No matter how cool your story or characters are, if the elements of your scenes aren’t arranged properly, the whole thing can fall apart.
Let’s go over the 6 elements to all good scenes, then practice writing together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how to create/arrange a good scene.
You can watch the video here to or scroll down for notes/highlights.
How to Create/Arrange a GOOD Scene
- When writing a story, you can have great characters and an intriguing plot, but if the elements of the scenes themselves aren’t arranged in a satisfying way, the whole thing can fall apart
- No matter how interesting the characters or story is, readers are going to get bored of a book where nothing interesting/relevant seems to happen for a while, or when exciting parts end abruptly
- Unfortunately these sections can be invisible to authors, since we always think our scenes are interesting/relevant!
- One of the best ways to solve these issues is by making sure your scenes have all six necessary elements
(Source: Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain)
The Six Elements of a Good Scene
- Goal — What does your character want? Make it clear, make them active in achieving it!
- Conflict — What gets in the way of their goal? Make it relevant to the character!
- Disaster — What happens to make their situation even worse? The more terrible the better!
- Reaction — How do they react to the disaster? Let their personality shine!
- Dilemma — What difficulty do they have after they react? Test their mettle!
- Decision — What decision do they finally make? Have it be risky and proactive!
Let’s take a look at some scene examples from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:
ROBE SHOP IN DIAGON ALLEY
- Goal — Harry needs to get robes for school
- Conflict — A boy at the robe shop asks Harry which Hogwarts house he wants and Harry doesn’t know
- Disaster — The boy insults Hagrid and Harry leaves the shop in a huff
- Reaction — Harry tells Hagrid what happened and finds out about Hogwarts’s houses
- Dilemma — Hagrid tells Harry about the houses and he thinks he’ll be in Hufflepuff, the weakest house
- Decision — Harry at least doesn’t want to be in Slytherin
SORTING HAT
- Goal — Harry and the other first years are going to be sorted into their houses
- Conflict — Harry thinks something will go wrong, he might even be sent home
- Disaster — He puts on the Sorting Hat and it wants to put him in Slytherin
- Reaction — Harry begs the hat not to put him in Slytherin
- Dilemma — The Sorting Hat tells Harry he could be great in Slytherin, but if he’s sure…
- Decision — …better be Gryffindor!
HALLOWEEN TROLL
- Goal — Harry, Ron and Hermione try to learn the wingardium leviosa spell in charms class
- Conflict — A troll breaks in Hogwarts and students are evacuated to their houses
- Disaster — Hermione is missing, likely in the bathroom where the troll is
- Reaction — Ron and Harry break from their house and go to find Hermione
- Dilemma — The troll is attacking her but they don’t know how to fight back
- Decision — Ron uses the wingardium leviosa spell they’d learned to defeat the troll
Pacing of the Elements
- You don’t want too much to happen between each element.
- For example, if Harry and Ron went down to visit Hagrid halfway through the Halloween Troll scene, all of the tension/excitement would be lost
- Some elements should be longer than others, depending on what kind of scene it is, if it’s slower or more intense.
- For example, in the Sorting Hat scene, the other children being sorted takes a long time and the last four elements all happen in just a few paragraphs. Oppositely, in the Halloween Troll scene, the last four elements make up the majority of the scene.
The Final Element: Kill Many Birds in One Scene
- The best scenes don’t just accomplish one thing, just like the best stones don’t kill just one bird
- Each of the three scenes did several things:
- Robe Shop: got Harry’s robes, introduced his rival, introduced houses in an interesting way
- Sorting Hat: sorted kids, told history of Hogwarts, reinforced Harry’s specialness
- Halloween Troll: taught a spell, troll comes into play later with Quirrel, made Hermione friend
- Imagine if for the Robe Shop scene, Harry simply went in and got his robes without issue. Or if Hagrid simply told Harry about the Hogwarts houses out of the blue. That would be so boring!
- Instead, equipment is purchased, a rival is introduced, and we learn about the world all together in one juicy scene
- The more birds you can kill with a single scene, the better, because readers will not feel like they’re being told information, but rather shown it in an organic way
After that, chat voted that we write an outline for a story using the six elements, then actually write it together.
Chat voted on three images to inspire our story: a snowy boat, a dragon and a girl, and murder Cheerios. Because of course chat did.
