Episode 48: How do you write scenes and chapters?

In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk all about the difference between scenes and chapters and the methods they use to write both. 

Show Notes

Next Level Authors Podcast

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

You are a Storyteller Podcast

Three Story Method: Foundations of Fiction by J. Thorn and Zach

5 Commandments of Storytelling on Story Grid

Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain

How to Write Manga Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Patterson 

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger 

Romancing the Beat Story Structures for Romance Novels Kissing Books Volume One by Gwen Hayes

Wide for the Win by Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Transcript

JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 48 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 17th of June 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Hello, Crys. How has your week been? Two weeks.

Crys: Well, I wrote words. I know that happened. I was on an episode of Next Level Author with Dan, filling in for Sacha taking a break. That was fun. My question was, how do you know when you’ve done enough? Cause we’re both workaholics. And so, we had a really good conversation on that.

And I’ve been prepping to go into full-time mom-ness, the kiddo’s dad is going up to the States to work for a bit. And so, we’ve had a lot of things to run around and get in place before that happens. So, it’s been a bit chaotic. How about you?

JP: Less chaotic? I just got out of a week with the day job that is more intensive. So, it was kinda nice to get out of there and have a little bit of respite. But I have had an overall good couple of weeks, I would say. I’ve been working on the edits for book one. And let me tell ya, info dumps, they’re so good. I love rewriting info dumps to not be info dumpy. That is my favorite thing in the world.

Crys: It’s funny because we’ve been having this conversation and I’m working on some stuff with info dumps. I caught myself in my Vella project like a line. And then I was like, oh, if I read it that way then I have to info dump why this is the way it is. And I was like–

Smalls: I need to go potty.

Crys: Okay, please go potty.

JP: Thanks, kid.

Crys: Yeah, I would have to input a why. And then so instead, I have this brother and sister who are in conflict, and so I will just use the conflict to explain it. Cause that was my question to you when you were like, how do I make this particular scene not an info dump?

And I was like who can have an argument?

JP: Yeah, so two of my biggest info dump sections: one that I finally got through and then one that I’m just starting and trying to tackle are basically like classroom scenes, but there is only one student and one teacher in the scene. After reading it, I 100% see it because as I was editing through it, I just wasn’t thinking about info dump.

So, I was like, oh, this is a classroom scene, like in Harry Potter, blah, blah, blah. But as I’m reading it now, I’m seeing all of these leading questions that I have are the main character posting, and I’m just like, I wouldn’t even say this. This is so like obviously an info dump. So, I’m looking at it and I’m just like, how can I add conflict?

So, I actually went back after talking with you, and I was looking at what are the wants and needs from both characters and trying to incorporate the two to figure out like, how I can alter the conversation. And unfortunately, that means cutting some bits of it because the main character doesn’t want to know that information, but I’m still getting enough info across.

And I think I got there with the first one. And I think I just need a little bit more time with the second one, and then it’ll be better. I’m not going to say golden because I don’t think everything’s perfect. That’s not how the world works, but I think it will be better.

Crys: And then I get to read it.

JP: And then you get to read it, look at that. And because you asked me and it’s not like we have less than half a month left if we were doing the villain short story, but I started maybe a little too late. But I’m actually making some decent progress on that. Which has been really fun. It’s been fun to just be weird and write the weird things I want to write.

Crys: Yeah. I think I prod you into getting started on something so that it will guilt me into getting started because you’re actually far more likely to just actually start on it than I am. And so now that you’re writing yours, I’m like, oh, I actually do need to start on mine. I abuse people for my own benefit.

JP: I’ll keep guilting you by sending you the messages or passages that I was like, oh, this is fun.

Crys: Exactly. We have a new patron.

JP: We do. It is Lon E Varnadore. Our good friend from Book Club. Thanks. You’re wonderful human.

Crys: All right.

JP: I’m just going to clarify we knew that before.

Crys: Did we miss anything else or are we ready to get into our discussion about scenes and chapter?

JP: Nope. We don’t have any new comments. So yeah, we’re good.

Crys: So, do you have a definition of scenes and chapters that you love?

JP: Just in my head. If you have a better one.

Crys: Mine’s in my head too, so share yours and then I’ll share mine. Or vice versa.

