A scene in a story is just words on a page. In your story, it had better have a purpose. If it doesn’t, get rid of it.
But let’s assume the scene belongs in the story and not on the cutting room floor. How do you keep the reader interested and focused on your writing?
Here’s some writing from a first, very rough draft of a short story in the Horror genre:
An unmarked warehouse stood at the end of a dusty road where a farm once was. A rolling steel door wound itself slowly open, and a panel truck drove inside. There was a group of boxes stacked inside a bin marked in Chinese, which would translate as “Guangzhou Circuit Board Components” — although both the firm and the paperwork attached to the bin were elaborate fictions.
Men in white coveralls loaded the bin onto the truck while a man in a brown uniform and two armed soldiers watched intently. Once the truck was sealed and locked, the brown-suited man banged on its side and the truck drove off down the dusty road, its cargo headed for the United States. Inside the warehouse, in neat separate laboratories, with vapor hoods, pressure vessels, and all sorts of elaborate equipment, several dozen chemical technicians worked synthesizing powerful narcotics for the international trade.
The narcotics just shipped were worth many millions of dollars, separated into small packages on their way to many independent distributors, who would ‘cut’ the pure product to only a few percent active content, for the undiluted synthetic narcotics were far too potent for use and ultimately deadly. Each package, small enough for a child to hold, had enough poison inside to potentially kill thousands of people. The drug was at least 200 times deadlier than heroin and a fatal dose was measured in picograms.
The bin joined many such bins inside a shipping container at the port of Tianjin, swung on board a massive cargo vessel, and out to sea, where it traveled for almost three weeks to the Port of Long Beach. In a customs center, the bin was opened, and the packages transferred and their barcodes scanned as package companies took their assigned parcels to their regional sorting facilities.
As a first draft, it’s not horrible. It’s complete, it’s obviously an expository scene, explaining something important to the story. The problems at first glance are that it’s not exciting and it’s too wordy. The pace is slow. It has little human interest. People are going to die later in the story and it has little foreshadowing.
You should show the reader an interesting person right now and then kill them. Give them a very temporary background character.
Say hello to Ming Zhao, a 22-year-old chemistry student who moonlights three days a week at an illegal factory making synthetic fentanyl and an analog of carfentanil, in the form of a finely milled powder ten thousand times more powerful than heroin.
“你好”
Oh don’t worry, fella, you’re a non-player character. Go put on your lab coat and sit over there, please.
Ming Zhao wiped his forehead with a gloved hand and adjusted his mask. The lousy vent hood was malfunctioning again, and he could feel the heat through his lab coat, his body sweating and his clothes damp, sticking to him tightly. The new batch of fentanyl, blended with carfentanil, was a perfect designer drug. He was testing the end product, fresh from a ball mill, a dust almost as fine as smoke, so easy to mix and ‘cut’ with filler for the end customers, distributors in America. He placed a cotton swab in a test tube and watched the reagent change color. Excellent.
Zhao noticed, almost incidentally, that he had stopped breathing. He dropped the test tube and grabbed his throat, making a small pitiful sound as air bubbled through his lips ineffectually. Zhao tried to calm himself and reached his hand for the pre-filled syringe next to him, loaded with naloxone, an opioid antagonist used to instantly reverse overdoses. In a triumph of concentration and will to survive, the chemistry student jabbed the syringe through his jacket into his arm and pushed the plunger all the way down. He relaxed, waiting for relief. He found a few moments later that now he could no longer close his eyes or move. His fellow chemist found him dead a few minutes later, wide-eyed and mouth open, slumped on the bench.
Business is business and proceeds regardless of small accidents. The tested product was heat-sealed by masked workers in small bags, padding wrapped around them, carefully packed in cardboard boxes. The boxes were carefully stacked inside a bin marked in Chinese, words which would translate as “Guangzhou Circuit Board Components” — although both the firm and the paperwork attached to the bin were elaborate fictions.
Men in white coveralls loaded the bin onto the truck while a man in a brown uniform and two armed soldiers watched intently. Once the truck was sealed and locked, the brown-suited man banged on its side and the truck drove off down the dusty road, its cargo headed for the United States.
See, all you had to do was give the reader someone to identify with. You don’t have to kill them in most genres. You also used the action to reveal details previously buried in the rather thick expository text of the first version. Now the scene moves, it has a rhythm and power. You’re showing along with telling. It has some suspense and plenty of foreshadowing. The reader is paying attention and in their mind’s eye is following those packages.
It was best to lop the last two paragraphs off and shrink it into part of the next scene’s description. They really didn’t belong in this scene, anyway.
“嘿，我呢？”
Quiet, Zhao, you’re dead.