If you’ve got sixty scenes, and you write a scene per day, it will take you two months to finish your story.

If you want to double your output and be done writing in a month, then you have to manage two scenes per day.

If you want to finish in two weeks, then you’ve got to write four scenes per day.

When working on a story, I seem to have no problem compiling about thirty to thirty five scenes — half of the necessary sixty or so. This always disturbs me, until I actually start breaking the story and fleshing out scenes. It is then I often find that one scene is actually two, sometimes even three scenes rolled into one.

If this happens more often than not, which it does for me, we can assume that the initial scene count is actually double what it appears to be. When you start figuring in the freak scenes that happen to split into three parts, then there will be well above sixty scenes when all is said and done. There may be seventy or eighty, which is a good problem to have because then all you’ve got to do is cut a few. Or leave them if you want a longer story.

One of the issues I struggle with is page counts. I’ve always planned for my stories to be one hundred twenty pages give or take a few pages. Why so short? I’m keeping them concise and visual. They are the novelized form of a movie script. I suppose this makes them more novellas than novels. That is fine with me.

The problem is with the rough Hollywood script equation; “A page per minute, each scene being two pages.” In theory, sixty scenes should equal one hundred twenty pages. In reality, this is unreliable at best. Some of my scenes are two or three pages. Others are only a quarter of a page. I’ve been struggling with myself on whether or not to push my scenes a little longer, as many of them are kept short and simple.

I don’t believe in wandering off into the character headspace, excessive description and explanations, or longish masturbatory narration. Thus I have to suffer the double-edged sword of my scenes being short and sweet. I have found that trying to fluff the scenes up and make them a little longer is contrived; More talking heads, banter that is redundant or strays from the heart of the scene. You can only dance around the focal point of a scene so much before you have to drive it home.

Pay attention to scene lengths in movies and TV. Some scenes are incredibly short, showing a character’s face light up as they dig up some information in the FBI database before a cut to the next scene. In a lot of your favorite movies and shows you will find single-shot scenes that convey very brief, simple information.

This is a little harder for novelists to digest, because some of these single-shot scenes would make a paragraph at best. How many novels have you read where the chapters or subchapters were only a paragraph long? My answer; Not many. But does it really matter?

In summary, my brain has been hovering lately in the mathematical portion of storytelling. Some writers might prefer to just let go, but I happen to think that the math of storytelling is important as long as it doesn’t introduce more problems than it is worth.

What do you think?