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*WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS*, *YOUR PROTAGONIST* *PURSUES A GOAL*. But will he succeed when *ANTAGONIST PROVIDES OPPOSITION*?

For instance, look at Storm Front. (Yes, I'll use my own books as examples, because I'm just that way. ;) Also, I'm more familiar with them than I am with almost any other writer.) Storm Front's story question:

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When a series of grisly supernatural murders tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden sets out to find the killer. But will he succeed when he finds himself pitted against a dark wizard, a Warden of the White Council, a vicious gang war, and the Chicago Police Department?

Scenes are important. Scenes are where all the plot in your book happens. Any time your character is actively pursuing his goal (as opposed to a character who is pausing to reflect or react emotionally to the events of the story) he is engaged in a SCENE.

The basic structure of a scene is simple. Your POINT OF VIEW character sets out in pursuit of a SPECIFIC GOAL. Someone else (usually, but not always, the antagonist) actively, knowingly tries to stop him. There is a CONFLICT. The reader is left to wonder whether or not the POV character will succeed (which can also be thought of as the SCENE QUESTION). The result of the conflict is *always* a SETBACK of one kind or another (also thought of as the SCENE ANSWER)--at least, until you get to the end of the book.

Let me break that into a simple format. This is the one I use every time I write a scene. I fill it out, like a freaking class worksheet (which at one time it was):

POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER:
GOAL:
CONFLICT (SCENE QUESTION):
SETBACK (SCENE ANSWER):

We'll look at each of them, one at a time.

POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER

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Sometimes, this is easy--for instance, when you're writing a first-person viewpoint novel, like the Dresden Files. The point of view character is always the same person.

Other times, though, you've got more lattitude (IE, a better chance to screw up). You've got multiple point of view characters in your book, and often more than one of them is participating in the scene. (Romance writers, especially, run into this issue a lot.) If you pick the wrong viewpoint character, you'll cheat yourself out of making your scene as interesting and appealing as it could be. Picking the optimal viewpoint character is VITAL.

Fortunately, there's a simple rule of thumb for people getting started. ALWAYS pick the person with the MOST AT STAKE, emotionally, in the scene. If you do that, you help build in additional tension, you get to show more emotion (aka, create greater empathy in the reader), and you help ensure that the conflict is real, that it matters.

You can break this rule--just like you can break all of these rules--once you know what you're doing. But until you are CERTAIN that you understand why this works, how it works, and what you can accomplish by NOT following the rule . . . don't. Please, until you've worked enough to get it yourself, just take my word for it that this rule of thumb is frickin' critical, and you will do well by yourself to stick with it.

GOAL

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Once you've got your point of view character, the next thing you need is a GOAL for them to pursue. This needs to be an ACTIVE, SPECIFIC goal, not just something vague. Instead of your character setting out to "do something to save the day" he needs to have a goal more like, "go pound Joe Blow for information that might let me save the day." Instead of "make the girl like me" his goal needs to be something more like "take the girl out for a wonderful night on the town with lots of attention to detail and customized surprises for her."

(That's the great part about writing action scenes. You get really clear, simple goals like "Get out of the room alive.")

Your goal doesn't always have to be life-shatteringly important. It can be as simple as "I want breakfast." The most important thing about it is that it must be clear, apparently attainable, specific, and important to your viewpoint character.

CONFLICT

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Ah, conflict. The heart of every story. If you screw up absolutely everything else about a scene but GET THE CONFLICT RIGHT, you're gonna be way closer to getting published than most people ever manage.

Conflict is what happens when someone, for some reason, up and decides that your character needs to fail in his goal, or else is pursuing a goal which, if met, will prevent your viewpoint character from reaching his goal.

CONFLICT IS ALL ABOUT CHARACTERS. IT HAPPENS BETWEEN CHARACTERS. Conflict is NOT "there's a forest fire!" or "it's really cold outside!" Those things can be used as dramatic elements, don't get me wrong--but they aren't CONFLICT. They are referred to as "adversity" and they are inherently second-class citizens when it comes to establishing interesting scenes.

(Most often, they serve best as a supporting role. It's one thing to be in a knife fight with your most hated enemy. It's quite another to be in a knife fight with your most hated enemy in the middle of a forest fire.)

CONFLICT, ideally, is two characters going head-to-head (on whatever level is appropriate--social knife-fighting can make reading every bit as interesting as literal knife-fighting), while both of them try to achieve conflicting goals.

