- What's up my friend, Abbie here, and welcome back to
Writers Life Wednesdays, where we come together to help
you make your story matter and make your author dreams come true. Writing is hard. You might have some fantastic ideas and some conflicted characters, and a great world for them to exist in, but when it comes to
the actual writing part, you have no sense of direction. What if there was a guide
that you could follow that would help you to write
stronger, more engaging scenes that pull your reader through your story and keep them asking
questions and hungry for more, desperate to know what happens next? Good news. There is a guide for this, and that's what I'm
sharing in today's video. Scene cards. No, not a bunch of blank index cards or sticky notes that you
spread all over your floor with a bunch of random plot
points written on them, trying to create something that
looks like a coherent story. This scene card is designed to help you find the focus of each and
every scene in your story, to make each and every
scene matter to your story, and as a result, matter to your reader. It might just change your writing life. Why does your story matter? Good question. What if I told you that there's a science behind every great story? I don't just teach you how to write, I teach you how to change
the world with your story and make your author dreams come true. Okay, before we get into the scene card, I have to answer the
most important question. What is a scene? Is it just another word for chapter? What if you're not writing
a book with chapters? Does a scene just have to
take place in one location in the one short window of time? Can you make cuts or switch to another
character's point of view during the scene? These are all questions
that I've been asked about writing scenes, because the word, scene
is very subjective. So let's redefine it, shall we? Instead of thinking about this card as a guide to writing
a one location scene, I want you to think about it more as a guide for writing a sequence. I was recently watching
Ron Howard's MasterClass and I took note of
something really interesting that he said about writing
eight to 10 page sequences to create a strong story,
rather than using a structure. He said, "Good stories
at work in sequences. "And when you have the
overarching narrative question, "the characters in conflict, "and the sequences have
their own beginning, "middle, and end that are satisfying, "it really pulls you along, "and suddenly you can't
wait for the next chapter." Now by chapter, he was talking about a
sequence in a screenplay, but it could actually be
a chapter in your novel, or it could be an episode in a web comic, or a musical number in the
next hit Broadway musical that you're writing. No matter what kind of
story you're creating, think of it as being broken up into a bunch of eight
to 10 minute sequences. Now, the sequence might be one scene, one location, one topic, one conversation, one short window of time,
or it might be a few events, it might switch point of
view, it might timeskip, or it might be a montage, showing
us a lot of time going by. In other words, no two
sequences are created equal, but every good sequence
has the same structure, a beginning, a middle, and an end, a setup, a conflict, and a resolution. Does that sound at all familiar to you? Uh-huh, it's the backbone of
the Three-Act Story Structure. That means every sequence
in your story has an arc that brings us on a journey
and takes us somewhere new. So we could call that
setup-conflict-resolution, but really it's more like setup-tension-conflict-crossroads-decision
and outcome. So, looking closer at
each beat of this arc, we first have the setup. That's where your
characters begin the scene fraught with internal conflict and probably facing some
external conflict as well. No matter what's happening,
tension should be building, leading us towards the
main conflict of the scene or the crossroads moment. I call this the crossroads
because it's a pivotal moment where the scene could really
go two different ways, depending on how your characters respond to the external conflict. The decisions they make, of course, are based on their own internal conflict, their desires, fears, and misbelief, and how they react or respond
leads them to the outcome. Now obviously, we don't want to resolve
everything in the outcome because then the story would be over. Instead, we want to raise the stakes. We want our audience
asking more questions. We want every chapter to end in a way that makes the reader
want to keep reading. Most people refer to this
as the cliffhanger moment, but I try not to overuse that
word, cliffhanger too much because when most people
think about a cliffhanger, they think of like that classic
doom, peril end to a chapter where the point of view
character gets like knocked out and everything goes dark. Now that is perfectly fine if it actually fits in your story, but imminent, unexplained
peril is not the only way to pull your reader into the next chapter. In fact, when overused,
this type of cliffhanger becomes what I like to call fake tension. When there is no real consequence or pay off to the cliffhanger, we quickly start to see
that this plot device is only being used to trick us into feeling fear for characters who are, in fact, in no danger. This technique also diminishes moments when the threat is real, Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome, basically. That being said, I do believe that there is a
way to incorporate real tension into every scene of your story, even if your characters are not in danger, by showing us their internal conflict and how everything revolves around it. You don't need traditional
cliffhanger endings to every chapter, as long as the reader always understands why what's happening
matters to the characters and as long as something
is always changing. Doesn't matter what's happening. All that matters is that we, the readers, understand why it matters. So let me show you the scene card now, and you can see how this works. At the top, we're going to
fill out some basic info for the scene or chapter, number, point of view character, and then, in preferably one line, describe the goal of this scene. Now we have our three beats,
setup, crossroads, and outcome. So for the setup, ask yourself, "What are the characters dealing with "both internally and externally
when the scene begins?" This is going to be what sets the stage for the main conflict to play out. Crossroads. This is where the crux
of the scene is revealed. Scene could go two ways from here. Characters make decisions based
on their internal conflict. Then when you reach the outcome, you're going to ask yourself, "Where does this leave the characters? "What has changed?" That's the most important
question to ask yourself at the end of every chapter. And that leads us to the cliffhanger or the new question as I like to call it. If we were gonna get super anatomical, we could just say that
every scene in your story asks a question, and the
following scene or scenes provide us with the answers, but you never want the reader
to have all the answers, okay, not until the story is over, which means you have to keep
your reader asking questions, keep them hungry for more. This is your curiosity factor, okay? We love watching people
make impossible choices. We love watching super
conflicted characters struggle with pain versus pain. Check out this video right here to learn more about the brain
science behind this principle. But bottom line, to make every scene or
sequence matter to your story, you have to show the
reader why what's happening matters to the characters and how it changes the game going forward. So use this scene card. It will help you tremendously to give every chapter in your story a sense of momentum and meaning. I will leave the printable
template below this video. You can download it and print off as many scene
cards as your heart desires. The template also comes
with an explanation to the sequence arc, as well as directions on
how to build this template inside your Scrivener. So pro tip. If you print multiple scene cards, only print page one, okay, because there are two other
pages of instructional stuff and you probably don't
want a 100 copies of that. So grab the scene card template,
use it, have fun with it, and remember, it is a guide to help you stay on the right track. I've designed it to be super versatile so that it doesn't limit your creativity, but instead helps you to dig deeper and find that internal conflict that will make your story unputdownable. Smash that like button
if you liked this video and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already because I post writing videos
every single Wednesday, and I would love to have
you here in the community. Also, be sure to check out my Patreon because that's where we go beyond videos and take storytelling to the next level. The Patreon community
is not only the best way to support what I'm doing here on YouTube, but it's also the only way
to connect one-on-one with me and get better guidance
and advice on your story. So, go to patreon.com/abbieemmons and get yourself inside that community, I think you will love it there. Until next week my friend, rock on. (soft whoosh) That's something that has worked
for me time and time again. Every time that I feel a lack of inspiration or
motivation for a story, at least in my experience,
it has always been a case of, I do not know this character well enough, I don't know their internal
conflict well enough, I don't know what they're
struggling with well enough.
