As I've covered previously, most successful stories have at least three different types of plotlines, and most commonly they are the external, internal, and relationship plotlines. Often these plotlines overlap, and almost always they interweave, at least to some degree. There are some exceptions to this; for example, you may have a relationship plotline with characters other than the protagonist, and it may even be, basically, a separate story (a topic for another day).
Many of your scenes will likely interweave these plotlines.
A lot of us have learned how to handle the external plotline. The character has a concrete, external goal, and faces antagonism, which leads to conflict. This conflict escalates and escalates in rising action, until eventually the character and antagonist face off in a defining way at the climax, where one or the other comes out the victor (simplistically speaking). Consequences take effect, and we fall into the falling action.
This is (essentially) the plot structure of the external plotline. For the narrative arc. For the acts. And for the scenes. Because story structure is a fractal.
