Moment vs scene vs story

What are the building blocks of a story?

Stories might contain characters, setting, and action, but these are elements; they're not building blocks of narrative—you don't stack one character after another to create a story.

Here's one way to think about narrative building blocks:

Stories are built from scenes.
Scenes are built from moments.
(Summary can be used to connect scenes, but we'll skip that for now.)

Story, scene, and moment are like three levels of resolution in a narrative, with blocks nested inside each other:

(Stills from Kiki's Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli)

At each narrative level, different skills and concepts become relevant and useful:

When writing moments, we tend to think about language, description, compelling detail, point of view, poetic devices, etc.
When orchestrating scenes, we are concerned with change, cause & effect, conflict & resolution, and so on.
When constructing stories, we apply skills such as introduction, development, advancement, and reincorporation.

Roughly speaking:

Moments tend to be more sensory and descriptive, focus on a single action, possibly no change in the character. (Example: the moment before a plane crash.)
Scenes focus on a single place and time, involve characters experiencing some kind of contrast or conflict, but perhaps with limited recombination of elements or change in the situation. (Example: wriggling out of a deal with a leprechaun flautist.)
Stories usually follow characters grappling with a situation over a period of time, combining multiple story elements before ending in significant change in the character or the world around them. (Example: a society adopts mind-control suits en masse.)

This is important because, in Frankenstories, you can choose to write a moment, scene, or story—therefore all three types of skill are useful.

However, while Writelike already has detailed lessons on many moment and scene-level skills, it doesn't have anything that teaches story-level skills, so story-level skills will be the main focus of this lesson (although we will touch on moment and scene-level skills where necessary).

After playing: Identify narrative level

After playing a Frankenstories game, ask your students to identify which level/s of narrative they were working at.

If they've played multiple games, do students find they have a peference? Why might they prefer to work at a particular level?

Before playing: Target a specific narrative level

If students understand the difference between narrative levels, then challenge them to play a game at a specific level.

For example, if they tend to write long moments, try writing a story. If they tend to race forward with lots of events, try slowing down to explore a moment.

Teaching with Frankenstories (ARCHIVED 23.02.28)

Moment vs scene vs story