Speculative fiction scenes come in all shapes and sizes, but the best tend to follow the same rhyming scheme:
The protagonist (or point of view character) wants something badly. A temporary goal they must achieve to reach their goal for the whole novel.
They take action to try and achieve that temporary goal.
Problems and obstacles show up to ruin their day.
They try, fail, and try again to overcome those obstacles during the heart of the scene. Often, this uses the storytelling fairy dust that is “yes, but”/“no, and.”
Towards the end of the scene, we reach the outcome. The character either achieves the thing they wanted, or they fail.
Whatever the case, some new problem or complication appears.
This leads to a new goal they must pursue in the next scene.
If you read some of your favourite novels from the past few years, you’ll see that writers don’t follow this pattern slavishly or announce each step. However, most of the elements are usually there somewhere, lurking beneath the surface.
This is where most of my editing clients fall down. Their stories are a jumble of things that happen, rather than an intoxicating rhythm, and this sort of scene structure is their salvation.
It’s the one piece of advice I give out over and over again. An antidote to goalless, passive, or wandering stories that exhaust readers, perish in the query trenches, and cause their authors endless heartache.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at each of the individual elements of the glorious gift that is scene structure.
Now it’s finally time to put it all together.
Remember Evelyn, our hypothetical knight-in-training? Here’s a scene from the climax of her story that puts exactly this kind of scene structure into action:
Temporary Goal:
When we left off, Evelyn’s friends were about to be executed by her corrupt knight-commander. Now, Evelyn must find a way to save them and defeat her former mentor for good.
Action:
With no time to prepare, and no one left to help, Evelyn heads out to the old gallows and lies in wait in the rain. Waiting for an opportunity to act.
Obstacle:
Before she gets chance Evelyn’s sickly brother emerges to confront the guards. He’s here to save the family friend that was captured with Evelyn’s other allies, and is carrying their father’s rusty sword. It’s too heavy for him to wield, and he’s hopelessly out numbered.“Cut the boy’s throat first,” the knight-commander tells her thugs.
Evelyn has no choice but to intervene.
Try/Fail Cycles:
Q: Can Evelyn reach her brother before the guard kills him?A: Yes, but it leaves her flank open and the knight-commander drives her sword into a gap in Evelyn’s armour. Now Evelyn is wounded, and her brother is still in trouble.
Q: Can Evelyn get her brother out of the way?
A: No. There are guards everywhere and there’s no way for her brother to defend himself with that heavy, rusted sword. Evelyn has no choice but to give him her own. The one that she’s trained with. And take up her father’s old blade herself as the knight-commander launches towards her.
Q: Can Evelyn hold the knight-commander off?
A: Yes, at least for now. And with a lighter sword, her brother is able to get away. But Evelyn’s father’s sword is too heavy in her hand, and the knight-commander shouts to start killing the prisoners—starting with their family friend.
Q: Can Evelyn stop them from killing her friend?
A: No. She can’t reach him in time, and as he dies the knight-commander takes advantage: bringing down a brutal strike that shatters Evelyn’s rusty sword and drives her to her knees.
Outcome:
Evelyn has failed to save her friend and defeat the knight-commander. Now, she’s at the mercy of her former mentor and facing certain death.
Complication:
As if things couldn’t get any worse, Evelyn hears a shout and looks up. One of the guards has her brother and is dragging him up to the gallows.
New Goal:
Find some way to beat the odds. Save her brother and kill the knight-commander.
That then leads us into the final scene of the climax: the one scene that must be answered cleanly: the protagonist either wins the day and achieves their goal for the novel, or they fail and lose it forever.
The chain breaks. The story ends.
And everything the reader is here for finally pays off.
Here’s one thing that can trip people up about scene structure: it isn’t actually about scenes at all.
It’s just that “dramatic unit structure” isn’t as catchy.
The truth is, this repeating scene flow (goal → action → obstacle → try/fail/try again → outcome → complication → new goal) can play out over a single scene, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s split over two scenes. Or a chapter. Maybe even two or more chapters, depending on the story.
Again, this structure isn’t meant to be a cage or, gods forbid, yet another thing for us to overthink. It’s just a useful tool that, when we keep one eye on it, can help keep our stories moving.
And help to prevent the dreaded “two hundred pages where nothing really happens.”
As we’ve already talked about, the stakes in any given moment are the answer to the question: What awful thing will happen if the character fails?
Generally, we want to start the stakes relatively small and build them up throughout the book, but life-or-death stakes don’t automatically create tension. To really drive up intensity, we need to hit what the character cares about the most. The more of that we put on the line? The higher the stakes. It doesn’t even have to be something physical. Losing a relationship, or sacrificing a deeply held value is often just as strong. If not stronger.
We also need to set the stakes according to our genre. I’ve seen more than one novel that claimed to be cosy fantasy, but the stakes were the fate of the whole world. Part of what makes a fantasy cosy is very small, very personal stakes.
