you can leave behind some ambiguities and uncertainties about what's in store for the characters. Do Cinderella and the Prince really live happily ever after? That's another story.
Scenes: The Building Blocks of a Plot The building blocks you use to construct the story—or, if you prefer, the individual dominoes or the links in the chain—are scenes. A scene is a unit of story action. At a particular time and in a specific place, something happens that is significant to the plot. For instance: • A character is introduced or has new light shed upon him. • The nature of the relationship between two characters is established. • An event takes place—an action, a consequence, a complication—that moves the story forward. • A piece of crucial information is provided. A scene is a small story of its own, a mini-drama with a beginning, a middle, a high point or climactic moment, and an end. A bit of the conflict is played out, and the tension rises. Depending on the job it needs to do, a scene might be only a few lines long or might continue for several pages; some stories consist of a single extended scene. The second scene in my short story, Dreaming of Dragons, comprises the four paragraphs you read on page 24. This scene establishes the story's setting as Chinatown in February when the New Year celebration occurs, introduces the theme of wisdom versus luck, and gives readers their first glimpse at the statue of Buddha, which will be an ongoing motif. Suppose you were writing Cinderella and chose to bring readers into the bedroom as the stepsisters dress for the ball. Such a scene could serve several purposes. For example, as we watch them primp and listen to them chatter, we could discover that the stepsisters are vain, self-centered, and cruel; find out if the pair are rivals or friends; and learn how badly they want to captivate the Prince.
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