Here’s my review of Jack M. Bickham’s Scene and Structure, which I just finished reading. I found it excellent and very clearly laid out. As I mention in the review, the closer your book is to being a thriller, the more relevant you will find the advice (and even then it may not all work for you, but what advice works all the time)?
I’ve also posted extensive notes under the hashtag #sceneandstructure if you want to look through them.
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 14 (and last): The Scenic Master Plot and How to Write One
Every writer has a (different) general idea of what a novel is and how it should be structured. The more conscious that model is, the better you can manipulate and vary the scene-sequel structure to fit that general pattern.
A “master plot” is the way one writer sets out to write one novel – the kind of things that may happen and their sequence. It’s flexible, not prescriptive, and not fill-in-the-blanks or paint-by-numbers.
The master plot is a tactical plan for achieving linear story development (a story starting in one place and ending in another through logical development step by step, involving rising action).
Each new twist (scene disaster) adds more for the character, and reader, to worry about. And most novels also have subplots.
Bickham now gives a sample “master plot”. He emphasises that it’s an example rather than a template.
A prologue may or may not be used. If it is, it usually isn’t from the main character’s viewpoint, but establishes intrigue and hooks the reader, hinting at what might be wrong or mysterious. It can take place some time before the first chapter, or immediately before.
The time span of the first three chapters should be very tight, keeping the pressure on until the reader is properly hooked. The first chapter needs to start quickly and hook the reader hard, showing, in the main character’s viewpoint, the major change that alters the status quo and puts the character’s self-concept in jeopardy. By the end of the chapter, the MC has either the major story goal or a short-term goal that will make matters worse, or both.
In the subsequent chapters, you could (you might put some of these on cards and shuffle them if you’re short of ideas):
Establish the villain, the villain’s goal, and the villain’s capabilities and attitude (typically powerful and ruthless).
Establish supporting characters: best friend, minor antagonist, romantic lead.
Establish the hero’s background and show the hero pursuing the story goal with dedication (motivation drawn from the background).
Develop secondary characters and their subsidiary story goals, starting major subplots.
Characterise the hero, villain, situation or all three through the eyes of a secondary character.
Raise stakes suddenly with a “shocker question”.
Run a short-term ticking clock.
Bring in more background on the supporting characters and their motivations.
Introduce red herrings and false leads.
Drop in side quests and sub-quests, all leading towards the attainment of the story goal, all resulting in disasters which seem to take the hero further from its attainment.
Show confrontations with the villain in action sequences, providing big “peaks” and running straight on into more action.
Progress the romantic relationship through the hero’s struggles to deal with defeat and disaster.
Advance the villain plot onstage.
Give the hero a pause to rest up, heal, recover, regroup and reconsider. Answer the question “Why not just give up?” by restating the story goal, perhaps in different terms in light of what’s happened so far, and leave the hero newly determined and moving back towards new action.
Avoid the “boggy middle” by using a short mini-story across several chapters, fast-paced, related to the central story question but with side issues, if possible involving a ticking clock, with lots of development of the situation – towards the point where things can start to be resolved.
Flow action scenes into one another without a pause for a sequel.
Reveal the villain’s plot and/or motives to the hero.
Resolve a mystery, in a way that makes it look like the hero won’t live to use the answer.
Take the hero to the brink of ruin.
Switch viewpoints just at the critical moment to one of the secondary characters, then link back into the main plot – too late to rescue the hero (who should be self-rescuing).
Switch to review and analysis and backstory in a major subplot, just when the main plot is looking particularly dire.
Take away some support the hero has been counting on.
Hero and villain both escape their confrontation, but it’s not over.
Resolve some red herrings or bring major subplots towards conclusion.
Put the romantic lead in danger. [I find this one cliched and annoying.]
Show the connection of the prologue to the main story.
Kill off a secondary character or villain’s minion to show how dire everything is getting.
The hero must choose between the personal and the important.
Lead into a hero/villain showdown.
Showdown is one long, exciting, extended scene. A lot of plot threads resolve in this scene, leaving only the main question and the romance. By the end of this scene, both the main question and the romance seem doomed.
Villain gets the upper hand and offers a devil’s bargain: your integrity or your life. Hero chooses integrity.
Top everything you’ve don so far. Go large. No, larger than that. LARGE.
Hero finally wins – but was it worth it? Downside is apparent.
Tie up any remaining loose threads in the final chapter, including those for the secondary characters, but in the main character’s POV.
Resolve the romantic subplot.
(Again, this is an example “master plot” for a specific kind of suspense novel. It isn’t a template for writing every kind of fiction.)
#sceneandstructure
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 13: The structure of chapters.