The fate of the protagonists’ coffee shop is exactly the sort of thing we’re looking for in those genres. It can be every bit as dramatic as the fate of the whole world, and places the book more clearly in that kind of low-stakes genre.
Meanwhile, epic fantasy is far more likely to rest on life-and-death-and-the-fate-of-reality-itself.
As with everything, it’s about knowing the expectations of your genre, and meeting them (or intentionally breaking them) accordingly!
There are also a very small number of scenes that don’t follow this structure at all.
These are our low, slow exhales after something big and dramatic. The quiet and relationship-building scenes that stop the action from becoming overwhelming.
However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind with these:
We get far fewer of them than most writers think. Perhaps no more than three or four, and always in the wake of our biggest, most powerful plot points.
They are generally just one scene. The more of them there are (and especially the more that follow one after the other) the more the story goes slack and the reader loses interest.
The vast majority of writers add far too many quiet scenes, and let the lulls go on far too long.
Here’s a handful of different ways we can deal with that:
Ask yourself: Does this truly need to be an actionless scene? Does it come after an important plot point when everything has been shaken to its core? Does the reader need this moment to catch their breath and recover?
If not, could we add in a small thread of structure? Something the character wants from this conversation, this hour exploring the city, or whatever the scene is? Even a small goal or the tiniest stakes can help sustain a quieter scene and maintain enough tension to keep things moving.
Do we put the pressure back on in the next scene? Or, even better, at the very end of this one? Especially if this scene truly is a “lull” with no structure at all, are we returning to the meat of the story immediately afterwards? Or is the next scene quiet as well?
We haven’t focused much on quieter scenes because, in my experience, writers don’t need any help writing them. Mostly, they need to know when to stop, and how to keep the forward momentum that readers crave.
A lot of my writers worry about pacing without really understanding what it means.
As we talked about in the Complications post in this series, pacing isn’t about how many things happen. It’s a mixture of:
How many of the scene structure elements appear in each scene.
How quickly these cycles of goal → action → obstacle etc repeat themselves.
The size and severity of the obstacles in the characters’ way, and the complications at the end of their scenes.
Most struggling speculative fiction novels happen because the writer has misunderstood pacing, or paced things too slow. Their stories are packed with far too many scenes focused purely on exposition, exploration, and relationship building [link passive characters].
This happens for one reason alone: the author has lost sight of our starting point—the vital compass of their characters’ goal.
Ensuring the goal is the force behind almost every scene is the one lesson almost every writer desperately needs to learn. After that, we can start to worry about pacing: using shorter, more rapidly-cycling scene structure to speed everything up, and sustaining quieter moments with smaller stakes.
I’ve honestly never been a huge fan of this framework.
Not because it doesn’t work (it absolutely does!) but because it leads so many writers astray.
I see so many books where we get a small moment of action, followed by a lengthy diversion into the weeds—where the character thinks about what happened, worries about everything, decides what they’re going to do next, and the story goes nowhere at all. Nothing will kill the engine of a novel faster than this. Instead, we need to do the one thing our readers crave most: keep our foot on the gas pedal, and keep everything moving.
The authors who use the “Scene & Sequel” technique best aren’t starting and stopping like this. Often, the sequel is shoved somewhere inside the next scene, and the character is forced to process everything, feel things, and make decisions, while everything is still moving forward.
That can be absolute magic. It’s how we create powerful internal conflict—as the character struggles with their thoughts, feelings, and decisions while also facing external challenges. It increases the intensity in the most glorious way, weaving internal and external obstacles together through every fresh cycle of try/fail/try again.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it. Just...make sure it’s not strangling the life out of your story with endless emotional reflection, processing, and thinking scenes when all the reader wants to know (all they ever want to know) is: What will happen next?
Now that we’ve covered all the different elements of scene structure, here’s how you can use them in your own work:
Pick a scene/section of action from your latest WIP.
See if you can identify the various parts.
What is the point of view character’s goal in this moment? Is it a clear step on the path to their goal for the novel?
What do they do about it in this scene?
Is there a problem that gets in their way?
How do they try to overcome that problem? Is there struggle, further setbacks, and iterations of “yes, but”/“no, and” in there, or do they win/lose immediately?
What’s the outcome? Do they achieve their temporary goal, or fail to reach it?
Is there a complication? Some new issue that arises to either spoil their victory or make everything worse?
Does that lead to a clear (or implied) new goal that they must now pursue?
Identify which parts of the scene structure you’ve nailed. What’s working? And which parts are missing?
We don’t always have to follow this exact process, or include every element. But playing around with the structure, adding in bits that are missing, or tweaking the flow can be a useful experiment. Is the scene that you’ve ended up with stronger as a result?
Is it taking you closer to where you want the story to be?
Let me know how you got on in the comments! Share what you noticed, tell me what clicked, or ask any questions you still have—we’ll be covering them next week for a scene structure Q&A!
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