JP: I’m gonna do this, and then you’re going to laugh at me. Okay. So, scenes would be to me like the single point of action. I really subscribe to the three-story method when we talk about scenes. So, a scene comprising of more or less 95% of the time, a conflict, choice, and consequence in an enclosed unit.

I also view scenes as events with either the same people or within the same amount of time. And therefore, if new people enter into a scene or if time passes that may instigate a new scene, if that makes sense.

Crys: Yeah. And then chapters?

JP: Chapters. This one I actually struggled with because I feel like this one is way more ambiguous, which is why I wanted to talk about this.

Because for me, chapters are an enclosed unit of an event. So as opposed to where a scene may be a conflict, choice, and consequence that’s an enclosed space and time, this may be within a period of time– oh no, I don’t know what a chapter is.

Help me.

Crys: So, my definition of scenes is that they are a unit of story movement. So that’s my definition of scenes. And chapters are a unit of organization. So, there are different ways that you could organize a chapter.

It could be a collection of scenes from one character’s viewpoint, if you have a multi viewpoint book. One of the ways I actually like it best is it is a collection of scenes that ends around roughly the same length. That’s one of my favorite ways to use the chapters as an organizational tool because readers actually like consistency.

They really like the scenes to pass at about the same length. You think about TV shows, we generally like them to be about the same length because we have an internal expectation of how long it’s going to last. Can you think of a book that has had inconsistent chapters?

 There’s nothing wrong with inconsistent chapters. They’re a different kind of organizational unit, but can you remember as a kid like being like, okay, I’m just going to finish this chapter. And you just happened to be in the longest fricking chapter in that book. And you still have eight pages left to go, but your mom’s yelling at you. And like how frustrating that is because your internal expectation was okay, this chapter is going to wrap up soon and then I’ll be good to go. I’ll remember where I’m at. But you can’t read eight pages in the amount of time you have. So, I really like consistent chapters. Do I always use them? Absolutely not.

JP: Yeah. That’s one. I think that this was part of why I wanted to have this conversation was that in Abe and my book, we don’t have necessarily consistent chapters. Some of them are way shorter than others. But like it’s such a natural beat for us. And that’s the part that I’m like, which one do you follow?

Do you follow natural beats or consistency? And so, when I think about the times that I’ve come across really long chapters, for example, in The Wheel of Time, the one chapter that at least in audio audiobook takes over eight hours. It’s very long chapter. People talk about that chapter and the people that are in the fan base, they’re like, oh no, you’ve reached that chapter, but it’s not because the chapters long, they’re like the content of this chapter is devastating, just so you know. So that was the part that I was concerned about is, are we going to upset readers through not being consistent?

Crys: Nope. I did a nerd study, as I do, on chapter and scene length once upon a time. Excel spreadsheet, like downloading eBooks, breaking DRM, converting them to Calibre, converting them to Word, so that I could then just highlight each scene and chapter to see how many words it was and put it in an Excel doc.

And I did this for, I don’t know, like seven books before it just got exhausting and I lost steam, but I found that some authors have consistent chapter lengths and consistent scene lengths. They just are consistent. And then there’s other authors. Jonathan Mayberry for example, is the one I remember, who have scene lengths anywhere from 80 words to 6,000 words. And he’s one of the authors that every scene is a chapter. So that’s another point between chapters and scenes. A chapter is always made of scenes. A scene is not made of chapters.

JP: Yeah. I think that’s a good dichotomy as you can’t really cut a scene up in that way.

Crys: No. Are there any other organizational styles of chapters that come to mind for you? Cause we have like point of view, the natural break, and I think with the natural break you often want to end on a bigger cliffhanger for that group of scenes than the previous scenes perhaps had. I think it’s really good to end chapters with cliffhangers. So that that person can’t just end at the end of a chapter.

JP: I think when I was trying to research into how chapters may end, it’s like cliff hanger or an introduction of a new person or a new place, or like a new idea, but there’s almost always this intrigue to carry you on more. I think the one thing though is, there’s a difference between having a cliffhanger and introducing certain ideas and concepts. Because I feel like cliffhangers can sometimes be overdone or like painfully overdone.

Crys: So yeah, when I say cliffhanger, a larger question that the reader wants answers to immediately.

JP: Yeah. I think that’s a great way to put it and it expands the idea of what a cliffhanger is because there’s nothing wrong with Dan Brown’s book. Obviously, it’s sold a ton, but some of those cliffhangers, it was a pain for me because I needed to put the book down, but I couldn’t. And so, like at that point it’s crack and I’m just like, I need to put this away. Can you please stop dragging me?

