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50 Advanced Vs Value Shift Scene Craft

Value Shift

A scene turns something from positive to negative, or back.

What it is

A value shift is the change a scene makes in a character's situation, from good to bad or from bad to good. The situation is called a story value. A story value is simply a condition the character is in, and nothing moral is meant by the word. Safe or in danger is one. Trusted or suspected is another. So are solvent or ruined, certain or lost, and wanted or alone. Readers keep track of these conditions without any effort. A scene earns its place by flipping one of them, so the charge at the end of the scene differs from the charge at the start.

The core skill is naming the condition, and it's the step writers most often skip. Ask what a scene is "about" and you'll usually get a topic: a quarrel, a funeral, an interview. A topic has no charge and no direction. When you write toward a topic, you're writing toward nothing, and the scene drifts. Sometimes you check a scene and find the charge truly stays put. Then you have three good options, which you'll find under Why it matters. Polishing the prose isn't one of them.

One habit keeps all of this in view. Write the value as two poles with a direction between them, like trusted to suspected. If you can't draw the direction, the scene hasn't turned yet.

A value has a charge. The reader can tell whether it's good or bad for this character without the narrator saying so. Here are a few more pairs: believed or doubted, employed or fired, loved or tolerated, free or confined, hopeful or beaten, in control of the house or a guest in it. Each pair is a state with an opposite. The shift is a scene moving the character from one end toward the other.

The word value is borrowed, and it can mislead you. In everyday English, a value is a principle a person holds. Honesty as a virtue doesn't work as a story value. Honesty as a condition does. Picture a character who is told the truth in the first half of a scene and lied to by the end. Her condition has moved. So don't ask whether the word sounds moral. Ask whether you can put a character at one end and move her toward the other.

Three things get mistaken for values all the time. The first is a subject, as in "This scene is about the argument over the will." That names a topic. A quarrel over a will can end with everyone holding the same positions and the same grudges they walked in with. In life that happens constantly. On the page it kills the scene. The fix is to find the stake under the quarrel. For one sister, the stake might be her faith that her relatives will rally behind her. Faith in family has an opposite, so it can turn.

The second is an activity. "She drives to the hospital." "They search the apartment." "He cooks dinner for his father." Each of these describes the surface of a scene. A search can run four pages and leave everyone exactly where they were. The charged thing sits underneath, such as the searcher's confidence about who she's really up against.

The third is information. A fact matters only when it changes somebody's status. It blocks an option, breaks an alibi, ends a friendship or kills a plan. If it only adds to what everyone already knows, the scene is exposition dressed up as dialogue. So swap the weak question, "did somebody learn something?", for a better one: "is anybody now standing somewhere different?" Information scenes are the main source of scenes that are competent, readable and unnecessary.

Your goal is one short line for every scene. Here's a sample: Value: her standing in the house. Direction: secure to humiliated. Try writing that line for the chapter you like least, and give yourself five minutes. The line can fail even for experienced writers. When it won't come, the failure usually explains why the chapter is weak.

Name the value from the character's side. Ask what this person would count as better or worse. One promotion can delight an ambitious deputy and ruin a man who has spent four books keeping out of sight in the middle ranks. If you catch yourself writing "and of course really that is good for her", you've named your own value instead of hers.

Be specific. "Hope to despair" fits half the scenes ever written and guides you nowhere. "Certain her brother will back her, to certain he will not" nearly writes the scene's last beat for you.

One scene can turn several values at once. Her outer situation can change along with her view of herself and her relationship with the person in the room. Two or three at once is normal in a good scene. You don't need to list them all. You do need to know which one starts the next scene.

Make sure one of those values is on the inside. Outer values, like money, a job or a body in the trunk, are easy to name. Inner ones, like trusted to suspected or sure of himself to ashamed, are what make a reader feel the scene. A draft where every turn is outer reads busy and cold. For the inner side, see internal conflict. A long run of inner turns across a book adds up to a character arc.

The turn is the moment the charge flips. You can usually point to one thing that does it: a line of dialogue, a door swinging open, a name on a list, a refusal, a choice made instead of put off. If you can't point to a sentence, the reader won't feel a turn.

