What is a Scene?

So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, then what do they consist of?

Well, first of all, some chapters do consist of full scenes, or even more than one scene. Maybe. It depends on what your definition of a scene is. So let’s look at that first.

Like the relationship between chapters and scenes, I found it difficult to find a good definition of what a scene is. One definition I found was, to paraphrase it, a piece of a story where something changes. Interesting. Another definition that I found, in various variations, was that a scene consists of a setting, some characters and something happening. That’s not as obvious as it sounds at first.

Together these definitions gave me something to work with.

In my own project, now, I’m defining a scene in terms of the points at where I need to declare one scene to end and another to begin. I’ve decided that this is necessary when any of the following takes place:

A) When the setting changes, e.g. the action moves on to a different place. Now, The exception to this might—might—be a running shot where the “camera” (or the writer’s/reader’s mind’s eye) follows the characters as they move from one place to another in what is otherwise clearly continuous action.

It’s a judgment call in cases like this. Generally, the way I see it, even if the action is continuous, if the mood of the setting changes, that’s a scene break. Like if the characters are walking along in a sunny field having a conversation, and then suddenly they look up and realize they’ve wandered into the dark forest. That seems like a scene break to me.

B) When the characters change. The substance or mood of a scene can change pretty dramatically with the addition or removal of just one character from the dynamic.

There’s also a certain element of judgment to this, of course. You can have a character wander off for a minute to take a phone call or something, and if you don’t follow that character and listen to the phone call (which would clearly be a different scene), maybe the main scene continues.

C) When the viewpoint changes. Personally I prefer to almost always start a new chapter when switching to a different viewpoint character, and at the very least use a triple-asterisk type of break. Regardless, there are good reasons to declare it a new scene when the viewpoint changes. For example, one viewpoint character might be a wide-eyed optimist interpreting the action in one way, whereas another viewpoint character might be older, wiser, cynical, and interpreting the action in a completely contradictory fashion. This affects the mood of the writing at least as much as a change of setting, in my opinion, at least.

D. When enough time passes. This is subjective, like everything to do with fiction, but if you have some characters camping and talking, or walking down the road for days (and you don’t consider it a setting change), it seems to me there’s still a scene change. An exception might be the written version of a montage.

In terms of the breakdown of a book from a reader’s perspective, this stuff doesn’t matter all that much. Books are visibly broken into chapters, not scenes. Still, personally I found it necessary to develop some sort of understanding of what scenes are in order to learn to split them up with any kind of effectiveness.

There’s also the question of what specifically a scene consists of: the things that should be in it, and generally in what order. I’m not going to go into that now, but let’s summarize it as saying that a scene must be necessary, which means that it must move the plot along.

So, we have a working definition of what a scene is: [Viewpoint] observes [Characters] interacting in [setting] for a given chunk of time, and something changes that moves the plot forward.

If that’s what a scene is (and I could certainly be wrong about that, but I don’t think I’m that far off), then what are the pieces of a scene?

Coming up next.