Scenes vs Chapters (Writing Advice)

many writers can't seem to tell the difference between scenes and chapters they ask questions like are they the same thing are they interchangeable or are they different and if so what are those differences today we're going to talk about this so stick around by the way my name is brandon mcnulty i'm the author of bad parts also the author of entry wounds and welcome to my writing channel one of my subscribers requested a video on scenes versus chapters and his main concern was what are the differences between the two so we're going to talk about that today and what i'm going to discuss is first of all we're going to define what scenes are then we're going to talk about what chapters are and then i'm going to go over some key differences between the two but let's start off by talking about scenes scenes are structured storytelling units in which something changes and that change part is very important a lot of times you'll see definitions of scenes online where it says like scenes are mini stories or scenes are these storytelling units but oftentimes they forget to mention that a scene is something in which something changes you need to have a meaningful change in a scene it's very important and when we're talking about changes we're talking about a meaningful element within a scene changing from either negative to positive or positive to negative and a lot of different elements can change within a scene it could be a relationship between two characters that changes it could be a piece of evidence becoming known or a piece of evidence becoming lost maybe because the only character who knew about it got killed or it could be just an emotional change over the course of a scene negative positive positive negative whatever it is i'll give you an example let's say we have a detective story and we have a detective who shows up at a crime scene and he doesn't know what happened he doesn't have any knowledge of what happened but over the course of the scene he does some investigating and at the end he finds a clue that would be an example of a negative to positive change the negative at the beginning of the scene is that he doesn't know what happened but at the end of the scene there's a positive change because he finds a piece of evidence that leads him toward understanding what happened now here's a negative example let's say our detective tracks down a suspect and at the beginning of the scene the suspect starts to run but he's still within reach and the detective is chasing after him he's chasing him through the streets and they're jumping over fences and then at the very end of the scene the suspect runs into the middle of traffic gets hit by a car and gets killed so that would be a negative example because at the beginning of the scene it's a positive the detective has the suspect he's almost about to apprehend him but at the end the suspect is killed and he cannot impart any information that the detective wants to know all right now let's talk about scene structure i mentioned that scenes are these structured units of storytelling so let's talk about the structure and there are two types of basic scenes you have action scenes and you have reaction scenes each of these different types of scenes can be broken down into three different steps when it comes to an action scene you have goal conflict disaster what this means is that an action scene will open up with a character who has a goal they want something but they face conflict or obstacles along the way and they have to overcome these obstacles and as they're pursuing this goal and facing off against these obstacles they eventually reach a resolution and usually that resolution is going to be a disaster because disaster is what makes a story interesting you go after something you want but something bad happens and we have to see how is the plot going to resolve itself now with reaction scenes these are broken down into three steps as well you have a reaction a dilemma and a decision so the reaction the first step here is usually an emotional reaction it's going to be an emotional reaction to the disaster that happened at the end of the action scene so something happens it's a disaster and then the character is reacting in an emotional way how do they feel about that disaster or that resolution and then there's a dilemma what do they do next how do they want to carry out the rest of their plan or how do they want to go about solving their problems and then finally they end up having to make a decision and then they usually go on back to making another goal conflict disaster scene they make a decision and then they have to pursue a new goal now i'll give you an example of these two types of scenes for an action scene let's say we we go back to our detective and he has a goal he wants to find a piece of evidence at a crime scene but there's conflict there's obstacles in his way and it's the fact that he can't find anything at the crime scene there's the the place is empty there's nothing there so he starts digging around and he ends up finding a secret compartment in the floor and in the secret compartment he finds a piece of evidence but this ends in disaster for him because this piece of evidence links his girlfriend to the crime she might be the murderer she might be working with the murderer so then we have a reaction scene we have our detective emotionally reacting to this evidence he finds this and he feels maybe he's been he's been betrayed by his girlfriend or maybe he's disappointed or he's disgusted or whatever it is and then he faces a dilemma what do i do next do i take this piece of evidence back to the police station do i notify the other cops or do i go straight to my girlfriend and do i get her side of the story and then eventually he has to make a decision and that will decide what he does next all right now let's talk about chapters a chapter is a labeled unit within a story that may contain complete scenes partial scenes or no scenes at all and let me get a little more into detail with this definition so when i say a labeled unit what i mean is that a chapter is labeled in some way usually it's chapter one two three or so on sometimes you have chapters that are labeled with dates and times you might have a chapter that is labeled monday march 21st at 