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 of the things you hope will happen and the things you fear will occur, coupling it with the concept that a scene/beat begins when a petitioner wants something from someone who may-or-may not grant their request. 

I’ve pointed people–students especially–to both over the last twelve months, but I keep trying to refine my thinking. Trying to boil it down to a core idea that’s easier to explain.

This is where I’m at: scenes begin when two characters come into conflict; the beats within the scene are the ways we trace the tactics they use to achieve their goals, and the way those tactics change in response to the other person.

Each beat is a moment where the petitioner driving the scene realises their tactic isn’t working, and we shift into the new beat as they adjust their choices in response to that information. 

Beats are the things that make characters–and scenes–feel dynamic, and their as important for making fiction work as the macro-structure stuff.