The turn usually comes late, most often in the last quarter of the scene. It shouldn't land on the very last line, though. A few lines after it let the reader watch it land. Before the turn comes the conflict that makes it cost something. After it comes the reaction. Put the turn on the first page of a five-page scene and the other four pages have nothing pulling them along. The aftermath still matters, but it belongs to a different unit. Scene and sequel gives the reaction its own room.

A turn has to meet three requirements before a reader feels it, and you can check each one.

First, set up the old charge. The reader has to see where the character stands before you move her. So the opening of a scene matters more than its polish. Half a page of quiet confidence sets up the confidence she's about to lose, so those lines earn their space.

Second, the scene's own conflict has to cause the turn. A coincidence or news from outside reads like an announcement. Aristotle saw this in the Poetics. He called the reversal of an action into its opposite peripeteia, and he said the best reversals come about through probability or necessity, never through chance. His example is the messenger in Oedipus, who comes to ease Oedipus's fears and does the reverse by explaining who he is. Twenty-five hundred years later, that remains the strongest form of the turn: the character's own act produces the opposite of what it aimed at. Cause and effect covers the gap between a turn that's caused and one that's merely delivered.

Third, the turn has to cost something inside the scene. A reversal that costs nothing is only a rumor. Let a character lose the contract and seem untroubled in the next scene, and the reader starts discounting every claim you make after that. Stakes is about what a charge is worth.

Some scenes turn more than once. Negotiations, confessions, interrogations and proposals often turn two, three or four times. Each new fact changes what both people stand to lose. Two rules apply to them. The first rule is that every turn needs its own cause. Turns aren't a dial you spin, and an extra turn with no reason behind it gives a scene the weightlessness of a soap opera. The second rule is that the last turn counts. Its charge carries into the next scene and into the reader's memory, and it demands an answer. The earlier turns are the road that got you there.

So your one-line summary records the net movement from start to finish, never the biggest swing in the middle. That gives you a useful signal in revision. When a scene has a major turn halfway through and then closes on a shrug, the ending is in the wrong place. Either jump ahead to the decisive moment, or move the shrug to the start of the following scene, where it becomes the opening charge.

Sometimes a shift happens and the character can't see it. There are two versions, and they work differently. In the first, the character reads the direction wrong. He leaves a meeting relieved, having just agreed to his own ruin. His own score doesn't drop, but the reader's does. You get dramatic irony at the size of one scene. Easy to write and strong on the page, it runs on the mechanics of tension, and subtext is often how you deliver it.

In the second version, the character's position changes and she never finds out. The danger has passed, or she has quietly dropped out of the running for the job. She leaves the scene unaware, and the reader carries the weight for her.

Both versions sit close to a fault. If only the reader's information changes and the situation doesn't, nothing has turned. Say the reader learns that the housekeeper resents the newly married woman. No shift. Now say the housekeeper acts on that resentment and the bride's standing in the house collapses. Shift. The test is simple. Did the situation move, or did only the reader's view of an unchanged situation move? Both read well. Only the first is a scene doing its job. A chapter built entirely of the second kind grips from paragraph to paragraph, yet by chapter thirty the book feels like it's standing still.

Shifts also come in sizes. Robert McKee describes a ladder. Small exchanges inside a scene are beats, and each one nudges something a little. A scene makes a noticeable turn. A run of scenes makes a larger one. Then two or three turns the size of the whole book are enough to reorganize the entire novel. The midpoint, the all is lost moment and the first plot point are names for those book-sized turns. The mechanism is the same. What changes is who owns the value: the whole book instead of one afternoon. When a midpoint feels small, the usual cause is a value no bigger than an ordinary scene's. The event itself is usually fine.

Why it matters

Naming the value finds the real problem in a dead chapter. When a chapter dies, the urge is to rewrite the prose. You sharpen the dialogue, add description, put in a joke, change the weather. The chapter reads better and stays dead, because the fault was never in the words. Naming the value takes about a minute, and it sorts the trouble into one of two kinds. In the first, the charge moves but the turn is buried. It happens offstage, or in summary, or so early that the rest is aftermath. That fix takes about a page. In the second, the charge never moves at all. Now you're facing a structural decision with three options.

