The right scenes in the right order—easy, right?

The award for “Sassiest Writing Advice” has got to go to the great English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who once described the secret to writing good poetry as simply putting “the best words in the best order.” 

I mean, LOL. If only it were that easy, right? 

We fiction writers have a similar problem, though. We know our books need great stories to succeed.

We need to write tight, forward-leaning plots that engage the reader and make them demand that all their friends read what they just read so they can talk about “what happened.”

That’s the key. Poetry may rely on the words, but stories are about what happens, scene after scene after scene.

To paraphrase Coleridge, the secret of writing great stories is simply putting “the right scenes in the right order.”

No sass intended here. This is practical, learnable stuff. In fact, learning to structure good stories is an essential part of a fiction writer’s toolkit.

Choosing which scenes to include and in which order to put them is what story structure is all about. 

So how do we know which scenes to write? That’s the topic of this livestream. Learn the five qualities that make a scene the “right” scene—and why it’s so important to put them in a sequence that makes meaning out of what happens.