[00:13] Rachel: Hey, writers. Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
[00:18] Emily: I'm Emily.
[00:19] Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
[00:20] Emily: And today we want to talk about the basics of scene structure. This was maybe my favorite craft topic. I love talking about scenes because when I first started writing, learning how a scene actually worked was like, the first major mind blown moment, I feel like, in my ability to understand how stories worked and how they just like how you built one.
[00:49] Rachel: Yeah.
[00:50] Emily: Because I think everybody sort of understands that a scene is like a part of a story. But beyond that, I think the definition can get really fuzzy really fast in the ways that people talk about them.
[01:05] Rachel: Yeah, I had a very similar experience where I had heard the term scene, and I was like, Great. But I thought it was the same thing as a chapter and just wrote chapters, just wrote them. Like, who knew that maybe you needed a little bit of structure in those scenes and chapters don't matter. Yeah. I was just blown away when I finally understood what scenes are, what their purpose are, and how you can use them in the greater narrative of a story.
[01:39] Emily: Yeah. And it also puts some boundaries around what you choose to put in your story and how you choose to go from one scene to the next. Because I feel like when I first started writing, I was just kind of meandering. I was like, okay, they do this, and then they do this. Do I need this? How do I get from one place to another? Do I have to describe the whole journey? It was that question of, like, where do I start and where do I end? A chapter, a scene, whatever I'm working on, I think really is often coming from a place of not really fully understanding what a scene is and how scenes work together, because they do. They work together to build your story.
[02:15] Rachel: Yeah. And I think that when you finally piece that together and what we're going to be talking about today are these basics. But it doesn't matter whether you're a plotter and a panther to understand how this works. That was really eye opening for me, was that I could still know how they work, what they do, how they influence what choices I make without feeling like, oh, my God, I've got to follow this thing. Every single scene. Boring.
[02:51] Emily: This formula so boring. So I think it can be really helpful to start with this idea of the feeling of a scene, because we all know what a scene feels like. We see them on television, we read them in stories. And so that's where I think we make the mistake of assuming that we understand what they are because we've consumed them so much that we understand the feeling of them. But translating that feeling into sort of a structure and for lack of a better word, a formula for how you can create that feeling on the page for your readers, I think can be really helpful because what I love to see with my clients is when you go from, okay, I sort of vaguely understand this feeling. And then they really master the concepts of the pieces of a scene that they can then go and write from feeling. Because they've used the formula so much that now they understand what it feels like to go through a scene. So they can pants a scene without thinking about structure at all and then go back and be like, oh, look, I innately put all these things in here because it felt right. So that's, like, my favorite thing. It's like a scene is a feeling. It's a feeling of I don't know, think of your favorite moments in movies or television shows or your favorite moments in stories. And if you dig into what that moment of the story felt like, it usually is like somebody comes to the page and they want something, they're going after something, they have some kind of goal, and then conflict breaks out. Something happens that gets in the way of them achieving whatever it is that they're trying to achieve. And that conflict builds right at that building tension that peaks at some point relatively soon. We're not talking about the whole story. We're talking about a few minutes of a show or a few pages of a story. And it peaks at some point into a moment where the story shifts direction because somebody has to make a choice because something happens that shifts the direction in an unexpected way, pushing into and setting up whatever happens next. And so I feel like, is that a feeling? I brought it today as a feeling.
