Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33886
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33886
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Well, not specific to the scene-sequel model (for which I would harbour deep suspicion) but in literary terms I would say as disaster is an irreparable loss. A loss you can recover from, from which you can be made whole, is not a disaster, it is an inconvenience. A disaster forces a permanent change on you.

A loss from which you can be made whole is a practical problem. You take certain steps and you get your stuff back. A disaster is a moral problem. No matter what you do, you cannot go on as you were before. You may come back stronger overall, but you will have lost something that you can never get back. Frodo is damaged permanently by the ring. He can never be made whole, can never return to the life he left. He has endured a disaster.

Now, this leads us to ask if it is feasible for every scene to have a disaster, however minor. Clearly the answer is no. In fact many scenes don't even include a recoverable loss. Some scenes merely portray the life of the character as it is (the real world) so that when the disaster comes, we are in a position to understand the loss, to appreciate the full depth of what has happened to the character.

But if we cheapen disaster so the we can work one into every scene, then the losses must necessarily be trivial (or else your protagonist will quickly lose everything, including his life). Trivializing disaster in this way must necessarily trivializes the protagonists arc, which is to say that it must trivialize the story. It may take many scenes to set up a disaster that has sufficient gravitas to give a story weight and power.

What you do want to do in a scene, though, is to sow the seeds of disaster. Show the things that matter to the hero, the things whose lose would constitute a disaster, and hit at their fragility, the peril that may overtake them. This builds tension through a sequence of scenes without having to pull the trigger on some minor disaster in ever scene. It is this sense of value in peril that pulls a reader along. The disaster, when it comes, is the payoff, and the payoff is all the more potent for having been painstakingly prepared for.

Begin in sunshine. Let clouds gather on the horizon. Let wind begin to blow and raindrops to fall. Only then unleash the thunder and lightning. And when the storm is over, make sure the landscape is forever changed.

Original score: 0