Chapters are arbitary, a convention descending from the days of serial publication. There is no set length, though keeping the length fairly consistent within a book is good practice.
However, if you don’t want the reader to put the book down, make sure they can’t do so at the end of a chapter.
The best place to end a chapter is at the end of a scene, i.e. with the disaster.
The second-best is in the middle of the conflict.
You can also use the middle of the thought process of the sequel, where there seems no way out; at the decision point; at the beginning of new action, before a conflict starts.
There’s usually more than one scene in a chapter.
The place to not end a chapter is at a transition, like going to sleep or skipping some time when nothing exciting happens. Chapters should “link forward” to prevent the reader putting the book down.
When you feel it’s about time to end a chapter, ignore this feeling until you reach a point where the reader won’t be able to bear to stop. Then break.
#sceneandstructure
(Again, bear in mind that Bickham is giving advice for writing a particular kind of book, basically a thriller or other action-oriented story.)
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 12: Specialized Scene Techniques
If you hit a troublesome plot situation, the answer is nearly always to bend the “classic structure”, not get rid of it.
1. Scene interruption
This is something to do deliberately for specific effect, not randomly for “realism”. Use them to intensify already strong suspense in a crucial scene. Ideally, set a clock going to intensify suspense further.
Most commonly, scene interruptions come from a character emerging from the hidden story. They may demand a brief scene of their own.
The interruption can function as a stimulus to change the motives of a character in the main scene.
A scene within a sequel can be used to bring in backstory, or jar a character loose from being stuck in emotion and unable to think. This can be achieved either with a sympathetic character offering encouragement, or a hostile character offering criticism. Or the interruption may give a clue which enables the thought portion of the sequel to conclude.
If you want to place a sequel at the end of a chapter for dramatic purposes, you can delay it by placing a scene straight after another scene with no time to react until later. Or if the scene-end disaster is so profound that it needs a big decision, but the plot is so pressurized that new events will occur almost at once, you can delay the sequel in order to do it justice.
Sometimes a scene can be started with a goal announced not by the viewpoint character but by another. Tends to be more early in novels (when the main character is more passive) or at major transitions in space, when the viewpoint character is still disoriented.
The viewpoint character’s job in such scenes is to figure out the non-viewpoint character’s goal as clearly as possible. The viewpoint character then opposes the goal, creating conflict and getting the scene moving.
The disaster still strikes the viewpoint character, meaning that the non-viewpoint character generally attains the scene goal. (Antagonists should also generally attain their scene goals, even if they are viewpoint characters, because that’s bad for the protagonist.)
Flashbacks: these are most common in the thought portion of a sequel, while the character reviews story events and possible new actions.
If you have space, you can play flashbacks as full moment-by-moment scenes, eventually returning to the sequel where you left off. The danger of this is making the old events too interesting, so that the transition back is jarring, or bogging down the forward momentum of the story. It’s usually better to summarize.
You can also use a fragment of a past scene, just the critical moment, and summarize the rest.
“All-dialog” scenes are not actually just dialog; they need attributions (he said), internalisation, description, stage action. Otherwise they’re hard to visualise and become too abstract.
An “all-action” scene also needs some internalisation in response to some of the stimuli: repeating the scene goal, orienting the reader to the viewpoint character’s interpretation of what’s happening, what the options are and what the character will try next, showing secondary goals as they develop, conveying the character’s feelings.
Manoeuvres against an unseen opponent: create conflict by lengthening the internalisations, with the viewpoint character considering alternatives and possible disasters, trying to interpret any sensory evidence of what the opponent is doing, and imagining what they might be doing.
Multiple-agenda scenes occur when the hero faces a group of people, who have different agendas. Keep the viewpoint character clinging to the scene goal despite the confusion, and have one antagonist stronger and more vocal than the others, while the secondary antagonists interrupt the main fight at intervals (which is seen by the hero, and possibly the antagonist, as an impediment to resolving the main conflict).
The protagonist can win some of the side conflicts, because this makes the other opponents more determined and increases the impact of the final disaster.
#sceneandstructure
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Sequel, Chapter 11: Plotting with Scene and Sequel
There are a number of different ways that plots can go in a story written with the scene-and-sequel approach.
1. The scene disasters move the character further and further from a straightforward resolution of the story goal, each having to be solved in order to solve the previous one. When the turning point comes, solving one problem is likely to solve the others back up the chain, like dominoes falling.
2. Disasters pile up, but don’t obviously relate to each other (the character gets in more and more trouble, but solving the latest trouble won’t solve the trouble before that in any obvious way).
3. The scenes require side-quests to clear the way to return to the main quest.
4. The scenes are interleaved subplots, more or less related to the central quest, but some of which may only be playing out in the same setting with related characters.
