The Five Elements of Story/Scene Structure

From a post I shared with my online writing group:

If you stop thinking about the elements of scene/story structure as mechanical “steps” or “stages” your scene has to go through, and look at the scene as a natural, fluid (but logical) progression of actions and reactions, you may well find you’re using the “story elements” without even thinking about it.

Pretty much every interaction you’ll experience today follows this pattern, more or less. For example:

Baby poops (inciting incident)

Mom decides a diaper change is in order (turning point)

Mess is far worse than expected—Mom calls for help (crisis)

Dad comes to the rescue with a towel and fresh clothing (climax)

Baby is cleaned, and settled happily for a feed (resolution)

That’s kind of a silly example, but the point is, those story elements aren’t a structure you must artificially force your story to conform to—they are simply one way of expressing the natural flow most stories will take.

You could also write them like this:

Yikes! (inciting incident)
Ok, here’s what we’ll do…(turning point)
Oh, no, that’s not working…(crisis)
D****T!!! (Climax)
Here, this will do. Phew. (resolution)

Hope you found this helpful!