Story Structure
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Scenes, Scenes, Wonderful Scenes!
The scene is the building block of fiction. Once upon a time, a novel might contain a lengthy description of a field, several flashbacks, and lots and lots of telling. Those days are gone. We’ve become a cinematic society. Scenes speak to us. Pretty words are all well and good, and I do enjoy them myself, but not when they put the story on hold. Not when they bore me. Scenes move the story forward, keep your reader turning the pages, keep them on the edge of their…well, you get it. As Ansen Dibell puts it in her wonderful craft book, Plot: “Creating scenes means finding ways for your story…
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A Gentle Introduction to Story Structure
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A Gentle Introduction to Story Structure
Structure is foundational to telling a good story. Although the two elements do go hand in hand, plot is not the same as structure. You can think of it like the layers of a quilt. You’ve got the colorful outside fabrics and the patterns that make people say ‘that’s a beautiful quilt. ’ That would be the plot. Then, you have the fluffy white batting that fills the quilt. This is stuff that nobody sees in the final quilt and that only fellow-quiltmakers probably ever think about, but if you didn’t have that batting, your quilt would not be functional. It would only be two floppy pieces of fabric attached…
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Scenes, Scenes, Wonderful Scenes!