5. There’s a ticking clock counting down.
6. Each scene reduces the character’s options as he or she attempts one resolution after another, but keeps failing.
7. Plot complications and terrible developments previously hidden are revealed.
You’re always dealing with three stories: the backstory before this story started, this story, and the “hidden” story that’s happening offstage. You may have to plot all three of them out carefully for them to work together, even if you only tell one of them.
Subplots
1. Restrict yourself to one viewpoint character per scene.
2. Have one dominant viewpoint overall. (I’ve breached this in my latest, or almost; two viewpoint characters have four chapters each, and the third has five). This is because if you spread the viewpoint out too much the reader will be confused about whose goals are most important, and won’t identify strongly enough with any one character. (I take issue with both of those points.)
3. Different viewpoints should feel different. For example, their emotional reactions and their proportions of emotion to thought, the opinions they hold.
4. Only change viewpoint to enhance reader curiosity and suspense.
5. The best place to change viewpoint is after a scene-end disaster. Next best is the thought portion of the sequel. Third-best is the moment of new decision in the sequel. All these leave the reader with something unresolved which will keep them reading.
Pick up the viewpoint again exactly where you left it. This doesn’t necessarily mean at the same moment in time, just at the same point in the character’s structural pattern/process.
Content tricks to keep the reader worried
In a scene:
1. Drop hints about things the antagonist knows which the viewpoint character doesn’t. (You need to eventually reveal these.)
2. Have the antagonist reveal something (which is bad news) that the protag didn’t know going into the scene.
3. Make it clear that the protag came into the scene with faulty assumptions.
4. Have the antagonist set up a ticking clock for the scene.
5. Show that the stakes are higher than previously realised.
6. Hold back the full details of the viewpoint character’s agenda, but hint at them.
In a sequel:
1. Set a clock ticking – limited time to make a decision.
2. Have the character realise, in the thought segment, new dimensions to the disaster.
3. Overwhelm the character with emotion so that the thought segment is rushed and inadequate, leading to a poor decision.
4. Insert a “roadblock” scene into the early part of the action segment so that the character must complete a side quest to get back to the next scene and carry out the decision.
5. Don’t tell the reader the decision the character reached (use this sparingly).
6. Interrupt the sequel with a new threat that must be met immediately.
#sceneandsequel
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 10: Problems and how to fix them
1. Too many people in a scene. A scene normally needs two people, one to want something and the other to stop them getting it. If you have more than two, find a way to shut the others up for a while or send them away, and the scene will be more intense.
2. Circularity of argument. Plan the strategies of both parties ahead of time. Keep the protagonist focussed on (and restating) the scene goal, and they can argue about other, related issues without getting off track (problem 4) or forgetting the goal and not answering the scene question (problem 7).
3. Unwanted interruptions. Only allow interruptions with a purpose, not for “realism”.
5. Inadvertent summary. Show, don’t tell. If part of the scene is boring, start later.
6. Loss of viewpoint. Don’t head-hop, and make sure your viewpoint character experiences something every so often and internalises about stimuli.
8. & 9. Unmotivated opposition and illogical disagreement. The antagonist should want something too.
10. Unfair odds. Don’t make the antagonist so powerful that the protag has no reasonable chance of winning.
11. Overblown internalisations (a risk of romance fiction). Keep things happening.
12. Not enough at stake. Make sure scene goals are important.
13. Inadvertent red herrings. Don’t mention something and then fail to develop it.
14. Contrived disasters. The disaster should be unanticipated, but flow logically out of the scene.
#sceneandstructure
Jack M. Bickham, Scene & Structure, Chapter 9: Variations
Bickham’s advice is to plan your book in the “classic structure” of scenes alternating with sequels, with all the parts in order, and then introduce variations as needed.
For example, you can interrupt a conflict with a different scene (that is, different action in which there’s a different goal), in order to realign a character’s motivation so that they will make a decision they otherwise might not.
You can jump into the middle of the scene and supply the goal later, or imply the disaster. Do this sparingly, as a way of increasing the pace.
Your characters’ internalisations will naturally try to become mid-scene sequels if the stimulus is powerful enough to throw them into deep reflection. As a rule, resist this, but allow it if it’s needed to explain a major change of direction by the character, to get the reader in tune with the character, or to work in important backstory. Just watch for the “talking is a free action” or “comics dialog while falling” phenomenon, where the internalisation goes on for pages in supposedly a moment of time.
You can stretch or compress the sequel components, or even change the order a bit. Or you can interrupt the sequel with an unexpected scene if you don’t want the character working out the answer just yet.
Always remember to return to and complete the classic structure before moving on. Don’t leave the reader hanging.
#sceneandstructure