There’s no real standard for scenes or even chapters. The rule is really ‘if it works, it works’. William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, has a chapter in his novel As I Lay Dying, that is five words long. “My mother is a fish.” So how do you know how long your scene should be? The answer is, you don’t. There are novels that don’t have chapters. They’re just one long continuous story.
But there are ways in which scenes are often structured. If you’ve got a scene that isn’t working for you, then you can try structuring it.
First, if you don’t mind, go watch a ten minute short film. It’s animated, and it’s about a puppy. It’s called Feast and I swear, it’s charming. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2icqx7
I’ll wait.
Charming, right? It’s made up of several scenes (a scene in a screenplay changes every time there is a change in location or a jump in time, but scenes in prose work differently.) But it’s structured in a classic way.
It opens with the lost puppy who is adopted by a Dudebro. Dudebro and dog live an idyllic life and then Dudebro falls in love with a girl who makes him eat healthy. A scene starts with two characters wanting different things. The dog wants to eat all the good stuff but the girlfriend wants everyone to be healthy.
A scene progresses with obstacles. In this, the dog wants both all the food AND the Dudebro to be happy. When Dudebro and girlfriend break up, dog gets all the food. But that’s an obstacle to Dudebro’s happiness. Dog makes active choice to help Dudebro and girlfriend get back together.
Dog gives up pizza for happiness. Dudebro and girlfriend get married. Then they have a kid who is messy and feeds dog junk so dog gets happiness and pizza, and meatballs and cupcakes.
So how does this particular structure work?
- Set up a situation with obstacles to resolution. A good way to do this is by having two characters who want different things. But any situation will do: the Jack London story “To Build A Fire” is about one guy trying to get a fire started. In winter. In Alaska. In the middle of nowhere. It’s a life or death situation. But really, fiction is easiest when you’ve got two characters who want different things. In this story, the Dudebro wants his girlfriend and even to be healthy. The dog wants French Fries.
- Play out the negotiation between the main character and what they want/need. In the case of “Feast”, the dog wants what feels like incompatible things. He wants Dudebro to be happy because he loves Dudebro. But he also wants Fettucine Alfredo. His obstacles are internal (want versus need) and external (how does he get them back together?)
- Resolve the situation. The best resolution does two things. It sets up the situation for the next scene. Since “Feast” is a complete short, it doesn’t do that, but if this was a scene in a longer work, imagine that the resolution involved a further complication—maybe as the kids are running around, we see that the wife is pregnant and the boy is upset and jealous. A good scene both provides an immediate resolution but reminds us that the overarching issue isn’t solved. The other thing that the end of “Feast” does is it is inevitable but unexpected. We are surprised by the baby, not because it’s completely unexpected that a married couple might have a child, but because we’ve been concentrating on something else. So the ending of “Feast” surprises us, but in an ‘oh! Of course!’ kind of way.
Often a scene does that with a ‘button’, that is a line that feels like the end of a scene. So in a heroic quest, a scene might end with a line that reminds us of the stakes of the story. ‘It was a wonderful moment, but she remembered with a chill that the Dark Lord was still out there.’ Anything that feels like it ‘buttons up’ the scene is good, and there are an infinite number of ways to do that.
Another way is a cliffhanger. Endings of scenes and stories is an art, and at the end of the day there are suggestions, but no real rules.
To sum up, one way to structure a scene is to set it up, play it out, and stick the landing. But that’s not really a formula so much as a guideline. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story or book where every scene was structured this way. Doing this, it’s hard. Endings are especially hard. Good endings are amazing and have a strong effect on the reader.
I said I’d show you a way to structure a scene. I didn’t say it would be easy.