called that, but that’s a move she doesn’t start until the story’s end. The tale’s Movement parts aren’t the flight to Kansas and whatever happens on the way, they’re her journey to find Strengths that could let her go.)

So Dorothy’s quest is to discover the depth of love (Strength) to work those shoes… after she stops relying on the Strength of the Wizard. In fact the Wizard’s offering two ways out: a perfectly good balloon ride (that turns out to be too time-sensitive for a girl with a dog-shaped Deus Ex Machina), and before that his “magic” that’s a red herring—a bit of Knowledge plotting. But first, just to learn about that “Strength” she has to go and claim another Strength, by beating the Witch.

And those several Strengths are scattered over Oz—imagine how much shorter the tale would be if the Wizard and Witch were right there when she landed with the Munchkins, ready to fight out their differences with her in one busy scene! Instead it’s that Movement (and the missing Knowledge about the Wizard) that spreads the story out on the way to those Strengths; it’s what gives her time to meet her three friends, dodge the Witch’s attacks (our villain doesn’t miss her chances to use own Strength), and of course build up the Strength she’ll really need. And all those journeys, discoveries, and fights are made up of their own combinations of these—the Tin Woodsman even gets to break down a door.

Other stories are their own mix of the same elements. A thriller might turn on getting hold of a bloody shirt for evidence, layered over with the trail of Knowledge to find it, the Movement to get to each clue, and the Strength to reach them and come out alive. A business story could be gathering the resources to launch that billion-dollar idea; a monster hunt needs get hold of its silver bullets and then track down and shoot the werewolf.

(“But that isn’t ALL the story! Why is Dorothy even chased by the Witch, why’d the Wizard send her after her, why are her friends and her home so important—”)

I know. That’s the last piece of the Plot Device puzzle. Strength may give us pieces that Knowledge and Movement lay out, but we all know the thing that really aligns them all, and makes the story mean something. So next week: Motive.

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The Plot-Device Machine – Movement

I’m about to share with you my all-purpose tool for the all-purpose question that my characters (and I’d bet yours) are constantly asking. That question is, “How do I get out of this one?”

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Or, it can be how the hero will find a new way into a dilemma that holds the key he needs, or of course how enemies and good old Murphy’s Law can get at him. From escaping traps to staying on the good side of a tempestuous ally, in a hero’s eyes his life is a multilayered challenge that almost seems to be conspiring to push him to his limits.

And readers never stop asking the same questions, because they know his life is!

So much of the nuts and bolts of writing is building the dramatic out of the practical. Would that escape be more intense if he bargained rather than fought his way through? Does the plot touch all the bases of tracking a killer?

When I’m looking for problems or solutions for my characters, I’ve found I have four main options. As a writer you won’t see any of these as new, but I think the key is in seeing the combination of choices, and the ways they can steer a scene or story. (Plus, me being me, they all have their own implications for picking someone’s paranormal or other suspense resources.)

So my plot devices are either about:

Movement
Knowledge
Strength
Motive

Movement

Yes, I listed movement first, and it’s not because I have a weakness for chase scenes. Stop a moment and think:

[bctt tweet=”How many pages are the hero working his way through a place? #Movement matters. #writing”]

On a small scale, mobility can mean chase speeds and barriers, or whether hero or villain can find an unprotected approach to get where he wants. (Try the back door, crawl up the sewers, whatever way’s the weakest link.) On a larger scale, running a business or just getting through the day have their own logistics issues, and a problem anywhere on all those roads—or getting a new and better way around—may well be the most changeable part of the story. Or, you can force the heroine’s boyfriend or mentor to move across the country, even if it’s just to make phone contact less comfortable.

As often as not, part of making a whole scene or more story work is physically placing everything it needs. That can mean having a sense of:

Pacing—of the story, not the people on the move. Do you want to stretch a scene out with escape maneuvers, or sum up a month of military campaigning with a paragraph that explains thinning supply routes? Giving a section more space usually means finding more complications for it, and a longer or rougher ride is an easy way to provide that.

Or else, just taking movement out of a scene focuses it on everything else. The more you’re trapped with your enemy, for better or worse, the more you know something’s about to change… though even then something might come between you…

Who wants to bring which things together, and who doesn’t? Is that bystander who sees the approaching figure a cop who thinks standing and shooting at a monster will do any good, or is it Carrie Coed who’s perfectly happy to RUN AWAY?
Speeds, and also distance, to which goals. Letting Carrie run to just “get away” may not be as intense as having her run to her car. So how far from the parking lot is she? How near was the beastie to catching her—and if it moves at a nice suspenseful shamble, the only way to let it gain on her may be to say poor Carrie’s already limping from a previous chase.

But then, movement isn’t only raw speed. If Carrie had one of my own books’ flying belts to float up out of reach (assuming the monster didn’t too!), or she had to run around a chain fence while the monster oozed right through it, the chase may take a very different turn.

