Words to Write by Podcast

Chapter 8 – Scene & Structure Subscribe to our Newsletter How do you take a ponderous story into a page turner? How do you take a Michael Bay paced novel and make it about more than one disaster after the next? In this episode, we explain Jack Bickham’s techniques to speed up or slow down...

When you’re bored with action-packed scenes and want to dive deep into the mind of your protagonist, maybe you should try a Sequel. In today’s episode, we explore Bickham’s idea of sequel, its parts, and how it glues the scenes together. But we don’t just take Scene & Structure’s word for it, we go looking for sequels in several of our favorite books. Also, along the way, Renee has an existential crisis, but don’t worry, she gets better.

After last episode’s deep dive into scene structure, we thought we’d ask a few published novelists and professional editors if they use scene goals in their writing/editing.

Then, for our podcast proper, we move beyond the scene basics into more advance concerns, like does that disaster you carefully crafted have the proper scope, immediacy, finality, and does it steer your story in the right direction. But we still need to get that pig back home, and in Chapter 6, Bickham points out (with not one, but two numbered lists) other things that can go wrong with scenes, including not having enough “going wrong.”