Making the most of your scenes

I had a minor revelation about a scene I've been working on. It's a basic scene of dialogue between my 16 y.o. main character, Megan, and the boy she's interested in.

I already knew the purpose of the scene; that's something I think about in the plotting phase and often document in the scene-by-scene notes. I'm a firm believer in the idea that every scene can and should serve multiple purposes. For example, the main purpose of this scene was to give the two characters a chance to get to know each other better. However, I was also using it to do some second-hand character building of the third main character--the boy was going to reveal some information to Megan that would give her a bit of a short cut on getting to know this third character.

Now, this is a pretty rudimentary example of the whole multiple-purpose scene thing. Presumably, everyone's characters are discussing something more relevant to the story than the weather in their dialogue scenes, so they're probably imparting information to readers about other events or characters in the story just as I'm doing in the example above.

However, I had stopped there with my intentions for the scene. I was prepared to have the dialogue be sort of fun and lighthearted - a chance for the reader to start to fall in love with the boy, as well as Megan. Which would be fine.

But then I thought again about the purpose of the scene. About its potential. About Megan's relationship to this boy and his to her and why they would eventually be drawn to each other. It certainly isn't because of the boy's witty banter, though that doesn't hurt. That's when I realized that I had to underscore their conversation with that reason (no spoilers! haha). I gave it some thought and discovered that I could take a different angle with the conversation and--from this very early dialogue--start laying the groundwork for the reason why the boy will be drawn to Megan instead of other girls and she to him.

Now my scene has even more purpose. My plot should be stronger for this. On page 200, readers should be able to look back to page 30 and see that the seeds were planted long ago for the long awaited "ta-daaaa!" in their relationship.

This is a very basic example of how you can layer purpose into a scene, but it's very current so I thought I'd share. Does anyone else do this consciously?