All this really means is that you need an antagonist with the same specific, attainable goal, the same kinds of emotional stakes, as your protagonist. Once you've got the right kind of set up, the scene almost writes itself.

(Notice that I say "antagonist" and not "villain." It doesn't have to be a villain. It can be a concerned friend, trying to talk your character out of doing something. It can be a misguided heroic-type, who just happens to be acting against your protagonist, like Murphy was in the first couple of Dresden books. It can be an admirable and even likeable foe, like Marshal Sam Gerard in The Fugitive. The choices are vast. The important thing, though, is that he's working against your viewpoint character.)

And, done right, the conflict poses an implied SCENE QUESTION. Will your character succeed? Or even better, WHICH character is going to succeed?

SETBACK

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The SETBACK is the result of the CONFLICT. Your character set out to accomplish a certain goal--AND HE DOESN'T GET IT.

Eh, you say? What what?

He doesn't get it. Come on, if it was that simple--Goal, attained! Goal, attained!--it really wouldn't be a terribly interesting story. Think . . . oh, the early Superman cartoons. A dozen problems would start happening--bad guys, natural disasters, what have you. Then Supes would show up and, one by one, smash/burn/freeze/throw/beat up the problems, mostly with very little apparent effort.

THAT GETS BORING FAST.

(In fact, I often don't even like to use the word "setback" to describe the results of the scene. I like referring to it as the DISASTER. But I'm melodramatic, that way.)

In any case, the character doesn't attain his full goal, his total completion, until the END OF THE STORY. If he gets it early on, hey, why keep reading? The best stories keep the reader on edge (IE, not entirely satisfied) until the story's climax, at which point all questions are resolved, all goals met, and we can all go have a cigarette or something.

There are a number of ways you can end a scene--or phrased another way, there are a number of ANSWERS to the SCENE QUESTION. Let's go over them, beginning with the least desirable, from the standpoint of a writer trying to keep a reader glued to the story:

ANSWER 1: YES. Already told you, this one is a no-no. It's the simplest, leaves you with the least drama and the fewest options. It's predictable, almost inherently comes with less conflict, and gives you the worst odds of keeping a reader's attention.

("Trapped in the pit of starving, diseased wolverines, our hero struggles to get free! He leaps to safety unscathed, and continues his journey!" See what I mean? Bor-ing.)

ANSWER 2: YES . . . BUT. This one is a lot better. In this scenario, your hero accomplishes his scene goal all right--but there's a complication of some kind, and one that might have consequences down the line. Generally, the more dire and/or disastrous the potential consequence, the better.

("Trapped in the pit of starving, diseased wolverines, our hero struggles to get free! He leaps up to climb to safety, the wolverines raging and foaming beneath him--but just as he reaches the edge of the pit, and freedom, he is savagely bitten on the leg! He is free! But it is only a matter of time before Mad Wolverine Syndrome reduces him to a snarling, foaming monster!" See there? Way more interesting than getting away without a mark to show for it.)

ANSWER 3: NO! Another solid scene resolution, from the writing standpoint. The hero sets out to attain his goal, but is flatly denied. Maybe he gets shut down by the antagonist. Maybe he makes a mistake and blows it completely. Either way, he gives it his best shot and is slapped down. Now he'll have to back off, re-evaluate the situation, and try something else. Use this scene answer with some caution, because it can have the effect of bringing your story to a halt. Too many of them can become frustrating for the reader, and can make your character look foolish and/or impotent, thus reducing reader empathy and the tension of your overall story.

("Trapped in the pit of starving, diseased wolverines, our hero struggles to get free! He leaps up to climb to safety, but the crumbling edge of the pit gives way, dropping him back down among the foaming monsters! He reaches for his communicator and shouts, "Red! I may have a problem here!" See? This can be a good way of getting other characters involved, dropping in some more character interaction, what have you--but you're still stuck in the pit of wolverines. Unless you are writing "Wolverine Pits of Madison County" or something, you don't want to stay stuck in the wolverine pit forever, so use your NO answers carefully.)

ANSWER 4: NO! AND FURTHERMORE! My personal favorite scene answer. Not only does your hero NOT attain his goal, but he manages to make matters even WORSE along the way. It's best if the worsening of the situation is your protagonist's fault, because that's just FUN, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

THIS answer is really the one that gives you the most interesting scenes, provides the meat for the most interesting and endearing sequels, and is generally the Big Gun you pull out when your plot is slowing down. Warning: it does force you, as the writer, to get a little creative, because it multiplies the problems your hero has to solve. But hey. If you weren't at least a little creative, you wouldn't be here.

