Where did the 800-word scene challenge come from?
In the beginning, there was a problem. Will Dave step up and take the challenge for himself or continue to vainly hope that someone else will solve his problem?
Setup
Before I get to my own Crisis question, let’s talk about what the eight-hundred-word scene challenge is first. This exercise is the fundamental practice in the Story Grid Scene Writing Workshop (SWW). Every week for six weeks, the students draft new scenes based on specific parameters. These parameters are chosen by their writing coach (me or one of the other great coaches in the program) to challenge the writer in areas where they can improve the most.
The first scene every student in the SWW writes has the following parameters:
It must be eight hundred words or less.
It must be a two-character scene.
Each character must have a working Object of Desire in the form “The character wants to A without having to B.”
The scene must have the Five Commandments of Storytelling:
Inciting Incident
Turning Point
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
Some weeks, the students are challenged to revise the previous work, especially if the scenes don’t work or if there’s significant learning potential to be mined from upgrading and enhancing the previous scene.
As the workshop progresses, the students are challenged to write in different settings, scenes that are more dialog or more action, more characters in conflict, etcetera, as the coach identifies that they’ve assimilated the fundamentals in less complex work and they’re ready to be challenged in a new way.
The goal is for students to improve their craft, not improve a specific piece of writing. The focus is on the student and the student’s skills, not the words themselves.
That’s it! Sounds easy, right?
Inciting Incident
At this point, I’ve been coaching students in the SWW for six months. During that time, many of them have (quite reasonably) asked for working examples of scenes that abide all the same restrictions that we impose on their exercises. Unfortunately, the masterwork scenes from novels that we use as teaching tools are all longer than eight hundred words. The masterwork scenes all abide the Five Commandments well, of course, as you would expect. However, more than one student expressed (perfectly understandable) skepticism that doing so was “impossible” under the eight-hundred-word constraint.
Turning Point
Being a time-constrained person who has arranged my life to juggle three careers simultaneously, I took my concerns to the rest of the coaching cadre of the SWW. I figured I’d present the problem and then one of the other highly motivated coaches or staff would pick up the challenge to go find masterwork scenes that were eight hundred words or less.
Everyone reasonably agreed that it would be great if we had a library of eight-hundred-word scenes to share with students as examples and “proof” that what we challenged them to do was possible.
We debated how to collect them, where to collect them, and how to organize them.
We debated the possibility of having coaches or other Story Grid Certified Editors write some examples.
More students, who were gamely doing the work and improving in their story craft week-over-week, continued to challenge me on the constraint.
The idea languished. We’re all busy people striving to get our own needs met and live our best lives.
Of course, nobody volunteered to step up and do the work.
Crisis
Will Dave step up and take the challenge for himself or continue to vainly hope that someone else will solve his problem?
The SWW thinking on the tight word count emerged from several practical observations in the early iterations and I believe them to be valid:
Creativity emerges best under constraint in the same way that protagonists find their best (or worst) selves under pressure in a story. Stories are about people making hard choices under pressure to demonstrate who they are through action. Writers are people. This forces them to make hard choices under pressure in a very limited time.
Constraining the word count is a forcing function. The writer must use highly valenced language and make very intentional choices with their verbs, nouns, and (we hope as few as possible) modifiers. Because they can’t resort to exposition when every single word counts.
If the author can’t abide the Five Commandments in eight hundred words, they are not likely to abide them in eight thousand words.
The coaches each have a large number of students and a limited time that they’re paid to evaluate student scenes.
It’s painful to read long scenes that ramble and go nowhere, even when you’re paid to do so.
It’s painful for students to spend a lot of time producing words only to get feedback that those words ultimately don’t work.
The best feedback comes on the most rapid feedback cycle. Write some. Get some feedback. Write some more. This is easier in a shorter format.
I really wanted there to be just five bullet points, but here we are. (See what happens when you give people unlimited word count?)
I debated the option of culling eight-hundred-word scenes from various masterworks in order to teach. This would be time-consuming but would improve my own scene analysis portfolio and enable me to prove the point.
I considered that I’m also a writer, in addition to being a coach and an editor. I observed that in six weeks of writing short, complete scenes my students were radically improving their craft in several ways. I want to improve my own craft in the same way.
Climax
I resigned myself to the reality that no one was coming to save me. Then I chose to write my own scenes rather than spend the same amount of time mining the many masterworks that we use as teaching tools. Someday, I’ll go back and do that in the content genres that I specialize in (Thriller, Action, Love, War, and so on). Especially to develop my own library of scene archetypes for inspiration. And because I love reading.
But here we are. For now. Writing.
Resolution
Every week, I’ve challenged myself to draft a completely new scene in the same way that I challenge my students in the SWW to write an eight-hundred-word scene. I’ve done two so far and I’ve got notes for the Objects of Desire and the Five Commandments for many more scenes in my backlog to write.
I’m doing this in public for accountability and to get broad feedback. Don’t be afraid to nitpick my scenes. You might hurt my feelings, but that’s OK. I should be mature enough to handle it. (Or so my mental hygienist says.)
Why the 800 Word Scene Challenge?
I’ve coached many struggling students to improve from producing “just stuff that happens” to writing compelling, emotionally-charged, fully working scenes in just six weeks. Combined with feedback from a qualified coach or editor, this is the practice drill that makes the magic happen.
I’m a Story Grid Certified Editor and founding member of the Story Grid Guild. I’ve been helping my clients with developmental editing of their novels and screenplays as well as chapter-by-chapter scene coaching for their works-in-progress since 2020. I joined the staff of the Story Grid Scene Writing Workshop as a coach in mid-2024.
All my practice scenes are here as public examples of what’s possible for you. With a little of the right kind of regular feedback, you can learn to create working scenes that will fit perfectly into a larger story complete with powerful Objects of Desire and all Five Commandments of Storytelling.
I do reserve the right to revise my practice scenes in the future, but in the spirit of full transparency, I’ll always publish them as separate versions starting with v0. (Yes, one of my alters is a software engineer by trade. Everything in life begins with the index zero.)
If you’d like to join me in the story gym (or story dojo, if that term calls to you), sign up for the Story Grid Scene Writing Workshop. Our students write new scenes from scratch every week. We don’t want you working on your passion project, work-in-progress, or the book of your heart because you’re too close to the words to do the reps (or kata) to learn the narrative skills and build the story muscle. It’s harder to see the story fundamentals when the words are too precious to you. Build the skills and muscle first in practice, then take your newly developed power back into your own work. In the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger (paraphrased), “If you want to win, you’ve got to do the reps first.”
However, working on random new scenes that are assigned to you isn’t for everyone. If you’d prefer the same kind of weekly (but more expensive) coaching on your own work-in-progress scene-by-scene, I’m available for hire. Book a campfire chat with the Book Shaman (me—or more accurately, one of my alters) and let’s see if we might be compatible adventuring companions. Paid subscribers of this substack will also have the same opportunity for their own scenes once a quarter.
And in the name of shameless, capitalist self-promotion, I also publish my own novels. I don’t write about the heroes you want. I create the monsters you need.