What Happened

When I was a kid, my dad had a green Oldsmobile Cutlass with bench seats and an AM/FM analog radio. It had a rotary dial to tune in a radio station.

On road trips, once you left a town, you’d lose the radio station and have to start turning that knob to find a new one.

At first, it was all static and white noise, but then you’d get a hint of a melody coming through and stop. Then you’d slowly dial in the station to get as much signal and as little noise as possible.

This is what you’re trying to do when writing a scene.

Create and amplify the signal to the reader while cutting out as much noise as possible.

How do you do that?

Turns out, it’s a 3 step process.

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1️⃣ STEP 1: Create a Signal

Stories are about change. If there’s no value shift in your scene, then nothing important happened, which means it will be boring and/or confusing for your reader.

The way you track change in your story is with the Five Commandments of Storytelling:

Inciting Incident: The ball of chaos that comes into your protagonist’s life and destroys their status quo.
Turning Point: The final refusal of the protagonist to do what the force of antagonism wants them to do.
Crisis: The ultimatum from the force of antagonism that forces your protagonist to face the ramifications of the Inciting Incident.
Climax: When your protagonist acts on their decision from the Crisis.
Resolution: What happens as a result of the protagonist’s actions in the Climax.

Here’s the thing…

Without the Five Commandments, your writing is all noise.

There’s no signal. There’s nothing for the reader to latch onto and care about.

That means they will close your book and keep scanning for a better writer.

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2️⃣ STEP 2: Amp the Signal

Once you have the Five Commandments, you have a signal, but it may be very weak.

Meaning: Something changes, but not anything strong enough to create emotion and connection in the reader.

This is what we see a lot when we work with writers in our program.

So how do you amp the signal?

How do you take your story and turn it into something that is page-turning for the reader? Something where they must know what happens next?

Focus on the Crisis.

Ask yourself this: How can I make the Crisis worse for the protagonist?

What can I add to my scene so the decision the protagonist is forced to make in the Crisis is more painful?

Here’s an example: The mom (the antagonist in this scene) asks the protagonist to lend her some money.

The Crisis is A) let the mom borrow money or B) don’t let the mom borrow money.

It’s kind of interesting, but not really. There’s nothing to care about here. I don’t really care what happens.

Let’s change that.

The mom needs to borrow $50,000 because she found a doctor in Mexico who can give her a lifesaving treatment. But the protagonist’s daughter has just been accepted to college, and that same $50,000 is her entire tuition fund. If she gives the money to her mother, she risks her daughter’s future. If she keeps it, she has to live with the knowledge that her mother died while she sat on the money that could have saved her. To make it worse, her daughter begs her not to give it away because the grandmother has always been cruel and manipulative and only shows up when she needs money. The daughter is convinced the grandmother is lying about what the money is for.

Now the protagonist has to decide: believe her daughter and protect the future she’s worked so hard to give her, or believe her mother and risk everything to save the woman who’s hurt her the most. It’s not just a financial choice—it’s a moral one. Either she betrays her daughter’s trust or abandons her mother in what might be her final hour. There’s no version of this decision that doesn’t break her.

Now we have a real Crisis on our hands. Something the reader will care about.

We took the signal and amped it significantly.

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3️⃣ STEP 3: Cut the Noise

Now that we have a strong signal that will keep the reader engaged and turning pages, it’s time to get down to the line-by-line editing. We do this to cut the noise so our strong signal comes through loud and clear.

This is where we look at things like:

Showing vs Telling
Cutting down exposition and description to only what is necessary
Cleaning up the dialogue to make it read true
Valencing the word choice to let the emotionality of the scene come through

We want to clear out anything that will be distracting or confusing for the reader.

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Once you’re able to do these three things in every single scene you write, you will be a strong writer who can craft a story that keeps the reader glued to the page from cover to cover.