Every writer has sat down to write and fallen into the trap of overusing narration or over-summarizing a life with “and then” sentences.
It’s efficient, but it leaves the reader unmoved.
Good storytelling is more than an accounting of events — it allows the reader to be in the room, to hear the voices, and to feel the air tense when the conflict rises.
A story is not a flat line of events; it’s about the experience of those events in the retelling. That’s where the scene comes in.
A dinner table argument written only as “we always fought” is sterile and lifeless — but if you write the scrape of a chair across tile, or the way one person’s fork clattered to the floor when a question hit the wrong nerve, you’ve given life to the memory.
Authors like Stephen King have been telling us this for decades: readers want the concrete, the small observed detail that makes a scene come alive.
In On Writing, King tells us that good prose creates a “sensory telepathy” between writer and reader. That is the power of a well-crafted scene — it transmits sensation, emotion, and even silence along with the facts.
This blog is dedicated to craft and to providing tools that help you move away from flat narration and toward building scenes.
Dialogue, sensory detail, and action are the three tenets of this approach. If you use them well, your memories will breathe, argue, laugh, and break your heart all over again.
What Changes on the Page
Summary has its use. There are times when you have to transport your reader years in a single sentence or lay out the shape of a family dynamic without getting lost in details.
But when every page is summary, your story reads like a long police report — accurate, maybe, but bloodless. The magic happens when summary hands over the mic to a scene.
Think about the difference between writing “my grandfather worked hard” and showing him trudging in from the fields with dust caked on his boots — or between “we were poor” and a kitchen table with mismatched spoons.
Anton Chekhov knew exactly how this worked. In one of his letters, he insisted that in describing nature, you must “seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”
Using Dialogue to Animate Experience
Ernest Hemingway built his entire style on this principle. In Death in the Afternoon, he explained that “the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
Dialogue works the same way.
You don’t need to explain everything a character feels; you let the reader sense the weight of what remains unspoken.
The silence after the sentence — the word left hanging in the air — is as important as what makes it onto the page.
Readers will be pulled out of the story if characters speak in perfect, polished sentences. In real life, people interrupt each other, they mumble, they backtrack and circle around to what they really meant to say. Or they don’t say it at all; they let their silence do the work.
That doesn’t mean you should jam every line with ums and uhs — but it does mean giving dialogue space to ramble, backtrack, and sound like real people talking. If you can capture that, you’ll find its truth.
Use dialogue sparingly, but when you do, trust it to do more than just deliver information. Trust it to create subtext that makes readers lean in close. It only takes a few exchanges to convey what you might otherwise explain in a paragraph — if you let the iceberg show just its tip.
Anchoring Memory in the Body
If dialogue gives a story its sound, sensory detail gives it texture. Without it, scenes seem to float in some sort of no-place, and characters talk into a blank void. With it, even the most mundane moment gains weight and solidity. Readers don’t just see a room — they smell the soup simmering on the stove, hear the floorboards creak, and feel the cool edge of the glass in their hand.
Sensory writing is often misunderstood. Writers mistake it for listing every detail of a room, as if painting a background or taking inventory.
Instead, it’s about finding the one exact detail that makes a place feel alive. Say the right thing, and the reader is there with you.
Tell them of the faint metallic taste of blood when you bite your lip, or describe how a rain-soaked wool sweater still smells like the storm long after you’ve come indoors — and they’re there with you.
C. S. Lewis captured this perfectly in a letter to a young writer: “Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description.”
Abstract words like delightful or horrifying outsource the work to the reader’s imagination. Concrete sensory details do the opposite — they root the feeling in the body and let the reader experience it firsthand.
Scenes pull readers out of the author’s head and drop them into the midst of action, showing characters through dialogue, reactions, and decisions. We’re not told what happens — we’re shown — and in the showing, we relive the memory.
Scene writing is a skill, but it’s also a habit. It’s the difference between saying, “I went to work,” and “I loaded the dishwasher with a ringing in my ears.”
The challenge, then, is not to purge narration entirely but to find the balance that serves each story. This comes in revision: by dialing a manuscript back to dialogue and sensory detail, a writer can uncover the turning points, emotional stakes, and moments where summary simply can’t compare. For those places, the writer drafts a scene.
Memoirists face the challenge of both time and place — the memories have passed, but they must be brought back to life. This is where showing trumps telling.
It’s the difference between this line of summary:
I felt alienated from my family at that dinner.
…and this scene:
“We didn’t know what to say to him,” my mother tried to explain.
He shoved his plate away. “Eat your mother’s cooking. It’s the least you can do.”
