From scene to sequence

In my last email, I talked about scene building and I spoke a little as if the only two structural units in a story are the scene itself and the plot itself.

But that’s not really right. In the film industry, which gets a bit more technical about these things, they distinguish between the scene and the sequence. The scene could be very short indeed:

Actor gets out of car at lawn. Walks across a dark front lawn. Knocks at a door.

Something like that could easily come in at under ten seconds of screen time. 

But then you have the sequence, which is a chain of scenes that form a logical, coherent group of their own. So Jason Bourne style car chase in Paris is likely to have multiple, multiple short scenes. Something like this:

Jason Bourne jumps in car. Drives nervously away. Police sirens start to wail. He stamps on the gas. Car chase stuff. Bumping down a flight of steps in a Mini. People shooting. Cars crashing. Then, tra la, somehow Jason Bourne gets away. He ends up, safe but shocked, in an underground car park.

You can see that from a movie-maker’s point of view, there are a ton of scenes to deal with and film, but from the movie-goer’s perspective, the whole thing feels like one coherent unit – ‘the Paris car chase’.

Now, last week, we spoke about how the scene itself has a kind of rhythm of its own. A question gets launched. The tension around that question increases. The stakes and sense of pressure rises. Then the question is resolved or transformed one way or another. That scene ends and a new one begins.

All good stuff, right?

Well, it can be useful to apply the same kind of thinking to the sequence too. And here, the inner unity of the sequence often comes down to this: are the story-questions launched in each scene intimately linked or not?

So last week, we looked at a very short scene of 450 words. Fiona had just escaped from some baddies. She was looking for sanctuary. She came to her mysterious Russian friend, Lev, for help. He took her to his clean, but extremely basic, squat. She effectively rejected that as a place to stay. He agreed to take her somewhere else.

That was the gist of the scene. But the unity of the whole sequence flowed something like this:

1.    Fiona is just driving peacefully along a Welsh road, when – boom! – she gets abducted. That out-of-nowhere quality often signals the start of a major new sequence, a major new turn in the plot. The story question is now: why has she been abducted? What is going to happen?

2.    She’s taken to a barn and interrogated with violence. She believes that, even if she tells everything she knows, she will be killed at the end of the interrogation. The story question is now: will she spill the beans? Will she escape?

3.    She escapes, injuring one of the bad guys in the process. The story question is now something like: Will she make her getaway properly? Or will she be recaptured?

4.    It becomes clear that she’s avoided recapture, but she is very worried about whether her ever-fragile mental state will cope with what’s just happened. The story question is now: will she cope?

And so on.

The sequence doesn’t come to an end properly until she is back at work having, roughly speaking, survived not just the violence, but the mental consequence of it. If you look at your own work, you’ll find other similar sequences naturally jumping out at you.

And –

And what? What are the actual practical consequences of these thoughts?

Well, there might be a few, actually. For example, it’s very common to have a lovely time writing a sequence of scenes, such as I’ve just described. The story flows. The action moves. The whole thing is as fun and easy as writing ever gets. And then – you hit the end of the sequence. You have to find your footings again in the context of the wider story. And for a week or two, you thrash around, wondering why the work has suddenly become harder.

And the short answer there is: worry you not. That’s just part of storytelling. Give it time.

But also, it can be really worth thinking about your sequences in isolation. Are their highs or lows sufficiently high or low? Does there feel like a real structure there? (So think of the difference between a Jason Bourne car chase and a complex story-sequence like the Fiona abduction / escape one. The movie car chase is just plain fun and it doesn’t need much structure. Your work doesn’t have special effects and it doesn’t have Matt Damon, so you need the structure.)

If the sequence as a whole feels flat or lacking in intensity, it’s most likely because you haven’t quite evolved an internal sequence-structure that fits. If that’s the case, then the very simplest bit of analysis is just to take what you’ve written, scene by scene, and see how your story questions evolve. If there’s a natural, powerful movement from one scene to the next, you’re doing good. If the movement seems abrupt or too slow, you need to alter your pacing accordingly (which might mean adding or subtracting entire scenes, of course.)

But really, this email is a win if it makes you think about sequences as a story-unit in their own right. The problems and solutions in writing are often really, really obvious as long as you ask the right question. And sometimes those questions need to be asked about sequences.

That is all from me. I am neither ill. Nor locked in a vault.

That’s a win, right?

How about you? What sequences have you written that were most fun to write? Or most problematic. Tell me what you think, and let’s all have a Heated Debate.