Investigating Differences between Chapter and Scene

By Xoic · May 5, 2022 ·
In which I begin to determine what's changed between those heady days of literary writing and today's much more scene-oriented approach
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  1. Inspired by one brief comment in Also's mega blog post: Literary Fiction: A Consolidated Practical View

    I'm now on a quest to explore what a scene is, what a chapter is, and how they function in both popular and literary fiction (if I'm able to glean out anything so esoteric and fiddly from a web search, which tend to favor broad simple queries).

    First step—google for articles explaining the difference between a scene and a chapter:
    The second one is littered with errors and I don't trust the author's knowledge—each attempt she made to add a link failed and she never addressed the fact. Makes it seem very unreliable. However, in essence all 3 articles convey the same information—

    • A Scene is the smallest unit of story—a coherent string of events, actions, narration etc taking place in one location and unified by a single idea.
    • A Chapter is a group of scenes that are related to each other in what feels like an organic or sensible way.

    But as is true of most articles and books about story, these deal strictly with popular fiction (what I used to call genre fiction). They completley ignore litfic.

    One small problem with the above set of premises—I've learned from studying movies that a scene does not have to take place in one location. Sometimes the characters are in transit. They might be moving from a house to a car and then into an airport, all in one scene, and it can still be unified by the topic of their conversation for instance. But that's just a slight exception—a technicality really— and I'm sure the authors of the above articles would agree that a scene can move through various environments as long as the conversation or the action or the thought is continuous. In fact now I'm wondering what relation a scene bears to a single story beat. Offhand I'd say they're probably the same thing, but I'd want to look into it deeper before making any proclamations.

    In film the smallest unit (aside from a single frame) is the shot. Scenes are composed of multiple shots, and are grouped together to create sequences. At least at one time they were, the sequence isn't really used as a term or a concept in film anymore. I think it was used mostly in the early days of silent and black-and-white cinema, when a film reel was about 15 minutes in length. Sequences, unsurprisingly, were usually just about 15 minutes as well. This means that, according to the articles I listed above, in the early days movies followed the pattern of novels or stories more closely than they do now. Sequences served the larger grouping function that chapters serve in a novel.

    But what Also said about chapters and scenes was different in some ways from all this. He did include this info, but he added something else—the idea that novels and stories in the past used to include more than just description action and narration, which they're chiefly composed of today.

    This is really the part I'm most interested in. I think I'll break here, call this an intro, and follow up with another post, or maybe a series. No telling how deep this might go.
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