Purple Topic of the Week: What’s Your Scene?

[ladyseishou]

Robert McKee in his work Story describes a story scene as:

…an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value [positive or negative] with a degree of perceptible significance.

Following along this line, Jack Bickman in Scene & Structure proposes that:

Most successful fiction today is based on a structure that uses a series of scenes that interconnect in a very clear way to form a long narrative with linear development from the posing of a story question at the outset to the answering of that question at the climax.

Employing a sequence of scenes to tell a story developed historically from the use of personal letters by the earliest English novelists, says Bickman, and journals or diaries (Robinson Crusoe) to the adoption of a “conversational” story told by a first-person narrator to his “dear reader.”

Today, writers use many forms and points of view: first person, third person, many characters viewpoints, stream of consciousness, “document novel”, and the “collection novel” where the story is told through a series of seemingly unrelated short stories.

And as diverse as our choices may be regarding how we tell our story, the scene remains the common component that moves the story from its beginning to its end or as Bickman says:

The scene, you see, has conflict at its heart, but it is not static. It is a dynamic structural component with a definite internal pattern which forces the story to move forward as the scene plays – and as a result of its ending.

Purple writers, do you write/imagine/outline your story as a series of scenes where, as Mr. McKee describes it, your character experiences a change of “perceptible significance”? Or do you experiment with more unconventional story forms? Does your story’s setting or theme suggest structure?

Bibliography

Bickham, Jack M. Scene and structure. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writerʼs Digest Books, 1993.
EditDelete

McKee, Robert. Story substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting. New York: ReganBooks, 1997.

Comments

[lassarina]

Generally speaking, for long works (especially NaNo works) I've had the most success setting out each scene in a line, although I wouldn't say that the character always experiences a change of perceptible significance. In fact, the times I won NaNo, the change was intended to come gradually and naturally such that the moment when the character has his big revelation is also the moment when the reader has it.

I tend to think of a scene, rather than the character undergoing a perceptible change, as "The unit of time in which a thing happens, and the characters react." Obviously, some reactions are split into multiple successive scenes, but I think this definition as provided by McKee is unfairly slanted towards certain genres - it seems to be focused more on the character development side of writing rather than the plot-development side.

For myself and my own writing style, I prefer the "forces the story to move forward as the scene plays - and as a result of its ending." That, to me, is more in tune with what I think of as a scene, unless of course I am just misunderstanding what McKee intended by "change of perceptible significance." Also, many such changes aren't of perceptible significance at the time, and become so only in retrospect, which is another point to consider.

[ladyseishou]

Oops. I may have taken too many shortcuts in presenting McKee's definition of "scene." He builds an interesting hierarchy of terms to define "story" in the following way:

Structure
A selection of events from the characters' life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.

Story Event
Creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value.

Story Value
The universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.

Examples that McKee provides: love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, etc.

Story Event
Creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and achieved through conflict.

Scene
An action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character's life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a story event.

McKee writes that a novelist may want more than sixty scenes to tell his story, a playwright perhaps only forty and the screenwriter forty to sixty.

He also writes:

If the value-charged condition of the character's life stays unchanged from one end of a scene to the other, nothing meaningful happens. The scene has activity - talking about this, doing that - but nothing changes in value. It is a nonevent.

Why then is the scene in the story? The answer is almost certain to be "exposition." It's there to convey information about characters, world, or history to the eavesdropping audience.

Beat
An exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.

As McKee explains: "Inside the scene is the smallest element of structure, the Beat." I think lassarina that you are speaking more of what McKee calls "beats" rather than "scenes" when you talk about action and reaction in your writing.

Sequence
A series of scenes - generally two to five - that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.

Act
A series of sequences that peaks in a climatic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.

He concludes by saying:

A series of acts builds the largest structure of all: the Story. A story is simply one huge master event. When you look at the value-charged situation in the life of the character at the beginning of the story, then compare it to the value-charge at the end of the story, you should see... the great sweep of change that takes life from one condition at the opening to a changed position at the end. This final condition, this end change, must be absolute and irreversible.

So, scene by sequence by act, the writer creates minor, moderate, and major change, but conceivably, each of these changes could be reversed. This is not, however, the case in the climax...

I believe that both you and McKee are speaking of the same things but from different POVs more than it being a question of plot-driven or character-driven story. Maybe?

I also agree with you and have to say that I have the best luck writing my NaNoWriMo novel using a linear structured plot (as McKee describes it) as much as I would like to write something more unconventional or experimental (I think that I would break my brain given the time constraints).

[geminianeyes]

I usually imagine my story as a series of scenes. It's linear, and one thing leads to another. Sometimes I do have some more unconventional ways to tell a story, but each scene usually changes the characters involved in some way, even those who are merely looking on.

Nope, I have no structure. I think. :D

[shiromirai]

I think I tend to have my setting, at least initially, reflect some trait in the character that it is introduced in. It's very flexible (or maybe that's because I can't keep track of it all after a couple hundred pages XD XD) since the way I look at it, the setting is seen through the eyes of my characters and they would notice different things because of their personality. So the reader would see different things.