The Anatomy of a Scene, Its Care and Feeding

Scenes aren't static decorations on a stage - they are active, moving parts of your story. When properly executed, they tie your whole story together into a single, riveting pageturner...

Excerpt from WriterpreneurOS Book Six - now released (see below…)

By Dwight V. Swain (from a 1990 lecture)

CHAPTERS – SCENES – SEQUELS

So, you have as your goal that you build a novel, a step at a time, and ordinarily you build it in segments, which we call chapters. Now a chapter, in turn, is made up of a succession of new developments, of changes – presented in an interlocked series of scenes and sequels.

Those of you who have that book “Techniques of the Selling Writer” will find a lot of attention devoted to this. But for now, and squeezing it down as much as I can, a scene is a time unified unit of conflict, of confrontation.

And it's made up of three elements: Goal, Conflict and Disaster.

Now to link these units of conflict together, these confrontations, these clashes between two opposing forces to oppose opposing people, we need something to to tie them together. And what we have is known as a Sequel.

A sequel also has three parts. It has Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. Its function is to give your story some logic, some plausibility, and to enable you to get from the one clash to the next that is here.

We have a fight between two people. The fight is over and it ends on note of disaster. That is to say, an unanticipated development throws your character for a loss.

What is his reaction in the first place? Shock in all likelihood of some, some way or other.

Then dilemma, what do I do now? And finally, he reaches a decision as to what to do now.

And that decision provides him with the goal, the purpose, the what shall I do of the next scene – which brings him into conflict with whatever element he is battling and leads to a new disaster where upon he has a reaction, arrives at a dilemma, makes a decision, and goes on...

This is probably your most useful single tool in putting together a story.

So a scene is the place where you build the movement of your story, and a sequel is a unit of transition that links two scenes. Furthermore, the proportioning of scene-to-sequel determines the pacing of your novel.

That is: emphasis on scene, emphasis on the conflict element, emphasis on the struggle between your two forces – this builds action and excitement and speeds up your story.

Emphasis on the sequel, in turn, gives you the logic and the believability of your story. And you will find if you analyze books that they are built of scenes and sequels. They are built of units of conflict, ordinarily a time-unified scene. In other words, you don't have a scene start here and end three years later, rather you have it start here and carry right through at the moment. And so you build your story that way.

Now, again – boy, I keep saying everything is the most important thing in the world and it really is. Each time you introduce a new development (what they call a complication ordinarily in talking about these things) your character's situation changes. No incident in a story should end with your character's state of affairs and state of mind the same as when it began…

Now released in ebook format - paperback coming soon!

Yes, you can get your copy today!