A flat scene has three real repairs. A flat scene ends on the same charge it started with. Nobody gained or lost safety, trust or ground toward a goal. Nobody changed. Each of the next three paragraphs gives one way to fix it.

The first repair gives the scene a turn. Find the nearest condition in the scene that could come under threat, then make the threat real. Usually that means an opposing character who wants something badly enough to deny the viewpoint character. Scene goal covers the wanting, and conflict covers the denying. This repair suits a scene with good material and no mechanism.

The second repair folds the scene into another one. A flat scene often carries a fact or an emotional beat the book needs. Move that into a scene that already turns. Dropped into the middle of a confrontation, the fact costs nothing and borrows the scene's charge. Two half-scenes become one good one. When a revision has to lose fifteen thousand words, folding is one common way to get there.

The third repair cuts the scene. Let one sentence carry the information instead. Cutting is the hardest of the three and the one most often right. McKee's own advice for a scene that doesn't move is close to this.

Some popular fixes aren't repairs. The advice to "add tension" fails here, because there's nothing at stake to build tension on. The advice to "make the dialogue crackle" fails too. The rule to "start later and end earlier" is good general advice. Applied to a flat scene, though, it only makes the scene shorter. A shorter flat scene still isn't a scene.

A column of values shows you the shape of the book. Make a list of your scenes. Beside each one, write its value and direction. Then read down the column instead of reading the scenes, and look for patterns.

Runs in one direction blur together. Five worsening scenes in a row read as one long worsening, and constant bad news numbs the reader. Five wins in a row read like a montage. By the third repeat, readers stop registering which way things are going, and they report that the middle drags. Pacing goes into what these runs do.

Turning the same value over and over makes one long scene. Eleven scenes that turn on "does she trust him" read like one argument held eleven times. Variety in which value moves matters as much as variety in direction.

Turns that are all one size give the book no shape. A few scenes should shift almost nothing. Two or three should tip the whole board over.

An empty cell tells you where to look. If you can't fill in a scene's row, look hard at that scene. Sometimes it turns something you hadn't noticed, which is good news. More often you've found a flat scene.

A vague revision note becomes a short list. During revision, a fuzzy sense that the middle sags turns into a handful of specific scenes. Most of them can be fixed in a day.

The column tells you what to cut. When fifteen thousand words have to go, cut the scenes that don't move and the scenes that repeat. Don't just cut the ones you like least. The rule applies to a favorite chapter too, so the decision stops depending on how you feel about it.

Fast writers get structural insurance for a few minutes per book. If you publish several books a year, you can't hold a whole novel in your head. Write the value and direction for each planned scene before you draft, then check them once the draft is done. The habit costs minutes per book, and no other structural insurance costs less.

Series writers can see whether a new book turns anything new. Run the same column across a series and you'll see whether book four turns anything the earlier books haven't. Series arc picks up from there.

Real-world examples

Robert McKee's Story (1997): where the vocabulary comes from

The terms on this subject come from Robert McKee. His book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting came out in 1997 from ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins. He wrote it for screenwriters, but novelists read it mainly for this one idea. You'll find it listed below.

Chapter 2 of the book is called "The Structure Spectrum" and lays the idea out. McKee describes story values as features of lived experience that can flip from positive to negative, or back, from one moment to the next. He gives five pairs: alive and dead, love and hate, freedom and slavery, truth and lie, loyalty and betrayal. In his view, an event belongs in a story when it makes a meaningful change in a character's life situation, a change you can state in terms of a value and one brought about through conflict. A scene, for McKee, is action through conflict in roughly continuous time and place that turns the charged condition of at least one value. When the charge is the same at both ends, nothing meaningful happened, and what you have is exposition.

McKee also has a short piece on his own site, mckeestory.com, called "Do Your Scenes Turn?" and it restates the argument briefly and loosely. His advice there for a scene that doesn't turn is to remove it and weave its information into other scenes.

