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| Photo © 2010 Annaliese Moyer. |
A scene and a chapter are not the same thing.
I am not genius enough to have learned this on my own. Instead, I learned this from author Mary Robinette Kowal who appears on
Writing Excuses, a weekly podcast about the craft of fiction writing.
Here's the difference between the two: a scene is an element of
story structure and is a complete arc of some kind (whether milieu idea, character or event); a chapter is an element of
pacing structure. Ignorance of this difference leads to inadvertent mapping of the pacing structure (chapters) onto the story structure (scenes).
Translation? Readers get bored, so break up long scenes.
It may seem like a gimmick to end a chapter when a character pulls out a gun, conjures a monster, or is nabbed by a human-eating robot, but it keeps the reader turning pages.
Well-thought out chapter breaks have the same effect as adrenaline on the body: heart rate increases, and the reader decides to fight through the suspense, or throw the book at their nearest sibling/friend/cat before picking it up again.
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.
Let me say here that chapter breaks are not, or should not be, arbitrary. They are calculated to propel the reader through the content of the book. Scenes, however, serve an entirely different function: they make promises and fulfill them; what those promises are, and what fulfillment looks like depends entirely on what kind of a scene it is.
Orson Scott Card suggests in his book,
Characters and Viewpoint, that there are four different kinds of stories (or scenes): milieu (i.e. setting), idea, character or event. Each kind of story will have a particular beginning and ending (or promise and fulfillment).
Milieu stories start with a character entering a particular setting and end with them leaving it. They can be the opposite as well: leaving a familiar place to return to it later; either way the story focuses on an exploration of the setting. The
Lord of the Rings is, arguably, the greatest milieu story ever written (the books NOT the movies--the movies are also brilliant, but the screenplay shifted the story from its main focus on milieu to the characters/events). We start in the Shire, explore Bree, Tom Bombadil's place, the Wight Barrows, Weathertop, Moria (and I'm not even past the first book :p ), etc. and eventually wind up in the Shire again.
Idea stories start with a mystery, or question, and end when the mystery is solved, or the answer is obtained. Detective novels are the archetypal idea stories. Someone's dead and who's done it? The story is complete when we learn the perpetrator's identity.
Character stories are my personal favorite. They focus on (surprise) a character whose lot in life causes them to seek change. The story ends when they either find a new lot in life, or are reconciled to their original lot. The movie
A Knight's Tale (cheesy, yes) is one of my favorites because of the message that you can change your stars. That thought still inspires me.
Finally, event stories are your prototypical action/adventure stories. The end of the world is about to happen/is happening and the story ends with everyone dead or the world saved from destruction. Or universe. Or school. Whatever--the scope of threat isn't as important as the engagement with it. Or really, resolving the EVENT, whether its alien invasion or Voldemort returning. So yes, Harry Potter is, among other things, a great event story.
Now, these aren't the only kind of stories. Notice, there's no love story listed. No _____ (you fill in the blank). I think Card was attempting to be as generally specific as possible (yea, that doesn't make sense to me either). Love stories could be a character story, or they could be an event story. If you focus more on all the details of the wedding itself, and the conflict comes because, oh no, the flowers don't show up on time, you're dealing with an event story. But if, instead, the focus is on the psychological impact of your pending marriage to a guy who is ten years older, divorced, and already has three kids, then you're probably dealing with a character story. You could even make it an idea/milieu story if the main character is getting an arranged marriage and spends the whole novel trying to figure out the identity of their betrothed while hating on their restrictive, alien-to-us society.
I digress.
My point in all the explanation is this: the fundamentals of broader story structure apply to more narrow scene structure. Most (if not all) novels are not uniquely character or idea novels. You can have a character/milieu-driven idea novel like Raymond Chandler's
The Big Sleep. It's a hardboiled detective novel that ends when the crime is solved, but is made interesting because of the evocation of 1940's ish Southern California and the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe (if you haven't read Chandler, do yourself the favor--you'll swear it sounds familiar because Chandler was so widely imitated). You get the combination of story types by having character scenes, or milieu scenes, etc. along the journey of solving the crime. In fact, novels differ from short stories primarily because a short story accomplishes one thing (idea, event, etc.) while a novel tackles more than one.
More digression.
Just remember this: scenes advance the story towards it's conclusion; chapters propel the reader from scene to scene.
And that's my latest tip.
