the delphic expanse

Okay, so I have a dumb Aunty question coming your way!

What's the difference between and act/scene and chapters?

See, told ya!

paulinem wrote:Okay, so I have a dumb Aunty question coming your way!

What's the difference between and act/scene and chapters?

See, told ya!

You've got kind of two different questions going on in one there, pauline. An act and a scene are not the same thing.

As I said in my prior post, TV shows and movies generally have three acts. Act 1 is known as the "set-up" and it's where you basically learn who all the people are and what the situation is and how everybody and everything relates to each other. Then something called a "plot point" happens to spin the story into Act 2, which is the "confrontation". A plot point is an incident or event that hooks into the action and spins it into another direction. (Ever see Thelma and Louise? Plot Point 1 is when one of them shoots that guy. That's when it stops being two women headed out on vacation.) The confrontation of Act 2 is the part where the main character encounters obstacle after obstacle to fulfilling his or her dramatic need (what he or she needs or wants to achieve during the course of the screenplay). Then another plot point spins the action into Act 3, which is the "resolution," which is where we see how things get solved.

A scene is a particular unit of action within the story--a subsection of the act it's in. Each scene's purpose is to either move the story forward or to reveal something about a character. If it doesn't do either, it needs to be cut.

In the context of "Broken Bow," Act I is the flashback, the Klingon running through the cornfield, the dustup between Starfleet and the Vulcans in the hospital, etc. Plot Point 1 is when the decision is made that Enterprise will take Klang back. Act 2 is the confrontation--they lose Klang to the Suliban, they go to Rigel and get captured and shot at, they go to the gas giant, T'Pol's giving Archer static, etc.

An example of a scene in Act 2 is Trip and T'Pol in decon. Another would be Trip and Travis in the "sweet spot"--that whole bit exists to show us things about their characters. Etc.

If you watch any TV show or movie with this framework in mind, you'll be able to pick out the structure.

Scenes and acts are cinematic units of storytelling.

Chapters are literary units of storytelling. Keeping with the cinematic comparison, a chapter can contain more than one "scene", but they all should be related enough to count as one unit of "action" or "purpose" in terms of getting the story moved forward. I guess Chapter 1 of my "Body and Katra" is kind of an example--there are several different "scenes" because of the flashbacks, but they're all part of the same dramatic unit of action, I need the flashbacks to establish why they're there in the bar and show the relationship the characters have with each other, explain for the benefit of those new to Enterprise who they are and what they do for a living, etc--all without giving away too much and bogging the story down!

Most good stories, though, still follow a similar dramatic structure to the Three Act concept--you've got a beginning that sets things up for your reader, you have the resolution when you find out what becomes of the character and whether or not she gets what she needs/wants/seeks, and then there's all the stuff that happens in the middle that makes the road to the resolution interesting.

I hope that helped.

I don't know if that helped paulinem, but it sure helped me. That's the best explanation I've read on that topic. Thanks! I'm sure it will help me, too.

paulinem wrote:Okay, so I have a dumb Aunty question coming your way!

What's the difference between and act/scene and chapters?

See, told ya!

In my experience reading fan fiction, Individual chapters can be pretty long and have a lot of narrative.

In my story, most of the "acts" are mainly made up of dialogue with minimal exposition. They are also relatively short, 4 to 8 inches long on a page, tho' some can go a bit longer.

Thanks Aquarius!

Glad that's helping.

Just a little factoid: in an hour-long TV drama like Enterprise, Act 1 is generally going to be about the first 10 minutes, Act 2 is going to be about the next 20 minutes, and Act 3 is going to be about the last ten minutes. (Without commercials, the modern TV drama runs about 42 minutes.) So when people joke about the Red Shirt dying in the first ten minutes of the show, it's true, because that's when all the exposition stuff happens that lets us know that we're dealing with something rotten enough to kill a Red Shirt!

In terms of what JiNX said about chapters--yes, they do contain a bunch of narrative. In a TV or movie script, one page equals about a minute's worth of screen time. There isn't really any narrative because the story is going to be told with pictures--the page of the script describes what we see, so description is required since we have to know if we're outside, if the character looks like he's about to be sick, whatever. But visuals and dialogue are what tell the story. Some films do have narrators--Kick Ass, Forrest Gump, and Zombie Land come to mind off the cuff--but if you think about what's being narrated, it's information that wouldn't come out very naturally if you had two characters talking about it, so instead they've chosen to give you a visual and have the narrator explain it. And it NEVER dominates the movie, it just fills in the gaps that dialogue or visuals alone can't convey.

In literary form, though, you're much more narrative dependent, since you don't have pictures to help you tell the story. Though, there are exceptions to this--I've seen entire stories told just in dialogue. Generally, though, narrative tells us the things that can't be gleaned when characters talk to each other, in addition to helping us draw a mental picture of what's happening in the story. And again, like i screenwriting, if it doesn't reveal something about the character or push the story forward, it's superfluous and needs to be cut.

There are no hard and fast rules about how long a chapter should be. Pick up a bunch of different paperbacks and you'll see that. Sometimes chapters are only 2-4 pages long, other times they can be 25 pages, it just depends. When chaptering your own stories, I would say to just do what makes sense and best serves the story: make sure that it feels like a complete unit of action (this isn't to say that your chapters can't be cliff-hanger-y), and maybe err on the side of shorter because a lot of times fan readers drop out if it seems tedious--try to keep it 6-10 pages in Word (again these are loose) in the default font.

One other thing about screenwriting--if a beta reader or editor (or admin) has ever dinged you for "show, don't tell", or taking too long to get tot he point, I highly recommend picking up Syd Field's Screenplay and/or The Screenwriter's Workbook. A motion picture is the ultimate exercise in showing and not telling, and because of the time constraints of TV and film, you learn how to tell a story effectively and economically--in literature, you can go on forever and there's really no one to stop you, but because TV shows and movies are expensive to produce and people are only going to sit there for so long, with rare exceptions you have to get the job done within a certain number of pages.

And--I'm breaking this discussion off into its own thread.

Thanks for this, Aquarius! I'll be referring back to this information often (my minds a bit furry to take it all in at the moment).

Still being new to writing, I think I got confused because JiNX was talking in terms of Acts and not chapters.