Chapter 10 is called "Scene Design" and gets practical. That chapter is why the book matters for value shifts and not only for the larger idea of story. McKee breaks the turn into its parts: the turning point, the setup and payoff around it, the emotional shift it produces in the audience, and the character's choice. Two ideas from the chapter are especially useful. First, emotion is felt as change. A scene that opens and closes on the same emotional charge gives the audience nothing to feel, however busy it is. Second, a scene can turn in only two ways. One is action, when someone does something. The other is revelation, when someone learns something. A revelation turns a scene only when it changes a condition. Topping up facts everyone already knows does nothing.

The book has limits. Since 1997 it has sometimes been applied too rigidly. McKee was writing about film, where a two-hour running time makes every flat scene expensive. That holds less for a novel of 120,000 words and a patient reader. McKee also lays down rules like a lawmaker, while admired fiction has scenes that exist for mood, for character, or simply to be enjoyed. Keep the tool and drop the all-or-nothing rules.

Rebecca (1938): the costume ball and the confession

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca came out from Victor Gollancz on August 5, 1938. Its narrator is never given a name. Two of its scenes show the two halves of the idea.

Up to the night of the costume ball, the narrator has privately felt out of place at Manderley. That evening she means to claim her role as its mistress. Mrs. Danvers suggested the costume. A white gown has been made in London, copied from the portrait of an ancestor, Caroline de Winter. The narrator walks down the great staircase expecting every eye to be on her.

Nobody applauds. Maxim goes pale and orders her upstairs to change, without telling her why. Beatrice explains it. Rebecca wore that very outfit at the last ball, not long before she died.

The value is the narrator's standing in the house and with her husband. It goes from rising to wrecked in about a minute of story time, and one visible cause does it. Two things make the scene worth studying. First, the turn comes out of the scene itself. Her choice of gown, made on advice she chose to follow, produces it. That fits Aristotle's reversal that grows out of action. Second, at the same instant Mrs. Danvers moves the other way, from thwarted to triumphant. One event turns two charges in opposite directions, so the scene does twice the work.

The confession comes late in the novel. Rebecca's body has been found in her sunken boat, and Maxim tells his wife that he shot her. The order of what follows matters. First she goes numb and can't answer when he tells her he loves her. Then, as he describes his marriage, she works out that Rebecca never had his love. Her charge jumps toward joy in the middle of a murder confession. The moment is very uneasy and very well judged, one of the standout scenes in popular fiction. Last come the remaining details: how he got rid of the body, the danger if the truth comes out, the inquest ahead. By the end of the scene she's an accomplice set on shielding him, no longer a second wife competing with a ghost.

So the scene has three turns. The third one counts, because it's her condition for the rest of the book and what the rest of the book is about. If you summed the scene up by the swing toward joy, you'd file it under the wrong value.

No Country for Old Men (2005): a turn the character never sees

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men was published by Alfred A. Knopf in July 2005, and the Coen brothers turned it into a film in 2007. Its gas station scene is a clear example of a turn the character can't see.

Anton Chigurh, whom the reader has already watched kill, pulls in for fuel. The owner makes small talk about the weather and mentions that he married into the station. Something in the talk irritates Chigurh. He sets a coin on the counter and tells the man to call it. The puzzled owner asks what he's betting on and gets no answer. He calls heads. The coin shows heads. Chigurh accepts the call and leaves without explaining anything.

By the owner's own count, almost nothing happened. He had a strange customer, an odd few minutes and a vague sense of unease. The reader, meanwhile, has watched his life put on the counter and handed back. The turn is complete, and the character never finds out.

The scene counts as a shift, unlike news that only the reader receives, because the owner's circumstances really changed. During the toss he faced death. Afterward he didn't. Whether he understood any of it doesn't matter.

Spoiler for the end of the novel: near the close, Chigurh offers Carla Jean Moss the same toss. She understands exactly what it means. She refuses to play, then calls heads. The coin lands tails. She tells him the coin has no say in it and that he's the one doing this. She is killed. The same device works in opposite ways depending on awareness. The first man is moved without ever seeing it. The second victim sees all of it and dies with her argument unbroken.