[05:13] Rachel: Yeah, but I can see what you mean. I think what you're saying is that most of us that consume a lot of stories, like, instinctively know what this is. And it takes bringing an awareness to that beginning, middle and end of a scene to really understand it. So the scene that's stuck in my mind right now is the scene in the Pride and Prejudice movie when Darcy proposes the first time. So leading into that scene, they're in church. She's talking to the other military man. I forget his name. And he tells Elizabeth that Darcy separated. That Darcy separated Jane, and bingley, elizabeth is pissed. She goes on this dramatic, emotional run to this structure. I don't know. Gazebo. Gazebo. It's raining. It's dramatic. You're like, how could he? And then he's there, like, Elizabeth is just trying to get some space. And then Darcy's there. And then conflict increases. Conflict increases. And then she's pissed off. And he is like, Your family sucks, but I can't get over how much I love you. You should just marry me. And she's like, excuse me. And they have, like, a fight. And it's so tense, builds, intense. And you can see them both losing their composure. And they both try to be very polite and prim and proper, and then they both just kind of, like, bear their feelings. And the end of the scene is when Darcy leaves. Elizabeth rejects his proposal. That's, like the client of it. She's like, absolutely not. Why would I? You're the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry. She rejects it. I know almost every word in that movie. And then he is like, Fine. I'm so sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, and leaves. But then he chooses to explain himself. He writes a letter. The next scene is her Moping. And he gives her the letter. That explains why he decided to do the things that he did. And he apologizes for being kind of a jerk, but also explains, this is why I didn't think Bingley should marry your family. Marry Jane. And it's like a perfect little you see what leads to that scene. You see how it affects the way that they speak to each other. And then you see what happens after that scene in the next scene. That's very tightly linked. And I love it. And when I think of a scene or when I used to think of a scene, it was like one thing that happened in one place in one setting, and then you could move on to the next thing. And that's true in some cases, but really, it's like the emotional thing that's happening, the emotional thing that your characters are going through. And then the choices that they make because of what just happened in the scene. That's the scene. That's the thing. And it's easy to have that in one setting, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, like, one setting itself.
[08:25] Emily: Yeah, it's like this emotional wave where it's like, conflict happens that gets in the way of whatever a character wanted. And that conflict just builds and builds and builds and builds. And then it reaches this peak, and then it breaks, right? It's elizabeth saying no, I'm not going to marry you. She makes a choice that changes the direction of the story. Right? If she had said yes, that would have been a completely different story. And so she makes a decision, it changes the direction, and it makes the next scene possible because her rejection is what causes him to write the letter, which builds in the conflict of the next scene where she starts to understand why he did what he did. That's what I'm going for. What I'm talking feeling. It's this wave feeling of building tension throughout a story. And we'll use a lot of metaphors today because scenes link together kind of in that wave like sensation, but they also chain together. And so because each scene makes the next scene possible based on the decisions that the characters are making. And so that's kind of what we're going to break down for you today.
[09:29] Rachel: Basics. Yeah. So in general, a scene breaks down into four parts. What are they?
[09:38] Emily: Four parts. Four sections. It's kind of like beginning, middle, and end. And then now what?
[09:44] Rachel: Yeah.
[09:45] Emily: What's next if we were to talk about that?
[09:46] Rachel: Yeah.
[09:47] Emily: So the beginning, right, is your character has a goal. They have something that they're after, and that gives the story drive. It means the character is driving what's happening in the story because they've got something they need to do and they're going after it. Then conflict happens, right? Darcy is at the gazebo. Oh, gosh. And that conflict builds and builds and builds to a peak moment, that feeling that we've been talking about. And that peak moment is characterized by a choice that the character makes. And that choice has consequences that then directly make the next scene possible. So those four parts are goal, conflict, choice, consequence. And then those consequences lead into what their next goal is. And that's how scenes link together throughout your entire story.
[10:35] Rachel: Yeah, they should. This is an idea called the cause and effect trajectory. That's like what someone might label it. And what that means is that you have a scene where something happens, there's a choice being made. That choice creates consequences, and that's the effect. So you have the cause and effect, and then you have another cause and another effect, and it just keeps going in this chain link story. Genius by Lisa Kron does a really good job of diving into that. So love that book if you've not read it, but this should happen in every single scene. And that thing was a big old mind blown moment for me because I've talked about this a little bit before on the podcast. But when I first started writing, I had heard the writing advice that when you don't know what to do, just make the most unexpected thing happen. And so I always would go to like, oh, my God, nobody expects an explosion. Let's make things explode. So that was like my ace in the whole explode things. And then there were consequences because of that, but nothing was linked together. Like, my character's choices weren't creating any ripple effects. There was nothing that was the character driving the story forward. It was lots of random plot events that just happened to my characters that they had to react to versus a character driving this action of the story through their goals and their choices and the consequences of those choices.
