Build it and Scenes Will Come

You know I’m stickler for structure.

Every story starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. It’s the nature of story to have a beginning and ending, with something in the middle. I consider this very basic story structure, and if you build on this humble foundation a story will come.

We’re familiar with the line “build it and they will come,” which is paraphrased from W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, and the movie inspired by it, Field of Dreams. It’s a sweet film about an Iowa farmer who rewrites the story of his relationship with his dead father by digging up part of his cornfield and building a baseball diamond. He takes an illogical leap of faith after hearing the disembodied words, “If you build it, he will come.”

And if you want to build stories, you’ll have to get used to working with story’s essential building block: the scene.

The three basic stages of story—beginning, middle, end—outline a progression, which implies change. Something is different at the end compared to the beginning. Whatever goes on in the middle represents the unfolding of that progression. And your story’s scenes progressively dramatize the change.

Stories hinge around a character trying to achieve some kind of outer goal that’s difficult to achieve because the character also needs to do some inner work in order to succeed.

So, as you start to build your story, try working on the following six scenes—two for the beginning, two for the middle, and two for the end.

In the beginning, show us a scene in which the character is unable to accomplish the outer goal but has a good reason to try. Next, show us a scene that implies an inner problem that may be the root of why the character’s unable to achieve the goal.

In the middle, come up with a couple of scenes that show the character’s outer inabilities and inner limitations changing and evolving —let us witness, through dramatic scenes, this person trying to do the outer thing and struggling to fix the inner thing.

At the end, two more scenes are required: one showing us the character’s new (and earned) ability to achieve the goal (whether it’s still wanted or not) and another revealing evidence of the character’s inner limitation having evolved into a healed or expanded sense of self.

If you build this first half a dozen scenes for your story’s beginning, middle, and end, the rest of the scenes will come.

Write your dreams.