When to Cut, When to Write

[This article originally appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

If you’re like me, when you started writing, you followed rudimentary instincts on all craft questions. Characters simply appeared out of thin air; they did things (or they didn’t!). The setting was described. Sometimes. Eventually, inevitably, in my case, a character stood at the window, arms akimbo (why always akimbo?) and stared, deep in thought.  

At last, I realized I was making hundreds of craft decisions, and without rationale. In fact, every word was a decision. Who put all these adverbs in my story?!  

The first craft element I deliberately started controlling was pacing. Specifically, scene length. Finally, I could rush past boring things and slow down to savor the more delicious moments.  

Before we get into the nitty-gritty here, it’s useful to think about averages.  

Scenes—specific moments in a character’s life represented with some amount of vividness—vary in length from a single sentence to a whole book.  

Nicholson Baker’s entire first novel, The Mezzanine, is structured around a single, short scene. The narrator, on his lunch break, rides the office escalator where he works, and much of the book concerns his thoughts during this brief experience.   

Most scenes contain some dialogue—we’re social animals, and human interactions provide complex, lively drama. In screenplays, the general recommendation is that scenes not exceed three pages, which is three minutes of screentime.  

Most scenes in novels aren’t longer than 3–4 pages (500–1,000 words), though, of course, there are many wonderful situations that call for much longer scenes, which we’ll get to later.  

In fact, many personal essays and short stories are composed of what I call mini scenes or fragments of time, often used as specific examples of a concept.  

Lorrie Moore’s beloved second-person story, “How to Become a Writer,” is entirely made of mini-scenes. The longest scene is a quarter of a page and has two lines of dialogue—the short story’s only instance of a character replying to another character’s utterance. 

Readers generally appreciate shorter scenes, which honor their time and attention and keep things moving. So, writers tend to drop the reader into a scene after things have gotten interesting and pull the reader out before things get boring, which is why we writing teachers urge students to trim hello-and-goodbye fluff.  

Beyond that, things get complicated. Here are six specific concepts to consider when assessing scene length.  

At the beginning of books and even short stories, scenes tend to be quite short—often half a page or less. The writer is trying to accomplish much at the story’s start. We want to orient readers within our protagonist’s life, introduce key characters, ramp up sources of tension, and so on. 

Often, early in a book, because the reader doesn’t yet know these characters, scenes involve only two or three characters. Any more and the reader may become overwhelmed. These early scenes tend to be straightforward and easy to read.  

Later in a book, once readers are invested in the plot and characters, they’re more likely to want to delve into a longer scene, even a scene involving many characters interacting at once.  

If you just pick up a book at random on your shelf, and scan the scenes in the first 30 pages, and then scan the scenes in the last 100 pages, you’ll likely see that there’s much more dialogue (a proxy for scenes) in the last 100 pages, and the scenes tend to be longer.  

Interestingly, while early scenes are often brief in terms of “story time” (i.e., how much time takes place in the characters’ lives), they also often take up a disproportionate amount of page-space.  

So, a 30-second interaction between two characters might sprawl over two pages—as if time is slowing down—because the author is frantically jamming in as much exposition, physical description (both setting and people), as well as the point-of-view character’s thoughts (aka interiority), between the lines of dialogue and action.  

So, for example, the second chapter in Hadley Leggett’s superb debut novel All They Ask Is Everything, shows Julie, who’s hoping to foster a child or children, shopping for an outfit for a child she might be taking on, when the caseworker calls to say the child won’t be coming. The superb, short scene is interrupted for several short digressions into Julie’s background, her thoughts. A few minutes are spread out across several pages. 

Most scenes, structurally, work in three beats: setup, complication, and consequence. Many craft books base their scene-writing advice around this premise. Notably, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid asks writers to outline all of theindividual scenes in their book, noting the “arc of change” in each. If a scene doesn’t result in change, the thinking goes, you should probably cut it.  

Let the scene length be largely determined by the amount of tension (and stakes) occurring. This might mean that a very high-stakes scene, with lots of complex tension and subtextual conflict, could run long while still keepingthe reader engaged.  

In fact, you might find the scene goes on and on and on, and maybe that’s OK. Stieg Larsson and Tana French regularly get away with outrageously long scenes—20–30 pages—that remain riveting because the unfolding situation sustains a high level of tension that’s amplified repeatedly.  

The first five short (averaging 5–6 pages each) chapters of Lee Child’s Gone Tomorrow are a single long, riveting scene full of high-stakes tension. Jack Reacher spots a woman on the subway who he thinks might be a suicide bomber. Once the reader has this information, we’re locked in.  

For several chapters, Reacher contemplates a checklist of warning signs, and then, at last, he confronts her in the fourth chapter after looking at her and thinking for three chapters. Then the confrontation takes an unexpected turn in chapter five. The whole episode takes place over maybe five or 10 minutes, taking the reader all the way to page 29 of the novel.  