[12:06] Emily: Yeah. And that's what's called narrative drive, which is one of those we've talked about it before, but one of those concepts, I think, and verbatim words, phrases, things that you read in craft books, terms. Thank you. That's the word I was looking for. One of those terms that you're like, okay, I know I need it, but like, what the what is that? This is what we're talking about. We're talking about the narrative is being driven by the character, like you just said, through what they want, their goals, how they're going after them, and then the choices that they're making. And those choices have consequences. So that's what I really love about this little four piece chain link formula, is that it inherently ties together your external plot and your internal character arcs. Because if you think about it, in the four pieces, the goal and the choice are being driven by the character. They're being driven by what the character wants and what the character believes. And this is where they get to make mistakes. And we'll talk about that in a second, but those are the pieces that are tied to that character's internal journey. And then the conflict and the consequences are external things that are happening. The conflict is the plot that's happening to the character, and the consequences are plot events that the character is making happen through their choices. And so you get to see how, in that consequence piece, the character arcs and the plot are coming together because your character is driving your plot. So I think for so many craft resources talk about plot and character arc separately when really they're inextricably tied at the same level. And so once you start to understand that, you can start to see how to make decisions about what conflicts to include and what consequences to include and what choices your character should be making based on what their arc is and what you want to show through their story.
[14:04] Rachel: Yeah. So I'm working with a one on one client right now through our plot summary exercise, which for listeners is a general summary of the plot. We do our work to start to link those two things through looking at the plot from a 30,000 foot overview. It's a great toe dipping into what happens in this story as we're building it. And last week, this client and I, she had lots of ideas, but was really struggling to decide, what do I do for her break into two. She was like, well, he could go over here, or he could go over here, or he could go over here, and he could do these things XYZ. And we had a good discussion about it, like, okay, you have to choose one. What are we going to choose? What is the thing? So this week, she turned back in the assignment and she very intentionally linked this character's flawed beliefs to, how are we going to create a scene that challenged those flawed beliefs, that made him make a choice that would set up the rest of Act Two? And when she thought about it in that way versus, like, it could be anything. It could be any plot event. He could learn magic here or over here or over here. But she decided to put this character in a position where they were going to make the wrong choice. Yes, she knew that. She knew that his problems had to do with control. So she gave him a setting where magic was out of control, and that was going to trigger a lot of feelings for him and trigger how he was going to form his pivot point plan, which we have an episode on for Act Two. But I think this scene structure, it's easy to think, okay, I need to do that when I draft. But it also is like, okay, be thinking about these things as you're plotting. Be thinking about if your character is having a goal and they're going to make a choice, how does that choice affect the consequences, and how do those consequences set up the next scene and later scenes down the road? It's not just that we learn scene structure to help us draft a scene. It is scene structure helps us plan goes where and when and why in the whole plot.
[16:26] Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's where the differentiation between and I actually have my clients think through both of these when we're working on scenes, which is, what are the short term consequences? What immediately happens? What happens when they make their choice? When Elizabeth says no to Darcy, what are the immediate consequences? She hurts him, she hurts herself. They separate ways. There are immediate consequences to that decision. And then what are the long term consequences of that decision? Because that's where your character arc really comes into play. And we talk a lot about character arcs on our Magic of Character Arcs course, which, if you're not in it and you've been listening to this podcast, and we talk about it at the end of every podcast, what are you doing?
[17:12] Rachel: Get it now.
[17:14] Emily: But essentially, character arcs are shaped by flawed decisions. Your character has a flawed belief that you want them to dismantle, let go of, and the only way they're going to do that is if they make a lot of mistakes because of that belief that eventually teach them that they really need to change their outlook on the world in order to succeed. And this is how you do that. It's at the scene level where you have them make flawed bad decisions in each scene at that choice moment, at that peak moment that set up consequences later down the road. Consequences that are snowballing in the back of the book and building to a point where they're going to explode in a way that your character can't ignore. And that is going to force your character to face the fact that they need to internally change in order to get what they want. And so all of that happens. That's the other thing I love about scenes. I love scenes is that scenes tie together the big story and the smaller level, immediate story that you're writing on the page. They help you tie together what you're trying to do in the long run. With what you're doing on the page right now in the middle of Act Two, which I think is a really helpful way to reframe, to take bite size pieces out of your story, to not be so overwhelmed by, like, how are the things I'm writing fitting into the larger vision that I have for this theme? This is where that happens, is at that scene level.
