There are three acts to a story - beginning, middle and end.
Consider a 100K word novel.
You spend 25 K for the beginning, 50 K for the middle and 25 K for the end.
Each scene or chapter should ideally be around 2K words. Why? Because readers can’t quit in the middle of a chapter. 2K words is a good enough length, a potato chip length, where the reader will keep reading one more chapter.
This comes out in terms of scenes - 12 for the beginning, 25 for the middle and 13 for the end - more or less.
There are fifteen scenes that each part needs to have -
- Inciting
- Complication
- Crisis
- Climax
- Resolution
So that’s 15 scenes done. Now, for the rest of the 35.
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That changed when I was travelling from Helsinki to Mumbai. I picked up this book after having watched Sinners and Jurassic World. And I began reading about the foolscrap story grid, etc. It happened when Shawn talked about constructing a story, about the maths behind it. That motivated me to write - How to craft a story.