I'm still working my way through Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot by Brando Skyhorse at Wesleyan University, and the further I go, the more I realize this course isn't just teaching me how to write fiction. It's teaching me how to write, full stop.
Module 3 is about scenes — what makes one, what goes inside it, and why setting is never just background. If you're a content marketer who wants to write pieces that actually pull people in, this one is worth sitting with.
The Iceberg Theory: what you don't say matters as much as what you do
Skyhorse opens this module with the Iceberg Theory — the idea, most often associated with Hemingway, that the strength of a piece of writing comes from what's left beneath the surface. The reader only sees the tip. Everything else is felt.
For content marketers, this is an invitation to stop explaining everything. We have a tendency to over-justify, over-qualify, over-elaborate. We're so worried the reader won't get it that we say too much, and in doing so, we flatten the thing we were trying to say.
Trust the reader. Let some of the meaning sit beneath the waterline. The best content I've ever read leaves me with something to think about after I close the tab — not because it withheld information, but because it knew when to stop talking.
A scene needs five things — and so does a piece of content
Skyhorse lays out a five-point checklist for every scene. I read it and immediately started mapping it to content structure.
1. An action. Something has to happen. A scene without movement is just a description. In content terms: what is actually happening in your piece? What shifts between the opening and the close? If the answer is nothing, that's worth examining.
2. Dialogue that deepens understanding. In fiction, dialogue doesn't just fill space — it reveals character, creates tension, moves things forward. In content, your equivalent of dialogue is the moment you bring in a voice that isn't yours. A quote from an expert, a question posed directly to the reader, a real exchange from your own experience. Used well, it opens the piece up. Used carelessly, it just breaks the flow.
3. Specific, intimate details. This is the one that separates content that feels generic from content that feels written. Not "a busy office" but the stack of sticky notes peeling off the monitor. Not "a challenging year" but the specific Tuesday in March when everything shifted. Details that are specific enough to be true are intimate enough to be felt.
4. Inner point of view: Reach, Reflect, Reveal. In a scene, the character reaches for something emotionally, reflects on what it means, and reveals something about who they are. In content, this maps to the moments where you go a level deeper — where you don't just share a lesson but let the reader see you wrestling with it. That's what makes a blog post feel like it was written by a person and not a process.
5. A definite starting point and ending point. A scene needs to know where it begins and where it ends — not arbitrarily, but intentionally. The same is true for any piece of content. A strong opening commits to something. A strong close lands it. If either end feels loose, the whole thing drifts.
"Nothing happens nowhere"
The second half of the module brought in author Amity Gaige, who spoke about setting and description — and this is where things got genuinely beautiful.
Gaige describes the act of writing as trying to convey a dream. You are holding something in your imagination and doing your best to transfer it intact into someone else's mind. She calls the practice behind this "imaginative research" — not just reading or observing, but meditating, inhabiting, letting a world form inside you before you try to put it into words.
She also quoted Elizabeth Bowen: "Nothing happens nowhere."
Every scene, every moment in a story, happens somewhere. And that somewhere isn't set dressing — it shapes what happens, how it feels, who the characters are inside it. Setting is not the frame around the action. It is part of the action.
For content marketers, this is a challenge to ask: where does your content live? Not the platform — the world. What assumptions are you making about your reader's context? What's the room they're sitting in, the problem they brought to the page, the emotional state they arrived with? When you write as if your content exists in a vacuum, it often reads that way.
Gaige's point about imagination is worth holding onto too. The best content doesn't just inform — it transports. And you cannot transport a reader somewhere you haven't taken yourself first. Whether that means spending more time with your subject, writing more slowly, or simply sitting with an idea before you start drafting — the imaginative work matters.
Scenes are how we make things real
The through-line of this module is that scenes aren't just units of fiction. They're the mechanism by which abstract things become real. An argument isn't a concept in a scene — it's two people, a specific room, a line that lands wrong. A turning point isn't a narrative beat — it's a character reaching for something and having to decide.
Content marketers are in the business of making things real for people. Making a product feel tangible, making a challenge feel understood, making a solution feel possible. The tools of scene — action, dialogue, detail, interiority, setting — are exactly the tools we need to do that.
I'm only partway through this course and I'm already thinking differently about the sentence in front of me. More on the next module when I get there.
I'm currently taking Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot by Brando Skyhorse through Wesleyan University on Coursera. This is part of an ongoing series sharing what I'm learning.