[18:46] Rachel: Yeah. I work with a lot of romance authors and I read primarily romance and I write fantasy romance. So there's very as far as long term consequences, I have a very simple, easy example where usually all the time in a romance, there's a reason why the characters can't be together. And sometimes those characters will choose to lie, lie about that reason, or lie, have some sort of fear or they're driven to lie about something, and that's always going to blow up in their face. But it's usually not until the end of act two. So regardless of if they lie in act One or at the beginning of act Two or whatever it is, it blows up in their face, probably around the olive's loss. And it could cause or contribute to the breakup, which is also a standard structure beat in a romance. But that consequence has been building because they maybe chose to lie at the beginning of act two, but that character has known this whole time that they're hiding something. And then the deeper that they get into this relationship, the harder it is to tell the truth. I think we've all been there, not just in romance, but like, you tell a little white lie and then it keeps going, and then all of a sudden the truth has to come out and you look really dumb. That happens a ton in romance, and especially with the miscommunication trope, it's a big thing, but that's a good example of the consequence of that choice. To lie. Doesn't happen until long time in the book, but it causes a really big rift. There's the consequences that they made a bad choice and now they have to face the consequences, which is usually a breakup at that point.
[20:32] Emily: They have to choose between am I going to hold on to the reason why I lied, the belief that led me to lie, that lost me love. Right. That's the whole question of the breakup of a romance is like, am I going to cling to the thing that was keeping me from love now that I've lost it, or am I going to change? Am I going to allow myself to change my beliefs, humble myself, apologize, go through all the things to seize that love again and that's that internal change yeah. Caused by those external consequences.
[21:05] Rachel: Exactly. Yeah. So you're going to ask yourself when you're making these flawed choices, that short term consequence, and then how is this going to bite them in the butt later? How is this going to contribute to their eventual change because they now have to face the negative consequences of their poor choices.
[21:22] Emily: Yeah, scenes, man, they're so powerful, so good.
[21:27] Rachel: We love them.
[21:29] Emily: So the question we get all the time is, how does a scene differ from a chapter? Rachel, this is my at the beginning, but I want to end with it for sure.
[21:39] Rachel: Yeah, this is like one of my favorite questions because it was a total, again, mind blowing moment for me. We just talked about how cool scenes are. They're awesome. Chapters are like there are no rules. They don't really mean anything, and it doesn't really matter. When I first started writing, I was primarily a reader, and I read books with chapters. And so I tried to write in those same terms where I would write with chapters. But chapters usually don't. Like, a chapter itself doesn't always follow what a scene is, because chapters are used to keep a reader engaged. And most of the time, or some of the time, they'll end on the climax of a scene. That's the cliffhanger. That's the thing that makes you turn the page. But that scene is not over at the end of that chapter. The scene still continues into the next chapter. So when I work with my clients, I tell them, if you're planning or drafting, do not worry about chapters or chapter breaks. They don't mean anything. You can decide where to put your chapters after you have all the words written. And at that point, you use chapters to decide, how can I most engage my reader so that they keep reading? Where am I going to put a chapter break? And sometimes it's the end of the scene, and sometimes it's in the middle of the scene. But ultimately, that's like an author's choice. There's not like a structure element to what a chapter should be. The structure is the scene. So write the story with scene knowledge, with scene structure, and then come back in after you're. I mean, I would even say, like, before you're going to get a copy at it. Like, this is way down the line to me. Who cares? Until you're getting ready to submit a book somewhere. That's when I would consider chapter breaks for a very different reason than like, I'm ending a chapter here to increase the structure of the story. No, you're going to end a chapter there to keep a reader reading.
[23:41] Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And it's important to make sure that all the parts of a scene are on the page, because this is a bad example because I have not read Pride and Prejudice for a really long time. But I'm going to pretend that the scene we just talked about is a written scene in a story. So let's say that you ended your chapter for drama's sake with Darcy's deepest insult to her family. And then you're like, oh my gosh, I have to know more. So you flip the page, right. But you skip her choice to turn him down and just jump right to the next scene where she's in the cottage.
[24:21] Rachel: Right.
[24:22] Emily: We need to see her choice and we need to see the consequences of that choice in order to get that full feeling. It comes back to that feeling, right, where we've got goal rising, rising conflict, and then it peaks with some tension. There's a choice made and then consequences happen and then there's a goal.
