If your scenes look too similar… try the Tarzan Test

It’s one of the nastiest problems in writing, because it can pop up either because we’re struggling or because we’re getting in the groove: we keep using another of the same kind of similar scenes. Hero and heroine argue, or maybe hero uses his professional skill to work through the problem, or bullets fly… again. I’ve slipped into a few of them more often than I’ll admit, maybe because I’m trying to play to my strengths as a writer or because a given story does call for a lot of a thing. (For some reason gangsters in trouble like shooting people.) So I try to look at my plot through what I call the Tarzan Test, both to keep my scenes distinct and to see if those patterns can be a good thing for what the story is.

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

The test goes like this:

• If Tarzan fights a lion, and then he ever fights another lion, that’s redundant
• –or not

Check every scene against every other scene. Any two that start looking similar risk boring the reader… unless the writer’s good at making a distinction between them. But at the same time, if you’ve worked out a lot about what makes one lion stronger than another, or why one comedy act works and another fails, using both scenes puts real focus on what makes them each tick. The book I’m working on now, The High Road, has more a number of scenes of the heroes using their discovery to fly over the city, but in some scenes it’s to look for clues about their enemies and in others it’s to cope with the power’s side effects.

Of course, favoring action or conversation or whichever is part of what makes any story what it is, for genre and style and just because of what that tale’s key elements are. (Besides, we writers do have our preferences, and readers do open our books expecting certain things, so we ignore them at our peril.)

But it goes beyond that:

• If Tarzan fights a lion, then fights a crocodile, the story’s about the jungle
• If he fights a lion and then a poacher, it’s about the jungle plus who comes there
• If he fights a lion and then a World War I battle, it’s Tarzan in the larger world

The variety in scenes might do more than anything else to define what the story is. Making only animals the enemy makes a different statement than giving a human a turn as villain, and so does every other choice. There are writers and readers that would love to see Tarzan in something as realistic as the WWI trenches (the period’s about right), and others who think that breaks the fantasy of what the stories should be.

• If he fights a lion and then talks with Jane…
• If he fights a lion and then speaks in London about ecology…

Naturally a story is more than one type of scene. But one tale could use only a few types, others could have many… and then, what’s the balance between them? One writer could use a visit to the city as a token excuse for a range of rooftop battles, while another works through dozens of different reactions to bringing him to “civilization.”

I sometimes think of scenes’ variety as dots within a circle. The shape they make might be wide and diverse or tightly clumped, but its overall breadth tells us how many things the story’s about; meanwhile within that given space, having at least some of those points evenly spread out tells a lot about how well it’s being explored.

• If he fights a lion and dies saving Jane…

What each scene does for the story still means more than how it compares to the other scenes. And those effects are the biggest key for which parts are more different, and more important.

After all, even if you could kill off Tarzan, you could never do it through him saving anyone else. That’s just who he is.

(Update: for more musings on scene variety and ways to check for it, look at Been There Done That?)

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