Crys: Now Brandon Sanderson actually purposefully does not end all of his chapters with hooks. Granted, he writes massive tomes, and this is one of the reasons that he doesn’t do that. He has said specifically before, “I want to give readers a place where they can take a break.”

Most of us, however, are not Brandon Sanderson and have not earned the undying loyalty of our fans and so we do want to hook them on crack.

JP: Definitely. Maybe like a little crack.

Crys: Like sugar, not straight up crack.

JP: Caffeine. We want them drinking caffeine, not wine. There we go.

Crys: Yeah. And then the third method that we’ve talked out and I’m sure there’s a way more methods. These are common ones cause they’re the ones we pulled out of our brains first. The third method is to group scenes to somewhat equal chapter lengths.

All right. You ready to move on to scenes? What are scenes?

JP: Yeah. Cause I feel like we have a lot to talk about here.

Crys: Yeah, because chapters are an organizational unit, it’s a lot easier to figure out what are my personal rules. There are no rules per se, but what are your personal rules about what you want a chapter to be?

Because they’re just the framing of the scenes or the filling and there’s a million ways you can do them. So, you said you subscribed to three-story method when you write your scenes. So how do you go about creating a scene?

JP: I love the idea of having just the three Cs, so conflict, choice, and consequence.

So, when I use the three-story method in crafting a novel or an outline, I always take it from a bird’s eye view and do the overall story’s conflict, choice, and consequence. And then I break it down into acts. And then I break that down into each scene to see like what the progression is that I need to make.

And so now when we’re down at the scene level, I’m looking at where do I want my character to start. What is the normal for the start of the scene? And then what’s the point of change, the point of conflict? And then the part that I struggle with the most, choice. So, I subscribed to the idea that the main focal point character of the scene, it needs to make a choice. Otherwise, the scene is pretty flat in my opinion, and I want scenes where characters are making choices. This is the part where I want the character to make either the best, bad choice or any sort of choice in which the options are of equal or one may be slightly good and slightly bad.

There’s enough room that it’s not a surprise if they were to pick the other choice. So, it shouldn’t be an obvious choice in my opinion. And then consequence, so what is the consequences of their actions? That’s the groundwork of how I think it through.

And then I just kinda do the thing.

Crys: Yeah. I also use three-story method for my scenes, but I do combine it with a few other tools that have been really helpful. My favorite is scene and sequel, which comes from The Techniques of the Selling Writer.

So, these are two different kinds of scenes, scene and sequel. Your scene is your action scene. But your action scene, and this correlates really well with the three-story method, is going to be instead of Conflict, Choice, and Consequence. We can rename these to be Goal, Conflict or Resistance, and Disasters. Your action scenes should generally end in disaster.

Then your sequel scene is your reaction scene, responding to whatever happened in the action previous. So, you have your reaction, your dilemma, you’re thinking back and forth through your choice, and then it ends in a decision, you move into another action scene. What I really like about this is that it just clarifies it, like a lot of times you’re going to have fast movement scenes and slow movement scenes, thinking scenes and doing scenes

One of the things that Swain lays out as a guideline is, a lot of time your action scenes are going to be longer. Then it’ll be 1200 to 1500 words. You’ve got things going on back and forth. That’s going to be the meat of your story. You’ll often have several action scenes in a row before you get to a reaction scene.

And then the reaction scenes are shorter. They fill in your setting, your backstory, your theme. They’re the thinking, they’re shorter. 300 to 800 words. And I really find that useful when I’m trying to figure out. If I’m having trouble with the choice, is this an action scene or is this a reaction scene? Because that changes what kind of choice my characters have to deal with.

JP: Yeah. After reading The Techniques of the Selling Writer and talking with you a little bit about this, I definitely love this idea and it’s something that I’m considering, but I’m still like mulling over because I just want to get a book out. But I think that we do have sequel scenes.

It’s just a different way of looking at it and compartmentalizing those groups, because especially in what we’re writing, it’s very like cerebral. There are moments of trauma where the character has to process what is going on around in the world. And those are very reactionary scenes. I just think I love this method and I definitely want to subscribe to it at some point.