[24:40] Rachel: Right.
[24:40] Emily: And so it's that wave. And if you cut that and you don't include some of the pieces of a scene on the page somewhere, regardless of where your chapters are, we are going to feel that as readers, because we won't get that full. Feeling, even with the consequences, that catharsis, that little bit of catharsis of knowing the consequences, the unfolding consequences of the.
[25:02] Rachel: Choice that she makes.
[25:04] Emily: So that's what I would just caution when you're trying to figure out how to do that, we need all those pieces.
[25:12] Rachel: Yeah. And same as this can get tricky when you have multiple POVs and you're switching POVs by chapter or by scene, this is where I'll see kind of the most confusion. So we've talked about scenes in the context of how meaningful and important they are to a character, specifically.
[25:32] Emily: Yeah.
[25:34] Rachel: Unless you have a lot of experience with this, I typically suggest that a writer keep one scene in one POV head. You don't want to switch POVs in the SmackDown middle of a scene because often you're going to disrupt that goal, conflict, choice, consequences, cycle, because that character maybe you have the goal and the conflict in one scene or in one character's POV, and then you do the choice in another character's POV, and it's not connected anymore. You've broken the link because it's not the same character's choice for the same reasons. I've seen this done. So I'm not saying it's impossible. But I am saying, if this is new to you, if you're learning about scenes and scene structure, just keep one scene in one POV's head until you get a little more comfortable with how you would transition to another character and how you would put that character's choice or the consequences of that decision on a scene from a different POV.
[26:31] Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
[26:34] Rachel: Yeah.
[26:35] Emily: That's really helpful. Cool. We've got some resources. Yeah. So the first thing to do this is not tied to scenes, but the first thing you all need to do is go get magic of character arcs. Seriously. Because that email course, it's a free email course, the link is in the show notes and we talk about it every week. But it really breaks down the larger story, the bigger umbrella story of what your character wants and what their flawed beliefs are so that you can use right. We've already talked about how those filter down into their scene goals and their scene choices. So the very first thing that I would tell everybody to do is go enroll in that fundamental foundational course, because it's going to set you up for really having a framework within which to make scene decisions. So go get that.
[27:35] Rachel: Go get it.
[27:36] Emily: Then we have a workshop.
[27:38] Rachel: Yay. So we're launching a workshop in June. This is June 2023. It's called Scene Structure simplified. So we've gone over scene basics today. We talked about kind of the four main parts of a scene, but we love going even deeper than those four parts into eight scene structure beats. And those beats are how you can really make sure that your scenes are following that wave that Emily was talking about, that you have everything linked together, that it's very clearly driven by characters, goals and choices, that the structure is on point. We're going to dive into all eight of those beats in this workshop. It's a three day workshop. It happens over the course of three days, over a two week period. So the first day is June 17, and then the next weekend, we have two more days.
[28:38] Emily: Yeah. So it's basically broken up the first weekend. We will learn so much about scene structure, and we will actually get our hands dirty. We'll do some workshopping. We'll try out some of the concepts. And then throughout the week, you'll have the homework to do, some published works, analyses. So we've pulled some scenes from some published works where you will go and try to see if you can identify the eight scene structure beats in those published works to see how the pros are doing it. And then we'll discuss those together on the second weekend. And then also in between the two weekends, you will have the opportunity to submit a draft scene outline to Rachel and I for personalized feedback. So we will actually give you some guidance on what's working, what. We would recommend looking at some next steps we would take as you're building a scene out for your work in progress. So it's an opportunity to get feedback from us, which is pretty sweet. It's going to be pretty intimate. We're going to get real nerdy and into the nitty gritty of scenes together. And I'm just really excited. It's going to be super fun.
[29:46] Rachel: It is. The content for this workshop is like, out of this world amazing. So if you're interested in that, the link is in our Show Notes. It's $199 for those three days, including the personalized feedback that Mi and I will give you. So it's a steal. We're really excited about it. So find more info with that link. Check it out. Show Notes.
[30:07] Emily: Sweet. Awesome.
[30:10] Rachel: Okay. If you want to build a successful, fulfilling, and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
[30:19] Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping. Pages all through the night.
[30:29] Rachel: Link is in the show notes. We'll see you there. Bye.
