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Your Next Draft - How Taylor Jenkins Reid Crafts an Exceptional Opening Scene

How Taylor Jenkins Reid Crafts an Exceptional Opening Scene

Your Next Draft

06/18/24 • 30 min

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Your reader experiences your story one scene at a time. Make every scene un-put-down-able.
Great stories are made of great scenes.
Sure, your novel has a clever plot with twists and turns from the first page to the last. But the way your readers will experience that plot is . . .
. . . one scene at a time.
Which means if you want your readers to fall in love with your novel, you need to captivate them with scenes they can’t put down.
How do you do it?
I’ll show you in this episode. I’m analyzing a scene from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo to show you how and why it works—
—and how you can create the same magic with your own scenes.
You’ll learn:

  • The timeless structure behind this modern scene
  • How every single detail in the scene enhances that structure
  • What Taylor Jenkins Reid shares through exposition—and what she leaves out
  • How to draw inspiration from this scene to craft an exceptional scene of your own
  • And more!

This episode is a sneak peek inside my upcoming Scene Mastery Workshop. In fact, this is the first scene we’ll study in the workshop. Then, we’ll dig into seven more scenes from other great novels.
So if you enjoy this episode, you’ll love the workshop.
Want to master editing scenes this summer? Click here to get all the details and apply »
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06/18/24 • 30 min

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Your Next Draft - How Taylor Jenkins Reid Crafts an Exceptional Opening Scene

Transcript

every single detail in this scene emphasizes the value shift. There are no extraneous details here, nothing to bog down the momentum. Every single line is carefully crafted to make the change in the scene as sharp as possible. Because after all stories are about change.

Welcome to your next draft. Today, we're going to dig into scene structure more specifically, I'm going to pull out a scene from one of my favorite novels and show you h

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