By Allison K Williams
What I love most about being married to a non-writer is the conversations. His questions about publishing are often a reality check: yeah, sometimes publishers buy a book and pay the author and don’t bother to try to sell it, and…wait, what??? More positively, I’m often pushed to think through and clearly explain things I “just know” about story structure and character development. Last night, while walking through a souk in Muscat, Oman and valiantly resisting the offers of perfume sellers, trinket shops and black-market-handbag hawkers, we decided that all stories have five key scenes.
Premise: The existing situation, an untenable stasis. We can’t keep living like this.
Inciting Incident: A big discovery that starts the action. The protagonist must act—they can no longer hold the stasis together.
First Action: The protagonist responds to the inciting incident, causing a big change in character, situation or goal.
Consequences: Another big discovery that renews the protagonist’s quest and leads to a bigger, more important action.
Resolutions: The plot is complete and the protagonist’s life has a satisfying new stasis.
Each of these key scenes is not just a change of situation, but a change of self. Here’s a movie plot:
Premise: A couple is in counseling—our marriage is bland
Inciting Incident: We’re both assassins and we’re hunting each other.
First Action: We have a shootout at our house, gain respect for each other, and make love.
Consequences: Now that we’re a team, we’re both the targets, and must be honest with each other during a high-speed chase.
Personal & Plot Resolutions: We have each other’s backs in the final shootout, and our marriage is great—we’ve rediscovered our love for each other.
In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a classic redemption arc: can this marriage be saved?
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild is also a redemption arc:
Premise: I’m an addict/adulterer and hate who I’ve become after my mother’s death.
Inciting Incident: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I’ve packed the wrong things and I’m not really in shape, but strangers help me—am I worthy of help?
First Action: Hiking brings me closer to who I want to be, and I start grieving my mother
Consequences: Now that I can grieve with friends, I don’t have to comfort myself with sex with strangers. I can let my mother go.
Personal & Plot Resolutions: I reach the end of the trail, and ten years later I revisit, while living a good life with my family.
In memoir, the Premise and the Inciting Incident scenes are often reversed, or a bit of the Inciting Incident is used as prologue as in Wild, to give a sense of the narrator’s journey before experiencing the untenable stasis.
Once a writer maps out their dramatic arc by identifying these scenes, the rest of the manuscript becomes easier to write.
What are your five key scenes?
For the Premise, think about the end of your story. Who are you now as a result of your journey? Then start at the opposite. What scene most sums up your previous life that had to change? Maybe a stunningly bad decision, or a terrible situation you felt unable to leave. Maybe the humor of not rising to the occasion, or public embarrassment for the person you were. Maybe inaction in the face of crisis, or inability to do what you knew in your heart was right.
The remaining four key scenes are turning points: active, difficult choices. If the protagonist took the easy path, the story wouldn’t have happened. Strayed could have stopped hiking on day three and gone home. The Smiths could have saved a lot of ammunition by filing for divorce (as the actors who played them did).
When looking at your own story for turning points, ask, where did you make an active choice that was hard?
Our biggest challenge as memoirists is limitation: deciding which parts of our life belong on the page. What scenes tell the story? What’s superfluous, or better as an essay? Novelists must limit their creation, selecting the best moments from the vast possibilities of imagination. For all writers, identifying these five key scenes creates a map for your book, a structure to fill in with the rest of the story. When considering a particular incident, ask yourself if that scene leads to a turning point, or shows the consequences of a turning-point action. If the answer is yes, it belongs.
As with all craft techniques, this formula won’t apply exactly to every story, just as your narrative voice isn’t completely “correct” grammar. But in places where you diverge, where a scene feels important but you can’t quite connect it, look for purpose. Maybe the reader needs a calm moment in a tense chapter, or another person’s behavior later inspires an active choice, so we need that set-up now. Identifying those moments specifically will also shape your story. As you describe the scenes, notice small victories and big setbacks. Where did the protagonist learn what they didn’t know, and where did they learn something new? If you’re working with a manuscript in progress, are any key scenes missing? What does the story need that isn’t written yet?
Memoir or novel, self-help or movie script, identifying and writing your five key scenes sets guideposts. These guideposts can get you started—or get your book to the finish line.
_____________
Allison K Williams is Brevity ’s Social Media Editor, and the author of Seven Drafts.
New idea? Stalled manuscript? Join Allison in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a weeklong residency, Flash Draft Your Book in a Week with Madeline Island School of the Arts. You’ll identify, write and revise your five key scenes, and create the map to finish your book. More info/register now.
All Rights Reserved Book Blog