Incidents Revisited

In the last post we discussed the concept of writing incidents rather than scenes. To expand a little on this, here is how James V. Smith, Jr. suggests structuring your incidents in his book, You Can Write A Novel.

Smith suggests that you have:

1. An opening incident that hooks the reader and it should come as close to the beginning of the story as possible. So, if we consider our story as a series of incidents labelled say, A to Z. Let's make incident 'A' the opening, and so it will be of great importance to hook the reader.


2. Further, your story needs a point-of-no-return incident. This incident can lie anywhere, even at A in your continuum of incidents. For the purposes of the chart to come, I'll call it 'F'.


3. And the last incident of great importance, the greatest of importance actually, is the climax with will include the resolution and/or close of the novel. So it's the 'Z' in the continuum.

For those who like a visual to see how the incidents compare in importance, take a look at this blue print structure.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUWXYZ

So, what do you think? If you sat down and worked out your 'A', 'F', and 'Z' incidents, those being the most importance incidents in your story, can you see it being helpful to structure your novel as a whole? It's reminding me a bit of the snowflake method as I work through reading this book.

I'm off to another horse show this weekend. Busy, Busy, Busy!!

I pray everyone has a wonderful, safe, and healthy weekend with lots of joy to keep you smiling!

Surrendering to Him,

Eileen

Are you writing Scenes or Incidents?

Hubby and I went on a Chapters date on Saturday and as a result I find myself studying You Can Write A Novel by James V. Smith, JR. So far I'm finding what Smith has to say quite interesting.

He suggests that we write Incidents rather than scenes. That's a new concept to me, but I like his suggestion. Don't Incidents sound snappier than scenes? When I consider novels that I've really had a hard time putting down, I must admit, they read more like connected incidents making up the story. Each incident delivers a punch that draws me in further and further to the story world and characters. Scenes just sounds so drawn out now to me.

What do you think? What do you see as the difference between writing Scenes or Incidents? If any?


Personal Note:
Donner did amazing on the weekend for my girls. He went around the course like an old pro and it was pouring rain the whole day, too. Not exactly a good way to introduce him to showing, but he didn't seem to mind at all. Hurray!


Surrendering to Him,

Eileen