Here’s the scene outline we came up with:
- Goal — Girl’s family/crewmates are killed by a dragon, but she tries a different method to subdue it and survive: kindness
- Conflict — Dragon destroyed the food stores on the ship, and now they need to find more
- Disaster — They go flying for food, and see that Cheerios are sentient and bloodthirsty
- Reaction — The girl is terrified to see the dragon fight the Cheerios, but the dragon wins
- Dilemma — The girl discovers that the dragon is just trying to fatten her up
- Decision — …spoilers!
And here’s the story we wrote:
The dragon that had just slaughtered Mosha’s family and crewmates stared her down, hot smoky breath spilling out of its nostrils all over her white cloak. Its claws shook the ship as it lumbered toward her, ready to snap her in half with one powerful bite.
Mosha closed her eyes and prepared herself for the milky afterlife, prepared to greet her parents in the everflowing sky pitcher.
But today was not her day to be scooped by the Great Ladle. She unclasped her eyes and the dragon was merely staring at her, even its hot breath now only pleasantly warm, like a cleansing bath.
Mosha didn’t know why the dragon had spared her, while the inedible bits of everyone else’s remains lay splattered on the deck. They had all attacked the dragon with their swords and arrows, but had accomplished nothing except being its next meal. Mosha wanted to try something different.
She gently reached out and placed her pale hand on the monster’s snout. The nostril recoiled for a second, then blew out a snort of satisfaction, like a horse whinny after a good gallop. Despite the grisly scene she’d witnessed the dragon create, Mosha couldn’t help but smile.
“Maybe you just need a friend,” she said. “I can teach you that friends are for helping, not eating.”
She wasn’t sure if the dragon understood her, but it rubbed the side of its scaly cheek against her soft hand, and she patted it all around. The dragon let out a new sound, something like an alligator if it were trying to purr.
Maybe it was because she was touching the dragon, she could almost feel what it was thinking. If Mosha’s family and crewmates hadn’t attacked the dragon, then perhaps it wouldn’t have come after them either. It was just trying to protect itself!
Her stomach growled hard. She recoiled her hand from the dragon’s face to place it over her empty tummy. Their ship had already been low on stores, and the dragon had burned away what little remained in its fiery attack. Even if the dragon wasn’t going to send Mosha to the milky afterlife, dying of starvation here in the middle of the ocean would.
Again, the dragon seemed to understand. It lowered its long head down to the deck and gently flapped its wings, beckoning Mosha to climb atop. Nervously, she stepped up to its reptilian neck and placed one foot on it, worried that she would hurt it, but her small shoes were as heavy on its strong neck as milk droplets. She straddled it at the shoulders, and without any warning, it shot into the air. Mosha’s arms instinctively wrapped around the dragon’s neck as the salty ocean air stung her cheeks and eyes, flying past them at blistering speeds.
Once they were high enough that the ship below was only a brown speck through the clouds, Mosha could see where the dragon was headed. Just before the horizon was an island of golden grains. As they flew closer, Mosha could make them out swaying in the wind, an ocean of grains, waiting to grow out of their larvae forms.
And once the island was close enough for them to land, she saw an adult grain, wandering around, ready to be harvested and eaten. It was one of Mosha’s favorite grains, perfect for pouring the sacred milk onto and eating with a spoon.
It was a box of Cheerios.
The grain-creature roamed around its domain, legs and arms popping out the sides. It carried a weapon with it, an ax, likely to protect its brood still growing in the fields. Mosha’s mouth watered at imagining its crunchy innards splayed in a bowl, floating on a generous ladle of lovely lactose. But with a weapon, it would be too dangerous to attack. They’d have to find one that was less ready to fight back.
The dragon didn’t seem to care. It shot down toward the island, right for the Cheerio box, as if riding a high wave coming crashing down onto the water. Before Mosha could say a word of protest, the dragon slammed into the grain-field ground, with enough force to shake the entire island. It skidded to a halt as it bent all the wheat-larve in its wake, roaring in its declaration of battle.
It didn’t have to wait. The Cheerio box was already running over toward Mosha and the dragon, its sharp ax gleaming in the sun. It leaped into the air, ready to hack off the dragon’s neck. Mosha cried out, but the dragon merely clasped the ax with its hard talons, and slammed the creature to the ground.