("Trapped in the pit of starving, diseased wolverines, our hero struggles to get free! He leaps up to climb to safety, seizing onto the trailing end of a vine! But the vine gives way, sending our hero sprawling back down among the slavering beasts! He stares at them in horror, and only THEN realizes that the "vine" he seized was no such thing! He is now holding the tail of a thirty-foot long Peruvian Acid Cobra--and the incredibly deadly serpent is NOT happy to have been suddenly seized in the middle of its siesta. It opens its deadly jaws and lunges for our hero's throat!" Mmmmm. Now that's good fallout.)

Granted, these examples are pulp fictiony, but they're meant to serve as broad illustrations. In one way or another, every scene in every story where a character is pursuing a goal will fall into one of those four outcomes.

And you've done it! You've written a good scene!

Simple, right? It is. But it isn't EASY. Try it out, and PRACTICE it. Shockingly, you get better with practice. These days, I don't even really consciously think in terms of goal/conflict/setback. Those things are a part of my thinking process, and they've become transparent to me, now. I just think about the scene, forming it with a solid skeleton from the get-go, and it allows me to focus more active effort on other aspects of the writing--pace, character, mood, setting, description. Occasionally, I'll even have time to spare for making the language pretty. But if I didn't have that solid skeleton there, that other stuff wouldn't much matter. You've GOT to have the craft elements solid before you can start adding in artistry.


To recap:

POINT OF VIEW
GOAL
CONFLICT
SETBACK

And that's all there is to writing a really good scene.

Of course, books aren't 100 percent full of scenes. Characters have to stop to bind up their diseased wounds, be diagnosed with Mad Wolverine Syndrome, to worry about their impending doom and steal kisses from sympathetic nurse-heroines. Where's the conflict in that? How does that fit into your scene paradigm, Jim?

It doesn't, of course.

That's a sequel. We'll talk about those next.

And no, we're not talking about book 2. We're talking about the original meaning of the word sequel--the part that comes after, the next in the sequence. In the scenes of a book, you're getting all your plot-pursuing and action-taking and choice-making done.

Now you get to the hard part.

Getting your reader to give a flying frack about it.

To do that, you've got to win them over to your character's point of view. You've got to establish some kind of basic emotional connection, an empathy for your character. It needn't be deep seated agreement with everything the character says and does--but they DO need to be able to UNDERSTAND what your character is thinking and feeling, and to understand WHY they are doing whatever (probably outrageous) thing you've got them doing.

That gets done in sequels.

Pay attention. This is another one of those simple, difficult things.

Sequels are what happens as an aftermath to a scene. They do several specific things:

1) Allow a character to react emotionally to a scene's outcome.
2) Allow a character to review facts and work through the logical options of his situation.
3) They allow a character to ponder probable outcomes to various choices.
4) They allow a character to make a CHOICE--IE, to set themselves a new GOAL for the next SCENE.

Do you see how neat that is? Do you see how simply that works out?

1) Scene--Denied!
2) Sequel--Damn it! Think about it! That's so crazy it just might work!--New Goal!
3) Next Scene!

Repeat until end of book.

See what I mean? Simple. And you can write a book EXACTLY that way. Scene-sequel-scene-sequel-scene-sequel all the way to your story climax. In fact, if you are a newbie, I RECOMMEND you write your book that way. You can always chop and cut the extra scenes (or sequels) out later, and you will have a solid bedrock structure for getting your book done. We'll talk a little about balancing them in a minute.

First, let's outline exactly what happens in a sequel--and WHY the basic outline I'm gonna show you works.

Here's the basic structure to a sequel. It's another little worksheet you can fill out when you're thinking about it ahead of time:

1) EMOTIONAL REACTION:
2) REVIEW, LOGIC, & REASON:
3) ANTICIPATION:
4) CHOICE:

And it MUST happen in THAT ORDER. Why you ask me? Because we're all human beings, and THAT is the order in which we respond, psychologically, to events that happen around us. Especially to big nasty events that bring out a lot of emotion.

Most of you have probably been in a car accident of some kind, and that's the model I'm gonna use. Even if it was only a little accident and no one got hurt, everybody reacts in pretty much the same way. Imagine it with me, if you will. You're driving and all of a sudden, SQUEEEEEERRRCRUUUNCH! Car accident. What happens next?

You react emotionally, on instinct. Maybe you sit there stunned and startled for a second. Maybe you feel a moment of horror (if it was your fault), or else seething outrage (if it wasn't). Maybe you yell and curse, or throw up on yourself, or break out into hysterical laughter. There are a whole lot of viable human emotional responses to that kind of stimulus--but the first ones on the scene are ALWAYS the most basic, instinctive, emotional reactions.

