Plinko scenes

When I’m editing manuscripts, often I’ll come across a jarring scene that feels like it comes out of left field, has nothing to do with the scenes before and after, and never really ends up amounting to much.

I call these “Plinko scenes,” after the famous The Price is Right game. (Hello to my fellow children of the ’80s who watched Bob Barker when we were home sick from school!)

In Plinko (watch here if you’re unfamiliar), contestants drop a disc through a series of pegs, it falls in a fantastically unpredictable and suspenseful series of bounces, and the contestant wins a varying cash prize (or nothing) based on where it lands. There is no strategy involved, you just have to drop the disc and hope for the best.

So why do I call them “Plinko scenes?” Often there’s a particular scene an author feels attached to but doesn’t quite know what to do with, so they just sort of drop it into the novel wherever it happens to land.

Plinko scenes are metastasized “darlings” that the author can’t bring themselves to kill. But they can really sap momentum and tempt readers to put down your book.

The perils of “Plinko scenes”

In order for a scene to have momentum, there almost always needs to be a character who is trying to accomplish something or figure something out. And in order for that to work, they need to be active, prioritize relatively coherently, and conduct themselves in a way that aligns with their emotional state.

If a character is in a life and death situation and, instead of doing something about that, they take a few hours to sit and stare at the moon and engage in some lighthearted banter with their fellow traveler about a random topic, absent some other explanation or hints that there’s more to it, the reader is going to conclude they can’t possibly be very concerned about their plight.

Once the tension is raised, it’s dangerous to let it evaporate. A scene that’s plopped in out of nowhere risks breaking a reader’s flow and unwinding many chapters’ worth of delicious suspense.

Finish the swing on revisions

Plinko scenes are often the product of a revision that creates an orphaned scene that no longer makes sense because of broader changes to the story. But there’s something in the scene the author wants to hold onto, so they resist cutting it entirely.

If you find yourself with a Plinko scene and aren’t sure where to put it, what it really means is that you’re just not done. The scene either needs to be fully reimagined so it can seamlessly integrate with the rest of the story, or you need to bite the bullet and just cut it.

Look at it through the lens of an active protagonist and their motivations. If you can find a way to make it make sense that the events of the chapter are what the character is prioritizing and the emotional valences are aligned with the scenes around it, chances are it won’t stick out.

If you’re just jamming it in because there’s a break in the action and you don’t know where else to put it, well, you might as well play a game of Plinko.

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Art: Detail of Composition IV by Piet Mondrian