Crys: And I think most of us use those types of scenes intuitively. It’s not like he was making up these things out of nothing. He was like, hey, like from working with writers for forever, these are the two scenes that you have. And paying attention to how many you have of each kind and what order they are, gives you a stronger control of the pacing of your story and knowing which scene you’re telling helps you have a stronger scene, all that good stuff.

JP: Yeah. If you think about it, on You Are a Storyteller, Brian McDonald was talking about how story in and of itself came out of a need for survival out of a need for conveying a message of survival in one way or another, involving you see a snake, don’t touch it.

And when you think about story in that way, where you’re trying to basically convey a message of survival in some sense or another, there’s always going to be these action scenes. But then there’s always a debrief, like what lesson did we learn here?

And I think that’s where the scene and sequel really flows well, and it’s just a very natural method of storytelling because I think that’s ingrained in how we tell a story.

Crys: I agree. The third method for structuring stories that I’ve worked with and I’ve pulled out less often, but still occasionally, are the five commandments for story grid.

And these have the three-story method elements, but two extra ones. So, for the five commandments of story grid, we have the inciting incident, which is equivalent to three-story methods, conflict. The second point, which three-story method does not have is the progressive complication/turning point.

The third element is the crisis, which is the choice in three-story method. Another point that three-story method doesn’t use, the climax, where the choice is made basically or acted upon. And then the resolution, which is the consequences.

 The point that I find most useful, especially when I’m having trouble figuring out what my choice is, is that progressive complication turning point. And so, from your inciting incident, from your conflict, you build up to the point where your character has to make a choice.

You don’t go straight from the intro of the scene to, oh, I have to make a really tough choice. There’s no immediate step from over there, you build up to it. So that’s your progressive complications, things like in an action scene, things getting worse and worse.

And a thinking scene, new challenges proposed or rebutted against. And that turning point, that’s the one that was most helpful for me. That’s the point at which the mood of the scene changes. And the scene, I’ll set up a scene. A post-apocalyptic world, somebody is scrounging for supplies in an abandoned warehouse. They think they’re alone. They’re wandering around. Progressive complications could be not finding anything, holes in the floor, leg breaking through, but the mood doesn’t change until they hear a noise from a corner of the building where there should be no noise. And that moves you into the choice.

What do I do now? Do I run for it and possibly draw attention? Do I hide? And that turning point coming generally right before the choice helped me so much.  Ah, yes, the mood changed now. Most people will write that mood change instinctively. They don’t need to remember it. But when I’m having trouble figuring out what the choice is, often I’ll be like, okay, what’s the point at which the mood changes, because that will tell me what choice I’m going to be facing.

JP: Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of it too, is I think you and I are very much planners, so we like to approach it in a way where we want to decide, what are these choices going to be? What are going to be our difficult choices? And then we write that down. But in the aspect of those that may pants or those that may find it natural, they may be writing their first draft and then coming back at it and looking at, was this choice that was made here strong enough? And it may be as easy as changing like three words and all the sudden something that seems so calm of a choice becomes much more difficult choice. And I think that it’s just the way that we approach it as more, we like having our little pillars set up before we go to write, because then that way we can feel where we’re going, because that’s just how we function.

Crys: And play with the words in between.

JP: Play with the words.

Crys: Now, when you said your description of what a scene is, what ends a scene is when they change location or new people come in. And I also agree with that. Generally, a scene is signaled by the change of location, but it also may be changed by people. When a scene ends, do you always do a scene break?

JP: That’s funny. So that’s the thing that I don’t know. So, when I was looking at edits, there was a couple of times where J, who edited it, would say, “hey, this looks like two scenes here.”

And then I would immediately find it. And then I would just add in a hard break. But there are sometimes where two scenes will flow into each other and it’s the same time, and so they’re just flowing into the next scene. And in those cases, I don’t. I think the only time that I use the hard breaks are if it’s a passage of time or a very harsh change in location. But if they’re upstairs heading to breakfast, I may not do a hard change because I have that transition in there.

Crys: I’m the same. J and I have also had conversations about this. Cause he, style-wise, prefers the hard breaks. I do think that’s part of the genre he writes in that tend to be a bit more action oriented, and when you have action scenes, it’s you often do want those hard cuts because that fits the pacing.

Particularly in romance, it does not always fit the pacing to have a hard break there. It may fit the pacing more just to flow from one scene to the next, without putting a visual scene break in there.

