Scenes, part 1 of 4: purpose

The building blocks of story

Introduction

Scenes are the building blocks that construct your narrative arc. But first, what is a scene?

A scene is a single moment or event, set in a place and time, that contains a character or characters acting and reacting to events and each other. A scene will usually include all or most of these elements:

• Setting: where and when this scene takes place

• Characters: who is in the scene

• Action: whether it’s a car chase or two characters sitting down for coffee and a heart-to-heart discussion

• Dialogue: if there are two or more characters present in the scene; also internal monologue, even if there’s only one character present

• Emotions: of the point-of-view character (internally) and others (externally)

The majority of your book will likely be in scenes rather than in pure narrative form. With scenes, the reader can see, hear, and feel what is happening.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Scenes build on each other, with one scene inexorably leading to the next. Scenes raise tension and conflict ever higher as the story progresses and the success of the character’s quest to achieve her goal becomes more in doubt.

Occurrence versus event

Scenes will have an external goal and an internal (character) goal, as well as a story goal to drive the narrative arc forward.

One of the best ways I’ve heard this described is in The Scene Book, by Sandra Scofield. She says a scene has two elements, one on the surface and one underneath, which she calls Occurrence and Event.

If a husband and wife are sitting in an elegant restaurant sipping their wine and having a conversation while waiting on their food, that’s the occurrence. That’s the surface, the setting, the characters, the actions, the dialogue.

During the conversation, the wife is trying to figure out why her husband has been so distant recently. Is he having an affair, does he no longer love her, is he stressed about work?

That’s the underlying event. This will be composed of her internal thoughts and emotions, and may spill into the dialogue if she has the nerve to start asking him questions.

Add in character actions, reactions, and emotions if he gets angry and slams his cloth napkin to the table and storms out.

Then she will have an internal, emotional reaction to his actions, perhaps her internal thoughts about what just happened as well as her external actions to apologize to the waiter while she cancels the meal and pays the bill. Not to mention her internal emotions of being publicly embarrassed by the commotion.

Then she has to walk out of the restaurant and call a taxi while everyone watches her with pity or curiosity (action). She wonders if she should go home or to a friend’s house for the night (internal thoughts/emotions).

The occurrence or surface scene presents the underlying event that drives the story forward, raising tension and conflict.

We’ll use this example a few times below as we discuss writing your story in scenes.

Crafting scenes

Think of each individual scene as a small story to itself. It should generally follow the same narrative arc as a full story, but in a shorter, condensed frame. It is a single moment in time, whether the scene lasts five minutes or several hours. It will generally be in a single location, unless the characters are in a car traveling or something similar, but even then, the actual location of the scene is contained in the car.