As you can see from the above examples, thrillers and mysteries—due to the heightened tension that they’re working with—sometimes have outrageously long scenes. The common wisdom says that thrillers are “fast paced,” which you might assume means they have lots of scenes that move quickly, with characters rushing through time, but they’re often the opposite: They build tension and then slow time down, using long, methodical scenes.  

Literary fiction tends to feature fewer scenes, and the ones it does show are constantly interrupted by exposition, backstory, interiority, setting, and more. The pages don’t look like a screenplay; they’re full of substantial blocks of text peppered with brief trills of dialogue. Again, later in a novel, even a literary novel, you’re more likely to encounter longer and talkier scenes. 

Each genre will have its own rhythm, which devotees of that genre will know cold, and they will expect you to give them what they’re expecting. So, if you’re writing middle-grade fiction, a sci-fi space odyssey, or high fantasy, take a look at what your favorite contemporary authors in your genre do in terms of scene length. And keep an eye out for how scene length—and exposition—changes across the novel.  

In his craft book Thrill Me, novelist and comic book writer Benjamin Percy talks about the importance of scene variety using what he calls his “suspense-o-meter,” which measures the peaks and valleys of action.  

So, a short, funny scene will be followed by a longer, darker scene, which might be followed by a medium-length scene full of tension. “I’ll see that I have a meditative scene (maybe a walk in the woods),” Percy writes, “followed by a scene in which the characters hash something out (maybe over dinner)— and I’ll recognize the narrative lag.”  

Vary scene lengths like musical tempo. Short scenes accelerate the pace, whereas longer scenes allow immersion. Create intentional rhythm patterns across chapters. Follow high-conflict, fast scenes with slower, tense scenes. Sometimes, your reader just needs to catch their breath.  

This variety of tone and scene length keeps readers on their toes. Never know what you’re going to get next! 

But after a long scene, readers need a break. Specifically, they need some short scenes to catch their breath. And then maybe it is time to let your character stand at a window, with their arms akimbo.  

Crucially, the narrator’s voice has to remain consistent despite these variations. Denis Johnson’s beloved collection of short stories Jesus’ Son, is, in turns, hilarious and heartbreaking. But you’re never worried that you might be reading a different book as you go, because you’re always under the spell of Johnson’s seemingly slapdash (it’s not) and grubby lyricism.  

Emotionally heavy moments deserve longer scenes. Big plot points—revelations, and periods when subtextual emotional troubles burst through to the surface—need room to breathe. These might not be high-conflict scenes, but they carry emotional potency.   

If the scenes wrap up fairly quickly, sit with your character while they recover from this intense experience. Let them process their thoughts—the reader will be processing similar thoughts, so they’ll appreciate watching their protagonist work through them in their own way.   

For example, in my second novel, The Dismal Science, the protagonist, Vincenzo, feels old and obsolete (although he is not), is in La Paz, high in the Andes mountains, and goes for a walk with an attractive younger woman. He soon becomes so winded that he must sit down, while she goes and gets her car. It’s a humiliating moment. While she’s off fetching the car, I kept the reader with Vincenzo, even though he’s just sitting there, for a poignant period of reflection.  

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz, stares at the sky, “There was nothing over him now except the sky—the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it.” Tolstoy halts “story time” by focusing on the setting and Bolkonsky’s thoughts.  

The scene is memorable for its beauty and lyricism, but also because it becomes a momentous experience in Bolkonsky’s life—the serene sky while battle rages all around. The character returns to that image repeatedly over the rest of his life. If you press an image into the story with vividness, you, too, can halt time and reengage the image throughout your book.  

If nothing changes during a scene—emotionally, relationally, or plot-wise—compress it. Summary is the best way to handle exposition. If your narrator isn’t going to take care of the exposition, the characters will be forced to do it in dialogue, and no one likes expository dialogue, except for “Law & Order’s” screenwriters.  

You can craft a mini scene alongside some exposition. Mini scenes can help give a scene flavor, making what would otherwise feel purely expository or abstract feel more engaging.  

For example:  

That conversation between Therese and Roddy might have been 10 minutes—potentially a five-page scene, but the reader already gets the idea, so now it’s dispatched quickly with summary and a dash of dialogue.   

Take a look at passages from the great practitioners of summary—I’m looking at you, Marilynne Robinson—and you’ll notice that they litter their exposition with a lot of specifics to help sweeten what might otherwise feel like an info-dump.  

From Robinson’s 1980 debut novel, Housekeeping:  

Generally, I find it easiest to overwrite scenes at first. I throw it all in—even the hellos and goodbyes—and the overlong dialogue is interrupted by winding interiority, excessive physical description, digressions into backstory, blocking, and more.  

The scene will be half as long when it’s done, but it’s nice to have material from which you can cut a gleaming gem of a scene. Even in a super-long scene, in the first draft, I might start off with an even longer version!  

Think of that first draft as outfitting yourself with everything you might need for this scene. You might as well overpack at first. As you’re filling the scene up with everything imaginable, you might notice that some random, surprising thing is actually the key to it all—the limpid sky over Austerlitz, say.  

And the thing you tossed in casually turns out to be what makes the scene stand out for the character, and for your reader.