We know that something vitally important has happened, because we’re reading about it. It comprises the essential elements of scene - a place, a time frame, and a change that moves the story forward. That’s a whole scene, though there isn’t much to it. Those two tiny failures - broken circuit burned-out bulb - would have unimaginable consequences. But the light - never used, infrequently tested - failed to switch on.
![creation workshop creation workshop](https://incentive-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Εικόνα1.png)
The pulse reached its destination, a tiny light that should have come to brilliant red life. The break set off an alarm - a tiny pulse of electricity that raced through the wires to a monitored board at a control panel half a mile away. In the heart of the command center, a single wire, stiff and brittle from ten-thousand cycles of heating and cooling, snapped away from its circuit board. One setting, no characters, a single elemental change. Let’s start with the most basic of basic scenes. But you’ll find out that even the most complex of scenes become rather simple when taken down to its component parts. We’ll start with the simplest of all possible scenes and work our way to scenes of greater complexity. We’re going to create some very short scenes here - I’ll do some demos, and then you’ll do some practice scenes. What defines the completion of a scene? The moment of change. When is a scene a scene? When something changes. So what is this magical element that gives your scene its life and makes it the brick with which you build your fiction? Without this one element, you don’t have a scene, you merely have a vignette. It contains the single element that gives your story life, movement, and excitement.
![creation workshop creation workshop](http://www.cimulact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/LabFoto196167.jpg)
You can, of course, break the scene up into its component pieces - words, sentences, and paragraphs - but only the scene contains the vital wholeness that makes it, like an atom of gold, a building block of your fiction. You don’t build a story or a book of words and sentences and paragraphs - you build it of scenes, one piled on top of the next, each changing something that came before, all of them moving the story inexorably and relentlessly forward. As the atom is the smallest discrete unit of matter, so the scene is the smallest discrete unit in fiction it is the smallest bit of fiction that contains the essential elements of story.