Understanding the Micro-Structure of Scenes
Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) advice about making sure each involves conflict and changes/advances the overall story. Which is a pity, because understanding the microstructure of a scene is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your toolkit as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to resolve particularly thorny narrative problems. It’s one thing to say that a scene is built around two characters coming into conflict, and another to see how writers use that to generate specific effect Shawn Coyne gives a neat outline of beats within a scene in The Story Grid; Robin Law’s Beating the Story offers some useful frameworks when he breaks stories (and scenes) into alternating patterns
