Scenes make the best workflow. A scene is about the furthest you can break down your story into manageable bits in order to accomplish your goals. Lately though, I’ve been a little bit down on my process. The problem is even if you finish a scene it’s only 1/60th of your story. I don’t know about you, but I like better feedback than that. Completing 1/60th of my story isn’t satisfying to me. If you do a scene every day it still takes you sixty days, or two months. That’s not counting revisions.

And if you’re anything like me, you’ll cheat sometimes and skip a few days, or sometimes even a week if you’re busy with real life, work, etc. I have to remind myself sometimes that this is just a hobby. I don’t get to work on this for forty hours a week. If I did, progress would be much quicker.

So how can we keep the story broken down into manageable workflow in the form of scenes while still feeling good about the progress we make?

Ratchet up your daily goals a little. Instead of just doing one scene per day, try to do three. Better yet, focus on an entire sequence. If a particular sequence is six scenes, that may be too much for one day’s work if you already have a full time job like I do. So try to knock out two or three scenes in a single day, if you can. Then knock out another two or three the next day. Over the course of a few days you might complete an entire sequence.

Most stories are somewhere between eight and twelve sequences, or stages. The Writer’s Journey prescribes twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey. I’ve found the Hero’s Journey to be a bit too vague for my tastes. “Meeting with the mentor,” for example. What does that mean? What if I have several meetings with several different characters offering their expertise, and thus temporarily performing the role of mentor? It’s not as tidy a stage/sequence as the paradigm would suggest.

I use ten stages, or sequences — whatever you want to call them. Why ten? Because I’m aiming for twelve minute sequences, similar to the acts in television. Every twelve minutes you get a commercial break in TV. I happen to think twelve minute chunks fit the natural human attention span — at least towards the character’s immediate goals in the story. A story should also have some kind of payoff every twelve minutes so that people don’t get bored.

Then there’s the simple math of it:

12 min x 10 stages = 120 minutes

Now back to the issue at hand; Feeling a sense of progress, feedback, and fulfillment with the work you do each day.

Your workflow should continue to happen scene by scene, but you should have short term goals every week for the completion of a sequence. Instead of working towards completion of 1/60th of your story, why not work towards a better, more satisfying goal of 1/10th of your story? Then you only have ten goals, or deadlines. Each one will feel like a major victory, and you won’t feel like you’re struggling against the weight of something larger than you.

Work at the scene level, but keep your goals oriented towards the sequence level. Your goal should be to complete a sequence while working one scene at a time.

I hope looking at your story in this way will help you feel better about your workload and the progress you can make. I know it did for me!