Sensory Description and Specificity
Specificity is what turns description into immersion. It’s not “the forest was beautiful”; it’s the dew-strung spiderweb trembling between two branches at dawn. The writer’s job is to choose the detail that holds the whole scene on its back.
If you want readers to live your memory with you, ground it in their senses. Let them smell what you smelled, hear what you heard, touch what you touched. That’s what turns a line of prose into an experience.
When readers say a scene is “coming alive,” what they mean is that the people in it do something. Action anchors emotion. You don’t need to tell us a character is angry if you show the slam of a door, the sudden stillness before an outburst, or the way they ball a napkin into a useless, tight knot. Movement communicates more than adjectives ever could.
The challenge for writers is restraint. Action can be over-described until it feels choreographed, every twitch accounted for. The more powerful approach is to choose a gesture that shows more than it says.
A nervous character doesn’t need to pace for three paragraphs — show them tugging at their sleeve until the fabric frays, and the unease speaks for itself.
John Green once said, “I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts… I find this hugely liberating.” That’s a gift of an attitude for writers working with action. You don’t need every gesture — just the right one, the one worth keeping after the page is cut down.
In memoir or family history, small actions often have the most weight — like a father smoothing his tie before delivering bad news, or a grandmother folding a letter slowly, as if holding it open might change what it said. These are the moments readers remember long after summary fades.
Dialogue, Sensory Detail, and Action Together
Dialogue, sensory description, and action each add dimension to a scene, but their real power comes when you let them work together.
Dialogue tells the story, sensory detail plants us in the room, and action reveals the undercurrent. Together, they recreate the experience instead of simply summarizing it.
Imagine the line, “She was heartbroken.” That’s narration. Now, build it out:
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice too light. She twisted the ring on her finger until her knuckle whitened. The kitchen smelled of burnt coffee, sharp and bitter, as if it, too, had turned against her.
In three sentences, you’ve layered dialogue, action, and sensory detail. No need to announce heartbreak — the reader feels it.
Chuck Palahniuk, in his craft essay Nuts and Bolts, admonished writers not to use verbs like thinks, knows, realizes, and remembers. “The act of telling,” he wrote, “distances the reader. Instead, you should opt for specific sensory detail, action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.”
When you combine those with dialogue, you create writing that draws readers in and keeps them turning pages.
The key is balance. Every page needs dialogue, but not sensory overload. Not every emotion demands a gesture — but when the stakes rise to a confrontation, a revelation, or a turning point, layering these tools makes the difference between a flat record and a living memory.
Editing Narration into Scenes
Drafting often starts with narration — it’s the quickest way to get the bones of a memory on the page: “My mother loved to cook,” or “That summer was full of tension.” Those lines serve as placeholders, but if they stay in the final draft, the story risks feeling flat. The work of revision is deciding where summary needs to be fleshed into scene.
Stephen King advises writers to cut “everything that is not the story.” In On Writing, he describes revision as a brutal but necessary pruning process — a way of uncovering the heart of the story by stripping away the scaffolding.
Here’s a practical strategy:
- Highlight summaries anywhere you tell rather than show.
- Pick one vivid instance that illustrates the summary. Instead of “we were poor,” maybe it’s the moment your family stretched a can of soup for three nights.
- Ask scene questions: What did it look like? What did it sound like? Who said what? What was the one action that revealed everything?
- Layer in sensory detail and dialogue until the moment feels lived.
Sometimes summary is efficient and necessary, but when a moment carries weight, conflict, revelation, or transformation, it deserves a scene.
Writers who learn to spot these “scene-worthy” places turn flat drafts into textured narratives. The key is to approach revision as an opportunity. Deleting the scaffolding isn’t loss — it’s the process of letting the story breathe.
Lodged in Memory
Memoir and family history readers don’t recall the pat summaries when they finish a book. They remember the night laughter echoed on a porch, the smell of a house after a storm, the stinging words that ended a friendship.
Scenes lodge in memory because they are experience re-created. They open a window and let the reader in to witness rather than observe from a distance.
The trick is not to avoid narration altogether but to know when to push past it — to ask, Does this moment merit more than a summary? Does it deserve to live as a scene? To layer in voices, textures, and gestures is to create writing that doesn’t merely report life but reenacts it.
If you’re ready to make that shift and you’re not sure where to start, you don’t have to do this work alone. At The Writers For Hire, we specialize in translating raw memories into stories that capture readers’ imaginations and preserve experience with depth and dimension.
Whether you’re writing a memoir, an autobiography, or a family history, we can help you hone narration and craft scenes that endure. Reach out, and let’s bring your stories to life.