The big one: check everything for how it can change. Cliché or not, it’s only human for Carrie to stop and stare when the monster pours through the parking lot fence, or maybe even drop the car keys she needed. (Yes, this can be more a chance for “shock,” mixed in with more straight suspense of just following the movement.)

Especially, focus on how those characters try to control those. The creature might be smart enough to see that Carrie needs to run to the lot exit now, and try to head her off. But if Carrie had actually dropped her backup keys, and then doubled back to her car with her real ones, she can get to drive straight through the thing—SPLAT.

(Good for you, Carrie!)

All in all, movement ought to be a natural part of working out any writing. Wherever the story physically is, distance and barriers are a big part of stretching it out (distance metaphors—we can’t get away from them). And you’ll always find a few aspects of it that can be perfect for twisting the plot.

Especially, it can be part of defining the characters, and the story as a whole. A mobile hero might be the perfect match for a stronger but slower enemy (no wonder Peter Pan can laugh at all those pirates), or a faster, elusive villain can make him the one frustrated. At the same time it can set the scale for the story: Carrie only has to drive across campus to find out why her friends aren’t answering their phones, but the further Clark Kent realized he could fly, the more of the planet Superman patrolled.

[bctt tweet=”If you don’t think #movement can reimagine a whole story, two words: Road trip!”]

With all the different pieces of your plot, movement can be just the way to control who gets to act on what.

That is, if they know about it. Which brings us to next week: Knowledge.

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How All Writing is Suspense

Why is my writing all about suspense? I think a better question is, is there any story that isn’t really about building uncertainty, making the reader wonder about what comes next, making them care? Suspense. And understanding that may be the perfect tool for any kind of writing.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

But suspense is only one genre, isn’t it? One Wikipedia page (since it’s probably the quickest source to go check; I’ll wait) lists 22 genres, and umpteen variations within them. I actually class my own writing as fantasy, urban fantasy and paranormal in particular, one of several genres that many people think of for its distinctive character types and weaponry (see also Science Fiction) or conflict (Crime or Mystery).

Except, many of those genres are about choosing tools. When a writer sits down to use them, Tom Clancy doesn’t have the same aims as Ian Fleming, and my battles aren’t trying to imitate Seanan McGuire’s. (Not that anyone could…)

What the idea of suspense can do is bring all genres and styles together—and show how each of us is making our own writing choices, even line by line, but all following the same cycle.

I call it a “suspense” flow, because I think that’s the word that captures the energy we want each part of a story to have—especially how it depends on balancing different parts of the flow to get the pacing right. You might argue for “action,” “mystery,” or other words, but I think “suspense” captures more in one word. And it all builds on what all writers do know is: conflict.

[bctt tweet=”If #conflict is the ‘engine’ of a story, the #suspense flow shows which ‘gear’ the engine’s in.”]

How does that help us writing?

Partly, we can use the suspense model for a larger view of what any part of a story needs, whether it’s a single passage or a five-book plan. Such as checking for:

someone to root for
tone or atmosphere
complications, and a sense that these would be what he has to deal with
choices that are hard enough to reveal the character
pacing, not rushing or bogging down on the way to—
an outcome that means something

All of these are basic elements of writing and conflict, but this fits them all together to see them as part of the same cycle—and to ask whether they’re building the right kind of momentum, involvement, suspense.

“But my writing’s barely about suspense!” –If that’s what you’ve been thinking, consider this: the suspense flow is more than a way to find common needs in the genres and styles. It’s also a way to look at any part of writing, and to pick if you have any particular priorities for it:

If you want sensory mood or detail, you can start painting the picture right from the beginning, even before things happen.
To make your story more about its subject (anything from a neighborhood-specific tale to a political tale to SF and fantasy), you might define more of it by just what complications come out of it. Be sure the reader knows why it’s those problems those people have to face, and what that means.
A sense of mystery can mean playing up the contrast between choices about the subject, and of course stretching out how long it takaes to find that answer. Was it the vampire or the best friend that dunnit? Just why was the ruined city abandoned?
Or, classic suspense in its own right means extending the whole process, whether it’s building up more mood or looking for further complications to keep things up in the air.
Pure “drama” usually is code for making characters more important than what happens—not just important (we all want that), but focused on how they resist or interpret or put their own slant on the facts. Even in a whole sprawling war, nobody’s going to have the same PTSD as this one soldier.
Or an action story needs to do justice to the effect itself, the explosions at the end of the suspense cycle before the cycle starts up again.
(For that matter, comedy has the same need to stop there and enjoy the laughter. That same moment of release might well have explosions too, as long as fewer people are getting hurt.)