Next, your brain kicks in. (This takes a variable amount of time, depending on the person.) Your brain tells you things and you pay attention to it. Maybe it says "this accident was your fault, and if they catch you, you'll go to jail. Run!" Maybe it says, "Check to see if anyone is hurt! Call the police! Exchange insurance information!" Maybe it says, "Call so-and-so to help," or "Oh my God, I'm bleeding," or "Please God let me have my proof of insurance in the glove compartment." You think about things like how the accident happened, and what you could have done to avoid it, what's necessary to accomplish immediately--and then you get to think
about where you're suddenly not going to be.

(During your review, logic, and reasoning process, it is very human to realize or rediscover facts that bring on an echo of your emotional response, or which otherwise inspire an entirely new line of emotional response. If you realize that the guy who just slammed into your car ran a stop sign to do it, for example, it might inspire a radically different set of emotions than a moment before, when you thought neither one of you had a clear right of way.)

You can get as upset as you want, for as long as you want, but sooner or later you're going to have gone over all the facts of what happened a minute ago, and you'll start thinking about what happens NEXT. You anticipate the immediate future, based upon what you know and what your current options are. Maybe you've got a buddy who can pick you up and get you to work, and you'll only be a few minutes late. Or maybe you don't, and you've just lost your job. Maybe
you're going to have to find a phone to call an ambulance because someone is hurt. There are a lot of things that could be pretty obviously a part of your immediate future, based on your current circumstances.

And once those things have rolled through your mind, you've got to decide what you're doing next. Maybe you're just trading insurance information and getting back on the road. Maybe you're hiding the body. The point is, you've got a choice to make, and that choice is going to determine your next action.

Voila.

You've just had a sequel, a broad, archetypical human reaction to a sudden situation that goes radically out of your control.

YOUR CHARACTERS DO THE SAME THING.

At the conclusion of a scene, they've just had something go out of THEIR control. You know how I know this? Because you didn't answer YES to your scene question. Something went wrong, because you are a smart writer, and that's how you did the scene. Now your characters go through the same set of reactions:

1) An immediate emotional response.
2) A review of what happened, applying logic and reason to the events and why they turned out that way, and of what options are open to them.
3) Anticipation of what might follow the pursuit of those options. (Highly important, this one. Never underestimate the effects of anticipation on a reader.)
4) Your character makes up his mind and decides what to do next. IE, he makes a CHOICE.

Now, it's possible to SKIP some of these steps, or to abbreviate some of them so severely that you all but skip them. But you CAN'T CHANGE THE ORDER.

Emotion, Reason, Anticipation, Choice. That reaction is typical to people, regardless of their sex, age, or background. It's psychologically hardwired into us--so take advantage of it. By having your character react in this very typically human way, you establish an immediate sense of empathy with the reader. If you do it right, you get the reader nodding along with that character going "Damn right, that's what I'd do." Or better yet, you get them opening their mouth in horror as they read, seeing the character's thought process, hating every step of where it's going while it remains undeniably understandable and genuine to the way people behave.

Sequels, frankly, are what really make or break books. How you choose to show your reader your character's reactions determines everything about the reader's response to the events of the story.

Worse, sequels are very fluid, very flexible things to apply. You can do all kinds of tricks with them. Some sequels are all internal monologue. Some are conversations carried out with a character's best friend (or his all-in-black-id). Sometimes a sequel LOOKS like a scene, in the trappings anyway, but what's actually important is the character's internal reaction.

(Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true. *I* am your father. *NOOOOOO*. Yeah, that lightsabre fight looks like a scene, but at that point it isn't. It's a sequel.)

This is where, frankly, I think writers have the greatest fluidity, the most chance to apply their creative talents--which means, of course, we also have the best chance of screwing things up here. You can approach sequels from an almost unlimited number of directions. There are no limits to how you can lay out a sequel, except for your own imagination. Just remember:

1) EMOTION
2) REASON
3) ANTICIPATION
4) CHOICE

Get those in there, in the right order, and you'll be fine.

Let's talk, for a moment, about how you want to weight the various parts of the sequel, based upon your genre, what you want to accomplish, etc. The sequel is where you can put a spin on almost any story to make it more suited to a given genre. Each of the genres has its own bias towards a given part of a sequel.

