Writing Advice: Scenes and Sequels

So I've talked big for a few weeks, analyzed some books, and gathered advice. Now let's try and put some of this into work eh?

So let's start witht he before. For this exercise, I'm simply looking at the piece I wrote for Fiction Writing last semester. So here are the scenes as written:

1. Cat is learning to cast magic, she fails
2. Cat and Michael are walking home, get confronted by Sam about how they treat non-mages
3. Minister of Technocrats (non-mages) poison's Cat's mom in a meeting
4. She then dies
5. Funeral, Cat follows Sam to a Sim parlor
6. Michael and Cat fight over whether or not to go to war, Cat is banished
7. Cat is now on the mean streets, fights with a street urchin (Finn)
8. Cat's attacked by a technocratic platoon, saved by Michael
9. Michael convinces Cat to lead an attack on generators
10. Adrielle visits, offers living metal
11. Attack, Cat kills Sam (traitor)
12. Cat visit's Adrielle, Living metal in exchange for burning down the city
13. Cat burns down the city

In this story, I tried starting out with the last scene, and then working up to it from a discourse standpoint. This was largely a failure, and just left everyone confused. And because of my lack of sequels, everyone said my characters were a bit weak.

I realize that most of you won't have any idea what's going on here. This peice started out as a short story to set the stage for the 3rd novel in my series. The characters in the world are:

• Caitlin (Cat) Beltane - So I started her out as just a girl, a mage. Somehow during the inception of the story, she turned into a princess. Apparently I have problems with scope. Her power's fire.
• Michael Bordine - Cat's best friend / cousin. When she became a princess, he became a Lord. His power's water.
• Samuel Nits - A rival of Cat's, afaik no relation. His power's Shadow.

A couple minor characters as well. Living metal is this idea I've been playing with of a semi-sentient metal which can change it's shape to match the bearer's need. The idea was brought up in the first book, and during the second book, the antagonist stole it. The antagonist is the character who shows up in the end of the story, Adrielle.

The third novel takes place in a futuristic world, where the world has been torn apart by war. The mages and the mundanes (Technocrats) have been fighting for years, and it shows no sign of abating. The purpose of this short story was to set up this war. By giving the Mages the living metal, Adrielle has tipped the balance of the war, and the third novel will be, in part, about setting it right.

Sequels

So let's start by describing Sequels. A sequel is a chance for a character to react to the last Conflict (scene). According to Jim Butcher, a Sequel has 4 basic parts: 

1. Emotional Reaction - The character needs to react to what happened
2. Review, Logic, and Reason - The character reviews facts and works through to a conclusion
3. Anticipation - The character starts to think about their next step
4. Choice - The character chooses his next action, and this sets up the next scene

Scenes offer emotions to your story, add color, and affect the pacing of your story. Longer scenes, shorter sequels = action story. Adding in micro-sequels can warm up the tone of your novel (more emotional), in cool (e.g. classical PI novels), no emotions are shown outside of sequels. But they're always present. 

Scenes

So I haven't spoken about Scenes at all. We all have a basic idea of what a scene is. I've actually been trying to define them more solidly for my research. On one hand, you have a certain amount of locality, in terms of time, space, characters. I'll admit, this is what I thought going into Butcher's article on scenes. So I was wrong. Very wrong. Scenes are not just about locality, they're about conflict. A scene is where you challenge your character, while they try and get something they want.

A scene has 3 major components, though Butcher lists 4. The first, Point of View Character (POVC) is important, but I don't see it as a component so much as something to make note of.

The 3 components are:

1. Goal - Your POVC wants something.
2. Conflict (Scene Question) - Another character wants to deny POVC what he wants. While in lit classes, we learn that there are many types of conflict, Butcher maintains there's only 1, between characters. Man vs Nature or w/e is bunk.
3. Setback - POVC doesn't get what he wants. More particularly, there are 4 answers
1. Yes - Character gets what he wants. This can get boring
2. Yes... But - Character gets what he wants, but something goes wrong. Much more interesting.
3. No - Solid denial, also can be boring, but better than Yes
4. No, and Furthermore - He claims this is the most interesting. I might agree. Character doesn't get what he wants, and manages to mess things up for himself more.

Conclusions

So I've given a pre, and a segment about Scenes and Sequels. I intended to start the replotting process, but that'll have to wait for another time.