Where do ideas come from? It’s the question that you’re not meant to ask writers and other creative people, because the mythology of creativity is so fucking bizarre that providing a real answer is seen as a diminishment of the art produced. Or it’s disregarded because people assume the idea is the important part, rather than the work to flesh it out and build it into something. One of the best answers I’ve ever seen to the question actually comes from the perennially underrated Neil Gaiman novellette The Goldfish Pool & Other Stories, available in his first short story collection Smoke & Mirrors. In it, Gaiman’s novelist-turned-screenwriter protagonist reaches for an answer as he grapples with art and storytelling and the weirdness of Hollywood: People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more works than you’d believe. Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself. The irritating question they ask — us being writers — is: ‘where do you get your ideas?’ And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) advice about making sure each involves conflict and changes/advances the overall story. Which is a pity,  because understanding the microstructure of a scene is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your toolkit as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to resolve particularly thorny narrative problems. It’s one thing to say that a scene is built around two characters coming into conflict, and another to see how writers use that to generate specific effect Shawn Coyne gives a neat outline of beats within a scene in The Story Grid; Robin Law’s Beating the Story offers some useful frameworks when he breaks stories (and scenes) into alternating patterns of the things you hope will happen and the things you fear will occur, coupling it with the concept that a scene/beat begins when a petitioner wants something from someone who may-or-may not grant their request.  I’ve pointed people–students especially–to