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).
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-02 12:11 am (UTC)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:
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
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:
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).