Story Grid (2015) and the Scene Tracker: logging the shift scene by scene

Two tools built by working writers show what it looks like to track shifts seriously, and both are public.

Shawn Coyne's Story Grid began with a book in 2015 and lives on at storygrid.com. The method gives every scene one row in a spreadsheet. The columns include the story event, the value shift, the polarity shift (which way the sign changed) and the turning point. Coyne assigns every genre a core value. Action runs on life and death. A love story runs on love and hate. A crime story runs on justice and its absence. When a scene moves several values, you log the one that belongs to the genre. Valerie Francis's beginner piece on the same site, Value Shift 101, explains that values travel along a spectrum, mostly in small steps instead of jumps from one extreme to the other. With no turning point, there's nothing to log, which tells you the unit isn't really a scene. The Story Grid element covers the whole method.

Martha Alderson has taught her Scene Tracker for years. It goes with Writing Deep Scenes (2015), the book she wrote with Jordan Rosenfeld, listed below. The tracker gives each scene a row with seven items: date and setting, the character's emotional development, goal, dramatic action, conflict, emotional change from start to finish, and thematic significance. The sixth item is the value shift under another name. Her tip is that a plus or a minus will do for it.

Marissa Graff, writing on Writers Helping Writers in 2021, describes a slimmer version she uses with her clients. Hers has five columns: summary, goal, conflict, emotional change and effect. She credits Alderson for it.

Neither tool judges whether a scene is good. Each one makes a hidden property visible, and a diagnostic needs to do nothing more. The medium doesn't matter. A spreadsheet works, and so does a notebook or the back of your outline.

An everyday scenario: the chapter rewritten twice

Here's a made-up case. Say you're writing a police procedural, and chapter eleven has been rewritten twice and still feels limp. In it, your detective, Orla Kesteven, visits the forensic doctor to ask when the victim died. The doctor is pleasant but curt. There's some banter at the coffee machine, with one good gag. Orla gets her answer, between nine and midnight, and goes back to her car.

Your first try at naming the value gives you "the investigation", which is a subject. The real value is Orla's trust in her own reading of the case. She has that trust going in, and she still has it coming out. Nobody refuses her anything. Nobody in the scene wants anything that works against what she wants. The charges match, so the prose was never the problem.

Give it a turn. The time of death wrecks Orla's theory, because her suspect can be shown to have been in a holding cell until half past ten. The scene and the props stay the same. Her charge now runs from confident to empty-handed. The doctor hands her a fact that costs her something, even though the doctor isn't quite an obstacle. You'd choose this repair first, because now the chapter earns its place.

Fold it into another scene. Move the time of death into chapter thirteen, the second interview with the suspect's wife, a scene that's already moving. Put the fact in the wife's lines, or in the question Orla opens with. Chapter eleven disappears, and all you lose is the coffee machine.

Cut it. If the time of death matters to the plot but changes nobody's position, nine words of narration between two scenes can carry it. Dramatize the shifts. You don't have to dramatize every fact.

One line, a value with a direction, handed you all three repairs quickly, for a chapter you had already rewritten twice.

Try it yourself

A full pass over a complete draft takes about an hour, and a single scene takes about five minutes. Use whatever you like for notes: paper, a spreadsheet or a notes app.

  1. Name the value of your least-liked scene. Pick the scene you like least and write one line in this shape: Value: ______. Direction: ______ to ______. Make the value a condition, never a topic or an activity. If the line won't come, keep going down this list anyway with the same scene. The later steps will help you see why.
  2. Mark the charge at both ends. Write the charge at the start and at the end, each with a plus or a minus, like this: trust in her brother: + at the start, − at the end. The signs are crude on purpose. Crude signs let you compare a hundred scenes at a glance.
  3. Find the sentence where it turns. Mark the one sentence where the charge flips. If all you can say is "somewhere in the middle it gets worse", the turn is too spread out for a reader to feel. If you can't find a sentence at all, the scene has no turn, and you've learned something real.
  4. Estimate where the turn sits. Guess how far into the scene that sentence falls, as a percentage. A rough estimate is fine. A healthy turn usually sits in the last quarter or so. If yours falls in the first third, ask whether the scene should really start later, or whether everything after the turn is reaction that belongs to the next scene.
  5. Check what caused the turn. Ask whether it came from what the people in the room do to each other, or from a coincidence, a messenger or your own needs as the author. A coincidence can pass once. A second one can't.
  6. Check who pays, and when. Write one sentence about the cost and name the scene where it shows up. If you can't, nobody got a bill, and readers will feel how light the scene is. Paste this template into your notes for each scene you check:

