Scene Structure Exceptions: Incidents and Happenings

After our recent series about scene structure, it might seem that everything in a book must be tied down hard and fast within that framework. But what about when something in your story doesn’t seem to fit into the goal/conflict/disaster paradigm of the scene? What if something happens (and needs to happen) that doesn’t create conflict and doesn’t end in disaster? What if whatever happens isn’t a direct result of any of the major players’ goals?

Two Scene Structure Exceptions: Incidents and Happenings

All rules offer exceptions, including the rules of scene structure. Today, I’d like to share two of the more prominent of those exceptions: incidents and happenings.

What Is an “Incident”?

Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain (affiliate link)

An incident is a sort of abortive scene, in which your character attempts to reach a goal. But he meets with no resistance, no conflict.—Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer

Much as we want to keep our protagonists in hot water most of the time, it’s just not going to be practicable to thwart them at every turn. Every single goal can’t end in disaster. Sometimes characters will get exactly what they want.

For example, let’s say you have a detective character who needs to dig up some info about her suspect. He goes downtown to talk to his old mentor, a retired cop. They settle in for coffee, chew their toothpicks, and the young cop acts on his goal of discovering the needed information by asking his mentor to tell him what she knows.

Now, you could very well turn this into a full-blown scene. Maybe the old cop doesn’t want to spill. Maybe she’s scared, maybe she’s corrupt, or maybe she’s just ticked off at the young cop for any number of reasons. Now you’ve got conflict, and when the scene ends with the old cop refusing to share the needed info, threatening the young cop, or maybe getting gunned down by a watchful mobster, then you’ve got a disaster—and a full-scale scene.

It’s a good scene and may well be worth considering. But maybe you have other plans for these two characters. Maybe this needs to be just a quickie encounter and you don’t want to spend any more time on it than you have to. So you have the old cop tell the young cop what he needs to know, and the younger cop then moves on to encounter both conflict and disaster in the next scene.

This is an incident: goal, but no conflict or disaster.

What Is a “Happening”?

A happening brings people together. But it’s non-dramatic, because no goal or conflict is involved.—Swain

Not everything in a novel will be fraught with conflict. Sometimes a casual meeting between people is necessary to introduce characters, information, or maybe just to serve as a distraction (for either the protagonist or the readers) from something more important going on. You can’t blow up every exchange of pleasantries into a full-blown scene. Both your word count and your melodrama would shoot off the charts.

So maybe your young cop is on his way up to talk to the chief of police when he meets a fatally beautiful blonde in the elevator. This is an important encounter, since, in a few chapters, that blonde is going to become both his love interest and a key witness within the investigation. But for now, all you want to do is plant the indication she’s going to play an important role. She drops her poodle, he picks it up for her, she bats her eyes, they exchange a few words. Then the elevator stops and she sashays off. End of happening.

Again, you could turn this into a full-blown scene with all the trimmings. Goal: Young cop wants to make a favorable impression on beautiful blonde. Conflict: Bad poodle bites young cop, for which beautiful blonde blames young cop. Disaster: Young cop attempts to apologize, beautiful blonde smacks him one, and then sashays off the elevator, bad poodle tucked firmly under her arm.

All of this might lead your story in some interesting directions. But you must determine if that direction is one you really want to explore. If not, a happening, which allows the characters to meet briefly and then frees the protagonist to pursue the true arc of the scene, may be better suited to keeping the story moving.

***

At first glance, incidents and happenings can both appear to be fully-structured scenes. However, brevity and lack of conflict are indications of their true nature. Don’t take their inability to fulfill the demands of scene structure as something prohibitive. But do recognize them for what they are and use them sparingly and carefully.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What was the latest incident or happening you included in your story? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).

___

Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)