6 p.m and then the chapter after that is labeled monday march 21st at 11 pm sometimes you have chapters that are labeled with character names like in the game of thrones books you have a ned chapter then you have a john chapter then a tyrion chapter then another ned chapter and so on and so on and then sometimes you have chapters that are labeled with fancy creative names i mean there's a lot of creativity you can use here if you want to and that's really what chapters are about whereas scenes are more structured and rigid chapters are more open to creativity and flexibility and that's because chapters are these arbitrary divisions within a story it's totally up to the author how they want to break up their story into chapters you have long chapters short chapters you can have consistent chapters in terms of length or you could have chapters that vary in length or change up or you could have one sentence chapters or you know 40 page chapters whatever you want it's up to you and that's where your creativity comes into play and you can also think about how you want to use chapters in order to manage the pacing and suspense and story how you want to use chapters in order to make your large story easier to digest it's totally up to you you might even use chapters to change point of view or change a scene or change a setting or anything else you want to do in order to make the story more accessible for your readers and then another thing i want to point out with chapters is that they can contain scenes they don't necessarily have to i've seen chapters that are one word long and it's just nothing really happens there's no scene there's no goal conflict disaster or anything like that it's just a one word thing that is there to leave an impact on a reader for some reason or another but more often than not they do contain scenes sometimes complete scenes sometimes partial scenes and you can mix and match i mean you can have a chapter that contains a full scene and then it ends with a partial scene maybe you cut off the end of the chapter right before we get to see what the disaster is at the end of an action scene or we cut off a chapter right before we get to see what the decision is at the end of a reaction scene it's up to you all right now before we wrap up this video we're going to talk about scenes versus chapters what are the differences between them how do they compare how do they contrast that sort of thing i came up with a few different ideas here the first one is that scenes are concrete structural units and that's because they they follow those three steps goal conflict disaster reaction dilemma decision chapters on the other hand are more arbitrarily defined that means that you can basically make a chapter as long or as short as you want it can end wherever you want it can start wherever you want it doesn't have to follow any strict structure like a scene does second thing to be aware of scenes require beats and they require meaningful change to push the story forward chapters don't necessarily require these things at all some chapters as i mentioned earlier can be as short as a single word they can be there just to convey an image or to maintain the pacing or to you know speed things up whatever it is third thing to keep in mind chapter breaks are obvious because they are usually labeled or numbered scene breaks on the other hand can be obvious you can have like a dividing line that breaks up two scenes or you can even use a chapter break as a scene break if you want to do that to break up your scenes that being said scene breaks would also be fluid you could have one scene flowing into another and maybe you just reset the scene by mentioning a new location or time or whatever it is fourth thing to keep in mind chapters usually contain full or partial scenes it's usually the scenes that make up a chapter now that being said one scene may span more than just one chapter you might have a scene that is spread out over the course of five chapters especially toward the end of your story if you have like a battle scene that you want to you know chop up into different chapters in order to maintain the pacing or manipulate the reader's interpretation of how that battle is being fought and then the last thing i want to talk about in regards to scenes versus chapters is that when you're revising a novel or any longer work it helps if you organize your scenes into a list before you decide on how you want to divide the story into chapters and this is because scenes follow a strict structure it makes sense and it it's an obvious structure that you can pay attention to and you can say to yourself okay this scene follows this scene follows this scene and so on and so on and so on and you can see all your scenes together and once you see them together then you can get creative with how you want to divide them up into chapters it's not mandatory that you do this it's just a suggestion because it's usually easier to work with something that follows a concrete structure so i hope this cleared up any confusion you might have on the difference between scenes and chapters if you have any more questions feel free to reach out to me in the comments section below question of the day what is your favorite way to label chapters do you prefer the straightforward chapter 1 2 3 and so on or do you prefer your chapters to have more specific or fancy labels let us know in the comments section below thank you guys for watching if you want to support the channel please pick up a copy of either one of my novels also be sure to check out my other videos hit the like and subscribe buttons for me share this video with a friend and as always remember to keep on writing

Channel: Writer Brandon McNulty

Views: 28,982

Keywords: Writing, Writing advice, Writing Tips, Fiction, Creative Writing, How to write a book, How to write a novel, novel, book, scene, scenes, chapter, chapters, writing scenes, writing chapters, scenes vs chapters, chapters and scenes, structure, scene structure, how to divide your book into chapters, how to outline a chapter, how to write a chapter book, storytelling, how to write chapters, examples, example, scene writing tips, movies, screenplay, script, chapter length, writing chapter 1, write

Id: qdFzEneazmc

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022