Naturally each point on the suspense flow is only as good as how the rest of the flow meshes with it. Only the crudest action story gets careless about why the danger’s there, or the hero’s choices in facing it; sensory description that shuts off once the complications appear would be absurd. And again, “suspense” is a reminder that it only works when the pieces have the right balance for the pacing we want.

Even a sequence that’s all mood or description can look at this pattern. By the time that boy finishes strolling out to the lake, what state of mind should the passage have nudged him to, and the reader with him? Do the bits of detail contrast with each other in ways that stir up preferences in us (looking at the open sky, and the gritty, tiring dust his feet kick up, before he’s finally rounding the corner), or give a sense of one thing disrupting another to demand our attention?

Can you look at these and see which part of the flow you want to give a bit more justification, a few more words, or an extra scene?

It’s all there, by one name or another. And if the combination of your words catches fire, it will do it partly because of what we call suspense.

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Writing for Five Senses – Combining Them All

Can you write a description with just sight and hearing? No, but those two can organize how all five senses fit together.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Last week I wrote about the classic advice to “describe all five senses,” and how much easier keeping track of description is if we focus on alternating the main two. But of course writing isn’t supposed to be easy. Having two primary senses doesn’t excuse us from keeping all five in mind to cover a scene, or help weave them together to build the kind of high-powered suspense (or warmth, or humor, or whatever your own goals are) a story deserves.

Except, they do.

[bctt tweet=”Sight and hearing aren’t just a shortcut, they’re models for writing all five senses. bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

Two Models

Think about it: what’s the basic difference between eyes and ears? Different writers might think of points like:

Sight organizes our surroundings, with sound giving advance signs before something comes into view. (Or as we action writers call them, warnings.)
Sight gives a complete “picture” of surroundings; sound often adds feeling with someone’s tone of voice, or a noisy object’s “personality.” More poetic writers can savor this.
Sight shows everything (in theory); sound picks out which things are moving or active.

All true, and I think they all come back to one rule for organizing descriptions:

[bctt tweet=”#Describing sight is about things’ positions; hearing is about their nature. #writing bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

When I look out my window right now, I see everything from the parking lot up to the sky—which also means I have to (literally) focus on different parts of the view each moment, and it means that if I don’t see someone walking up to visit me, there’s nobody right there. Hearing is more selective; someone standing beyond my door is hidden until he knocks, and I still won’t know if he’s holding a package or anything else until he (or she) makes another noise with that.

–That position vs nature difference is nothing new to any of us, but how often do we really think about it, as writers? Especially one further effect of it: if there is a sound, my hearing might still pick it up through walls and behind my back, and even when I’m not paying attention. (Say when a car alarm goes off when I’m trying to write…) But sight’s power and limits might lead to me walking over to check what’s off on the side of my window frame.

Of the two, focused sight is the one we keep acting on to get a clearer picture of what we need; sound gets broadcast to us on its own. For a writer looking to follow the moment, that difference is pure gold.

And best of all, the other three senses fit right into these patterns.

Touch is as position- and focused-based as sight, the way we have to reach out to feel anything that hasn’t come to us; it even has the same similarity that we already have a skinload of cold air, tight shoes, and other touches we’re always half-aware of and trying to focus past. And taste only has the range of our tongues, except when memory or “the taste of fear” stir something up.

Meanwhile smell works much like hearing: certain things jump right out at us because they—but only they—give off much scent, and they pour those sensations right into the air.

There may be five senses, but all they follow these two plans… and so does a character using them.

Stepping through the Senses

Since I always look at my writing as a chance to build different kinds of suspense, I think my scenes only work if I can build them in the right order. So if I want to drop a reader deep into one moment, I might describe all five senses at once. But more often, I’ll tie it all to the process of how my character is living through that scene:

Step 1) First outside senses: Is there something he can hear, or smell, before what’s important comes within reach of the focused senses?

A crunch of boots on the snow made him whirl around.

Step 2) Surveying: What can he see, touch, or taste as he first tries to take in what’s there? And, which pieces matter most to him, and what patterns (like barriers or possibilities) do they form in his mind?

One of the thugs staggered from the door, blocking the alley. Dark blood soaked his shirt, but Mark shivered to see the “dead” man’s wild eyes gleam brighter than the knife in his hand.

As part of this, sound/smell components: check which few of those sensations would also create a sound or smell, and how those senses might “demand” a bit of our attention. So instead I could start those lines with:
One of the thugs staggered from the door, scraping dully against the brick wall as he blocked the alley….

Step 3) Act & React (focus+changes): As the scene goes on, keep tracking what the character and everyone else do, the same way as Step 2. That is, use sight, touch, and taste to do their best to follow everything worth noticing, but watch for which things are adding a noise or scent to the mix.

