Have you ever seen a child learn to use Lego bricks? The youngest child builds a tower, one brick on top of another. An older child interlocks the first two or three bricks but ends up with unconnected towers. The older the child gets, the more he understands that interlocking the bricks makes a stronger structure. Her structures grow taller, sturdier, and more complex. So it is with understanding story structure.
Most everyone understands the beginning, middle, and end “bricks.” Dive deeper into story structure and you learn about the three-act structure, the four-act structure, the five-act structure, and so on. Just like legos, some bricks have only two connectors, others have four. Some are thin and some are thick. Scenes are the interlocking “bricks” for building stories, the Lego bricks of story structure. And like Lego bricks, scenes come in all sizes.
What is a Scene?
A scene is a unit of conflict, of struggle, lived through by character and reader. It’s a blow-by-blow account of somebody’s time unified effort to attain an immediate goal despite face-to-face opposition.”
Swain’s definition tells you what the parts of a scene are. There’s an immediate goal, there’s face-to-face opposition, a blow-by-blow struggle, and that effort happens in a time unified way.
But that’s the surface level of what’s in a scene.
The Scene’s Purpose
Every scene has a purpose or function. The primary function of any scene is to provide interest and to move the story forward.
A Scene Provides Interest
A scene provides interest by showing your character in a situation where she must overcome some obstacle. It must be a difficult enough struggle that your reader questions whether your character will win or lose. Without that question, your reader is only mildly interested or not interested at all.
A Scene Moves the Plot Forward
In general, scenes move the plot forward with the “what comes next” step-by-step action. Well, not really. Scenes that actually went step-by-step following the character through every moment of their day would be pretty boring. The step-by-step of a successful story is showing the steps of character growth and plot progression that imply the in-between steps well enough you don’t lose the reader.
More specifically, a scene changes the protagonist’s situation. Changes can be for the better or for the worse in the eyes of the protagonist. But it must change.
Scene Structure
Yes, scenes have beginnings, middles, and ends. You know beginnings establish the who, what, where, and when. Middles are where the “action” is and ends tie it all up. But that “structure” doesn’t tell you how to write a successful scene. According to Swain, a successful scene contains a goal, a conflict, and a disaster held together by a unit of time.
Goal
When you get a pile of lego blocks, they could bring to mind a myriad of unique structures you wish to build. Still, to create a successful structure, you must have a specific goal in mind. Goals can include things like wanting to go from point A to point B, or to win a fist fight, or to survive the impending zombie attack. Those are goals of achievement. There are also goals of resistance. The resistance can be to say no to temptation, to resist the antagonist, or a vampire resisting the irresistible urge to drink human blood, among many other things.
“A goal is not a goal until it’s specific and concrete and immediate enough for you to take some sort of action toward achieving it.”
No matter what your character’s goal is, she must want that goal so much that she will do things she wouldn’t ordinarily do in order to achieve it.
Conflict
Conflict happens when a character who has a goal cannot reach that goal because someone or something thwarted her, opposed her, or some element of danger kept her from accomplishing her goal. (Need a more in-depth explanation read “Beguile Your Readers with Tension, Suspense, and Conflict.”)
Disaster
Here, disaster doesn’t always mean a loss of some kind. The disaster of a scene can a potential for a loss or catastrophe, but it also can be new information that raises a question for the future. It’s a change or information your protagonist didn’t expect and raises a question the protagonist doesn’t have an answer for yet. For example, now that your protagonist survived crossing the river, she faces a field of fire-belching geysers. Or maybe she learns something about the antagonist’s plan that makes her have to change her plans.
If your scene doesn’t end with a disaster that forces a change…you don’t really have a scene.
The Sequel
The sequel is the transition between scenes. Its function is to translate the disaster of the previous scene into a goal for the next scene, to telescope reality, and to control pacing.
It can be very short or paragraphs, even pages long. It is not a scene and has a structure of its own. A sequel contains reaction, dilemma, and decision.
The reaction is the emotional and mental state of your character after the disaster. She takes stock of where she is now.
Her dilemma is a choice between equally unsatisfactory alternatives. In the example above, where she’s crossed the river but now she faces the fire-belching geysers. She has a choice of going back across the river that nearly killed her or going through the fire-belching geysers. Neither one seems a good choice.
Her decision is what she will attempt to do next. Her decision should cause the reader to anticipate the next conflict in the next scene.
Caution: a long, detailed sequel is the place where many readers will put down a book and perhaps not pick it up again.
The Emotional Impact of a Scene
The emotion of a scene relies in part on the emotions of the character involved, the theme of the story, and the mood or tone of the scene. But the emotional impact refers to the feeling of movement in the story. If every scene ends the same way, the hero always wins the goal or the antagonist always wins the goal, the story loses the emotional impact. It will have no sense of the story moving toward something.
The writer must balance win and lose. If the first scene is a win for the hero, the next must be a loss, or neutral. Rotating through win, loss, or neutral is part of what makes the story feel like it is moving forward. It’s in this struggle your reader finds the most satisfaction. Your reader will turn pages to find out if the hero wins the day.
Scene, the Lego Brick of Story Structure
At the very basic, lego brick level, scenes convey the “what happens” in the story. But an interlocking, layered scene that includes a goal, conflict, and disaster followed by a sequel will create a more interesting story. The right goals, conflicts, disasters and sequels will make your story irresistible.
Build scenes that work for you, work for your story. When you use your scene’s structure to carry your reader deeper into the story, you create a solid story, and you have a happy reader who is ready to buy more books.
Image Credits
All images purchased from depositphotos.com