Mosha hopped off the dragon’s back and hid for safety among the wheat-larvae. And not a moment too soon. The Cheerios jumped into the air with inhuman height and snatched the ax back from the dragon. With a mighty slash, its blade bit into the dragon’s chest-hide, opening a wound to spill blood over the downed wheat-children.
The dragon did not waste time howling in pain. Before the Cheerios’s feet even hit the ground, the dragon gripped the sides of its cardboard body, and howled out with a battle scream so loud it pained Mosha’s ears even when covered.
With an air-cracking rip, the Cheerios’s body was split in two, spilling its delicious o-shaped, sugary organs and entrails to the ground.
Mosha had never seen something so delectable. She crawled out from the wheat-larvae, gazing down at the bounty before her. With a quick prayer to the Great Ladle, begging her holy forgiveness for not devouring flesh with her sacred milk, she gobbled up the Cheerios handful by handful.
The dragon raised its mouth to the sky, holding half of the Cheerios’s defeated flaccid body in either hand. It unleashed a flame of victory straight up in the air, rivaling even that of the sun in brightness and glory.
It dropped the dead, inedible pieces of the Cheerios’s box, then bent its head down to Mosha’s height again. It purred like an alligator, seemingly happy to see her filling her empty stomach.
“Thank you,” Mosha said between fistfuls of wheat-meat. “My family, they must’ve been like that Cheerios’s box to you too, huh? You were just hungry, and then they attacked. All you wanted was a meal, and then…”
The dragon stopped purring. It nudged Mosha’s hand toward her mouth, as if encouraging her to stop talking and keep eating. Mosha giggled and brought the handful to her mouth, but then stopped.“I’m actually not that hungry anymore,” she said, suddenly feeling nervous again. “Maybe I can eat more later?”
She lowered her hand, but the dragon growled and forcefully pushed it right into her mouth this time. This was no gentle urging from a friend for her to eat, this was forced feeding.
The dragon hadn’t spared Mosha because she was kind. It had spared Mosha because she wasn’t fattened up enough yet.
Her pulse quickening, Mosha surveyed her options. The ax lay on the ground, but Mosha was too weak to break the blade through the dragon’s hide. Even the Cheerios had only gotten one slash off on it before it’d been torn in half. She needed something else, a distraction.
Lying on the ground was her answer. The heart of the Cheerios creature. The part her parents used to save for last and let Mosha enjoy all on her own. The prize.
This cereal prize was a plastic whistle, shaped like a bear. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. Pretending to eat more wheat-meat with one hand, Mosha slowly reached for the whistle-heart with the other. When she felt its smooth body on the tips of her fingers, she clenched it and stuck it between her lips, blowing harder than the dragon had even blown its flames.
The sound was horrible. A dying goat mixed with a screeching bird. The heart-whistle’s piercing sound hit the dragon hard, making it roar in agony as it struggled to cover its ears in vain with its claws.
Not wasting a second, Mosha kept blowing as she yanked the ax from the ground, and scampered up the dragon’s chest, digging her shoes into the space between its scales, and the fresh wound the Cheerios had left. When her foot entered the bloody gap, the dragon screamed loud enough to be heard in the milky beyond.
Which was good, because that was exactly where Mosha was sending it.
She threw the ax down the dragon’s open throat. No more yells came from within, only a fountain of blood bursting forth as the dragon shook and swayed, clawing at its lips and trying to cough out the blade. Every spasm of its neck just shot out more warm red liquid, splattering over the wheat-larve and Mosha herself.
She gracefully landed back on the ground, watching as the dragon took its final breaths. It glared at her with its slit eyes, and she could feel its hatred burning through the air between them. At least it wasn’t able to actually do any burning.
The dragon’s head collapsed, its eyes cloudy and unmoving, its tongue dribbling out between its teeth. No longer did it make any sound.
Mosha stood before it, covered in a different animal’s innards for once. She licked her lips, tasting the dragon’s liquidy insides. It wasn’t as crunchy or satisfying as the Cheerios’s, but it did have a nice iron-y edge to it.
Today, she would not be eating the wheat-meat in a bowl of holy milk. She would be eating it in a bowl of dragon blood.
Mosha snickered at the dragon. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to play with your food?”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!