Mark edged back, watching his balance as his heels picked through the treacherous bags of garbage piled behind him. The stink of blood as the killer stumbled closer brought sour vomit to Mark’s mouth.

plus Background: For an extra layer, once and a while is there a sound or smell from outside the immediate area that could filter into the mix?
The police sirens faded in the distance.

—Or if those sirens were to turn around, that “background” sound could restart the cycle as a new Step 1 of the police starting to drive into view. (Even if they don’t, if you know my Lavine series, you know Mark has at least four ways to survive that scene.)

That’s how I build suspense, or poetry or warmth or any other mood, by playing up the differences in the “focused” and “broadcast” senses to work them each in at their own places. Because to me (and I make no apology for saying it)—

Losing that distinction would be… senseless.

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More than a Scene

It’s easy to think of a story’s scene as being about the next struggle or problem, or else touching a different base that hasn’t been mentioned in a while. That sense of “what’s next” may be vital, for the logic that ties the scene to what’s just happened and what’s needed up ahead. But it can also be a trap, to think only of the immediate needs and miss our chance to build larger resonances with the whole story.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Classic example: we all know what a story’s first couple of scenes (or first minutes in one running scene) will probably cover, as far as the hero goes. They’ll include

something to give a sense of the character’s regular life, and
the “establishing incident,” the “call to adventure” that takes it in a different direction.

–Yes there are a lot of variations, like putting the change right in line one and then catching up with “Why shoot at me, I’m just a…”, or someone with a “regular” life that’s already thrilling but still complicated by this new twist. But these are the classic building blocks of a start.

But, how many more layers could you build with them? Everything has a past; there may still be one event that puts things on the story’s course, but how carefully could you set up the road they’d been on until then, so we really feel how sharp (or subtle) the change is?

Consider the start of the manga and anime Monster, by Naoki Urasawa. The story’s tagline is “What if the life you saved became a monster?”–but, the first scenes aren’t simply the good Dr. Tenma performing ordinary surgeries before they wheel in the dying serial killer. Instead, he realizes he’s let his boss keep him away from desperate but poor patients, and so Tenma is actually defying his hospital when he insists on saving that particular fateful life.

Now think about it: how many writers do you know that don’t consider a start or other key moment complete without that kind of ironic spin? Other authors may dislike overt twists like that, but they’ll look around for quieter hints that can make the effect they want. This is hard-hitting, ambitious writing that we can’t do if we think only of the likeliest way to get from A to B. What’s the best way to get there?

And besides the big plot twist itself, when Urasawa chooses an obstacle of human schemes (rather than, say, Tenma being in bad health, or about to go on vacation), he also shows how corrupt the story’s world can be and how Tenma will have to struggle with his naiveté and ideals. Again, it can be too easy to fill a scene with the most obvious form of problem (or solution to it) rather than find the one that adds to the bigger picture.

Think of what could be called the “penultimate, penultimate Harry Potter action scene.” That is, the second-last book’s second-last struggle–a position that of course could make it a key moment for suspense buildup. And even though it’s a movie-trailer favorite as “That Half-Blood Prince moment where a lakeful of zombies get torched,” the real center of the scene is much more specific. Namely, it’s Harry under orders to help his mentor Dumbledore put himself through ultimate agony to complete their mission.

The “fire”fight afterward is a much-appreciated release from that tension, but it only goes so far to relieve our sense of guilt, all amplified by how this is the first time in six books that Dumbledore has openly asked Harry to go into danger. Of all the things J. K. Rawling could have keyed that struggle around (and we know she can think of quite a few), she chose the one that leaves Harry with a deep need to make it up to Dumbledore… and what happens then reminds us the Potter books are so much more than Quidditch chases or good-crushes-evil.

That’s the principle, things resonating from their past or on to the future, and it shows up in many of the more powerful stories and some mediocre ones too. We all know scenes of some hero busy doing one thing while a supporting character shows off his dissent or incompetence; what makes so many of them comic relief is that those conflicts doesn’t go anywhere further, while the other stories actually are laying groundwork for future changes or showing consequences for what’s just happened.

It works for obstacles, and characters, and it works for methods or resources. (In a sense, most of the story is either a method or an obstacle, plus the lessons learned from them; characters are simply the most important things to fit onto those sides.) If the hero has one way of solving a problem, it should be only a matter of time before the story explores how many ways that can go wrong, and how which ways he’s tried build a sense of what he still needs to explore or what he needs to keep his faith in.

One caution: it’s also easy to plan scenes completely from this viewpoint, placing certain things purely as a clue or an echo. This may add a lot to the larger picture, but scenes that also feel like they’re really connected to the story right now come off a lot better than those that whisper “Hold on and take this in, it’ll matter more later.”

All of these are the building blocks of a story. And building anything means being sure one brick fits with the next, but real architecture keeps the whole shape in mind. A scene can be the next thing, but are you choosing it to mesh with what came just before or some larger point?

Why stop at one?