purpose

As I said in the last post, I've been applying my "checklist" system to scenes in the stories I'm working on, and have come up with a couple of amendments. The first had to do with conflict; this one has to do with purpose.
Purpose is now the sixth category on my checklist. It's different from the Goals category, which is about what the characters are trying to achieve in the scene; purpose is about what you are trying to achieve. It's where you ask yourself: why am I putting this scene into my story? How does it fit into the overall narrative?
Is it there to grab the reader's attention and hook her so she has to read the rest of the story? Is it there to reveal a character's personality, or demonstrate conflict in a relationship, or to show that a character has grown in some way? It might be there to introduce a setting or to give the reader some important information. Or it might serve several purposes at once.
These are, of course, questions I ask myself all the time. NOT!
Nah, usually I just dive in and start flailing. And that can be okay; sometimes you can discover amazing things by flailing. When it comes to actually putting the story together, though (or revising it), there's a place for purposefulness. After all, if you don't know what you're trying to acheive with a scene, you can't really know if you're achieving it.