Scene: Value: Charge going in (+ or −): Charge going out (+ or −): Where it turns (the sentence, about __% into the scene): Cause: Cost, and the scene where it shows up: If flat, the repair (turn, fold or cut) and the decision:

  1. Log one act. For every scene in one act, write the value, the charge going in and the charge going out. Twenty scenes take about fifteen minutes. Only name things on this pass. Don't reread the scenes, and don't fix anything yet.
  2. Read down the column. Mark every run of three or more scenes moving the same way. Mark every place where one value keeps getting turned. Mark every scene whose row is still empty.
  3. Choose a repair for every empty row. For each one, pick one of the three repairs: give it a turn, fold it into another scene, or cut it. Write your choice next to the row, along with the date. Making the choice is the real work.
  4. Check the big turns against your structure. Whatever structure you use, its major beats are large shifts. Make sure your midpoint and your low point, the all is lost beat, each turn something bigger than an ordinary scene does.

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Reading value as virtue. Writers sometimes build scenes around moral positions. Courage is a virtue. Hesitating at the edge of acting and then backing away is a value, because a character can stand at either end of it. If nobody could actually occupy either end of a pair, all you have is an abstract noun.

Telling the turn in summary. "Everything changed after that phone call." "She knew then that she could never trust him again." Lines like these report the turn instead of letting the reader see it. The reader needs the cause on the page, whether that's the words on the phone, a look or a signature, and needs to draw the conclusion alone. This mistake survives excellent prose. The announcing sentence may be the best line in the chapter. See show, don't tell.

Letting a reversal go unpaid. A character is ruined on page 210 and comfortable again on page 213. Someone rescues her offstage, or a wound gets mentioned once and then forgotten. The reader learns that turns are decoration, and your later turns stop working too. Some lasting difference has to remain after a turn. The try-fail cycle depends on exactly that.

Moving only the reader's information. Revealing the housekeeper's history, which twin was adopted, or what's in the shed feels like movement while you draft. Across the whole book it reads as standing still. To check, ask whose position has actually changed.

Alternating strictly. Up, down, up, down is as dull as no movement at all. After about six scenes the reader hears the metronome. Vary the size of the turns and which value moves. Two scenes in a row going the same way are fine when they're earned. Just avoid a long unbroken run.

Swinging from pole to pole every time. Most scenes in good novels shift a value by a degree or two. A full swing from one extreme to the other in every scene wears the reader out by halfway and leaves the climax nothing to do. Save the big swings for two or three places in the book. Pacing has more on spacing them.

Ending every scene on a loss. Over time, the advice that "the scene must turn" drifted into "the protagonist must lose". Constant downward pressure produces a book people admire and put down. Wins raise the charge that the next fall has to break, and they let readers like the character. The best single move is a partial win that comes with a bill.

Turning one value for the whole book. Knowing the book's main pair helps. But if every scene turns that same pair, the scenes become interchangeable. Subplots, secondary relationships and the private conditions of your viewpoint characters need values of their own. Carrying those values is much of what a subplot is for.

Checking the charge too late. A flat scene picks up dependants as you keep drafting. Three later chapters refer back to it, or a character makes a first appearance in it. A fix that would have taken an afternoon at the outline stage now takes two weeks. Write one line for each planned scene before you draft, and check the lines at the end of each act. See outline and revision.

Thinking every shift is an outer plot event. The word "shift" makes it easy to picture a plot event. The strongest shifts can leave every outside fact the same and change only what a character can believe about herself or about someone else. A manuscript where every turn is outer reads as competent and mechanical.

Related elements