If you are like me, you've probably heard the terms "scene," and "act," and maybe even "sequence" at least a dozen (if not a hundred) times without anyone explaining what they actually are. For most of my writerly life, I've heard about the 3-Act Structure, without anyone explaining to me what an act actually is. Sure, they may tell me what story parts go in which one, what happens, but they don't tell me what it actually is. Like, why is that stuff an act? What makes this a scene? And what is a sequence? 🤦♀️
So with this post, I'm hoping to help others with that, explaining what these things are, structurally, after all, they are structural terms.
(Though, as I've acknowledged before, much of story structure can get down to how you decide to slice and dice it, and people use different terminology, making writing terms ambiguous, which doesn't help.)
Scene
If you don't have an exact understanding of what a scene is, you probably at least have a vague one, thanks to the scene selection menu on movies or the high school play you saw being rehearsed in the auditorium as a teenager.A scene is usually defined as a unit of action that takes place in a single location and continuous time. When the location changes, or the time jumps, or in some cases (particularly in plays) when a new set of characters enters the location, it's a new scene.
In Guardians of the Galaxy, the opening scene is when Peter is a kid and his mom is lying in a hospital bed dying from cancer, and it ends as he runs outside and is abducted.
Then we jump to 26 years later on a different planet--a new scene.
Seems simple enough, right?
But here's the thing, for a scene to work structurally, it actually needs to do more than that. The scene is a structural unit, perhaps even more so than a setting unit (time or place), but often, people only define it using setting terms, like we have so far.
In reality, a scene follows the same basic structure of the overall story.
And it typically breaks down in similar ways (or usually should).
Open with a hook
Establish the setup (where and when we are and what characters are in the scene)
Have a rising action with complications
Hit a climax
Have a falling action or denouement
You can even break this down further and get more detailed, but for simplicity's sake, I'll leave that there (and save the advanced stuff for my online course).
Now, the "climax" is also known as a turning point or plot turn (or even plot point). It changes the direction of the story. It was going one direction, and then wham! it's going a new different direction. The most obvious, simplistic way to look at this, is that it turns us from rising action to falling action. But if you prefer to just think of it as the climax, that's fine too.
The difference here is that in a scene, the "climax" is going to be smaller and less impactful than that of the whole story. Smaller unit, means smaller turn.
