Starting a Scene: Two Important Questions

One of the most important questions I've learned to ask myself when brainstorming/writing a new scene is,

What am I bringing to this scene?

And then the next important question is,

How can I take advantage of that?

You see, I think all of us consider this on some level, maybe even a subconscious level, because unless you're writing the first scene of your story, your scene is building off the scenes that came before it. You're guiding the reader through a narrative.

But it wasn't until the last year or so that I consciously and actively started asking and considering these questions.

And holy cow, the scenes I've been writing are so much better for it!

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Writing Micro-concepts

Today I'm going to talk about what I call "micro-concepts." I don't know if there is a real term for them, but micro-concepts are cool little tidbits, little concepts that come up in some minor point of the story. They can be about a minor character, or a bit of indirect plot, or a snip of detail. They are really cool ideas or just great ideas that come up in passing. They may be only one sentence long or a couple of paragraphs.

In contrast, a "macro-concept" is an overall concept in a story. It might be the concept of your story itself. In The Hunger Games the idea that kids have to fight each other to the death in a reality t.v. show is a macro-concept. In the trilogy, Peeta becoming exactly what he feared was a character macro-concept. Macro-concepts are usually what come to mind when we talk about concepts in a story--we're thinking of the big picture. The overarching ideas.

But concepts appear in small aspects too. Micro-concepts are like that post I did a while back on picking the right details. We could pick some kind of generic concept for something small in our story, or we can pick something fresh or interesting. I'll give some examples.

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