JP: Do you ever do soft scene breaks, as I’ve heard them, which is not using any sort of asterisk or line, but it’s just having an extra paragraph space.

Crys: I see nothing wrong with that.  I don’t tend to do that because I like asterisks and I just like typing them.

Honestly, like, that’s my real reason. I visually like that because my eyes as the author, when I am analyzing something, will skip over just the soft break. But the asterisks are just a visually easy thing for me to say, ah, yes there’s this point. And so, it’s not necessarily a reading preference, I don’t have a preference for reading, but as the writer in editing mode, I do prefer them just because I don’t have to think as hard.

JP: Yeah, that’s fair. I’ve never used them. When I was looking up some stuff that we could talk about, I saw it and I was like, I’ve never heard of that in my life.

Crys: And for those of us who format with Vellum, it is just super easy to use the three asterisks in our Word document or Google Docs in my case, to indicate that because Vellum will immediately interpret that as your fancy little scene break image, but it might mess up just empty lines. Vellum is pretty awesome. It may not actually do that, but that is far more likely to get screwed up by a formatting program than it is an asterisky thing. And I try to do as little work as possible with nitpicky things. So, I do some heavy formatting in Word as I’m typing. Like I have all my settings set up so that when I import it, I don’t really have to do any work on my formatting because I already formatted it as I worked in it.

I fix anything that got screwed up when I get back from the editors so that when I import it, it’s just mostly there.

 JP: Makes sense.

Crys: One of the things I really appreciated about the discussion of scenes in Techniques of the Selling Writer is that he also validated incomplete scenes, which he called happenings and instances. So, these are scenes that do not have a conflict choice, and consequence. They may have an inciting incident. They may just be short things where people meet, but like nothing happens, but they give flavor or just slightly necessary information. And these should be super short, like not super overwhelming, but they happen. And that makes sense because some people do write stories that are tight, compact, but not every story is meant to be told that way.

JP: I agree with that. I think we even have it where we’ll have a certain passage of time and we want to just convey the message that time passed in its own happening.

And reading it through it doesn’t need to have all of the points of a scene because it’s just a quick little, these are the things that quickly happened, and then we continue on. Necessary information, but not information that we wanted to dive into.

And I think too, like scene length can be anything. It can be a hundred words or less even up to thousands.

Crys: Yeah. And there are definitely theories of what the length the modern reader is really comfortable with. A lot of people will say that’s between 1100 and 2000. You know, when we’re talking about Vella episodes are recommended to be around 1500 to 2000, but all of that is completely dependent on your audience.

So, our audience right now are people who are alive now. People who tend to want things faster, quicker in general.

But if you’re writing for an audience that likes slower paced things, that likes more flowery, poetic prose, you’re going to have a completely different definition of what scene length is or ideal scene length is for that audience.

I’m not saying that you can’t look at Charles Dickens and Sommerset Maugham as masters of the craft, but also realize that they were writing for completely different audiences. And also, Dickens was getting paid per word, so he got a little wordy.

JP: You just like to extend the amount of vocabulary that one may be able to do.

Crys: Which honestly, isn’t that different from KU these days.

And I’m not saying that to disparage you because I have definitely patted and fluffed some stories and readers have not complained.

JP:  Like I was saying with the short story I was doing for villains, like I definitely have an overabundance of certain words because I’m enjoying how weird it is. And it involves using a lot of just flowery language. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Crys: Also, using older words that aren’t super common, feeds the aesthetic of that story.

JP: Agreed.

Crys: All right. This is your weekly reminder that we have Patreon and if you would like to join us, we have the post up for our August Book Club choice. If you’d like to help us choose our August book month choice, you can join us on Patreon and you’ll also be able to join us for the live discussion, which we will record Wednesday, the 14th of July.

This month we are reading Wide for the Win by Mark Leslie Lefevbre.

JP: Okay. And in our Patreon for the August 2021 Book Club poll, we have three options:

How to Write Manga Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Patterson

Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

Romancing the Beat Story Structures for Romance Novels Kissing Books Volume One by Gwen Hayes.

Crys:  Do we have a question?

JP: Do we have a question? Oh boy. Do I ever.

I am curious on how you, dear listener, I am curious on how you structure your scenes and chapters. Do you subscribe to having equal length chapters or do you do a variety?

Crys: Excellent. Thanks for joining us this week, everyone. And we will be back next week.