Romance, for example, is VERY heavy on Emotion and only slightly less on Anticipation. Mystery and SF lean very heavily on the Reason portion of the sequel. Action novels go light on everything but Choice, and give you just enough sequel to get you through to the next scene. Horror loves to linger on Anticipation. Think about it for a while,and you'll start to see what I mean.

So, if you're writing a romance, you'll want to place extra emphasis on your character's Emotional reaction and on his Anticipation of what could come next.

Mystery writers had better be able to produce clear lines of logic in the Reasoning portion of their character's reaction. If you need the reader to be cozy with a character, put extra emphasis on that character's sequels. If it isn't necessary for another character, go light on the sequels, or skip them entirely.

If that wasn't enough, Sequel-to-Scene ratio is the single largest factor for controlling pace. Sequels have a unanimous tendancy to slow the pace of your story, while scenes have the opposite effect. If you've ever read a book and felt like it blurred by too fast and never seemed to touch on anything long enough, go back and look at it. You WILL find that the book's scenes took up a great deal more space than its sequels. If you've read a book that you thought was too slow, too cerebral, or that wandered back and forth while droning on and on, go back and look at it. You WILL find that sequels took up a hell of a lot more page space than scenes.

It's a balancing act, and how you stack up scene-to-sequel is going to depend on several factors, including your genre and your audience. Romance, for example, is really nothing BUT sequels with occasional scenes to make them stick together. Romance wallows in sequels, because that's what it's ABOUT--emotions, feelings.

If you write an action book, those emotional passages--not so much. You'll want to spend more time and effort on the scenes, and make sure that the sequels don't start to outweigh them. If you're writing for a more cerebral, mature audience, they have a much higher desire/tolerance for sequels than if you write for, for example, young adults. The older audience might well be more interested in the thought and emotion behind the plot, while the younger audience might want you to stop moaning and dithering and get straight to the point. You control that pace by balancing sequels with scenes.

Sequels also determine what I've always called the "warmth" of your novel. When people talk about a "warm viewpoint" what they really mean is that you're throwing in a lot of emotional reaction. Oftentimes, warm viewpoint novels (like the Dresden Files) toss in micro-sequels as a part of scenes. Any time you see Harry talking to someone, wanting to tear his hair out, forcing himself to control his temper and get back to the task at hand, you've just ridden through a micro-sequel with him.

"Cool" viewpoint novels, like the more classic hardboiled PI novel, downplay their protagonist's Emotional reactions--often skipping them entirely during a scene, and showing them only indirectly during sequels. They tend to emphasize the Reason side of things.

My God, there are so many things you can do with this stuff. Brainy, intelligent characters go heavy on reason--and then you cheat by going light on Anticipation, and keeping his Choice half-veiled from the reader, so that when he actually acts in the next scene he looks a lot smarter and more resourceful than he might have if you went step by step through the whole thing. ("Of course! He animated the T-Rex! Brilliant!") Characters who are balancing their loyalties up to some critical moment can get the whole sequel laid out, extra heavy on Anticipation, and then you deny the reader any info on the Choice until they're actually in action.

Get it? SEQUELS ARE WHERE YOU APPLY THE COLOR TO YOUR STORY. It's the best point at which to manipulate your readers' emotions. I've been working within this craft structure for ten years, and I feel like I'm only barely beginning to get a handle on it. Seriously. You've got to give this some thought.

Knowledge of how sequels effect your book's impact on the reader is damned handy in rewrites, too. If a character is coming off too flighty, all you have to do is add in a bit more Reason to their sequels. Character too dry and boring? Add in more Emotion to /his/ sequels. Someone comments that your character's motivations aren't clear? Go give their sequels a tune-up, and make sure his Emotion-Reason-Anticipation-Choice is in the correct order and consistant.

When you do it right, the reader knows exactly what is going through your character's head, and why. The /reader/ starts being the one anticipating along with your character, and when that happens, you pwn them. It creates forward momentum for the next scene, and it helps the reader /want/ to read it.

This basic structure for sequels is pretty much the ENTIRE secret of my success. I do it like this in every freaking book I write. I know it works because check it out. People like my books. They like them for some of the special effects, sure, and for some of the story ideas sometimes--but mostly it's because they find themselves caring about what happens to the characters, and that happens in sequels.

People don't love Harry for kicking down the monster's front door. They love him because he's terrified out of his mind, he knows he's putting himself in danger by doing it, he's probably letting himself in for a world of hurt even if he is successful, but he chooses to do it anyway.

Emotion. Reason. Anticipation. Choice.

Special effects and swashbuckling are just the light show.

The heart of your character--and your reader--is in the sequel.