This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 493 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast. A couple weeks ago, actually I think it was in the last podcast, I talked about my plans

for optimizing my writing or really my creativity since that encompasses more into my daily schedule this year.

Since then I've put my ideas into plan and I'm pretty thrilled to report that they're actually going like

gangbusters.

Since I've struggled with an optimal writing schedule for the past year, I was actually

really surprised how easy it was to implement this new approach.

The main change was moving my writing from the evening to the morning,

which has been great not just because I've gotten lots of writing done, yay, but also because it's made my evenings a lot more flexible for other odds and ends, including the occasional bout of creative journaling or what I'm cheekily calling night pages for those of you familiar

with Julia Cameron's morning pages. Anyway so far so good on those New Year's

resolutions and I hope yours are coming along well too.

And now I hope you enjoy this week's podcast,

Six Steps to Create Realistic and Powerful

Scene dilemmas.

Scenes are the building blocks of your story. As go your scenes, so goes your story. If the

scenes present a solid chain of deliberate structure, that's what your story will be. But if too many scenes lack focus or dramatic impetus, so will the story.

Every aspect of scene structure is important. Any aspect that is

accidentally overlooked can throw off the balance of the entire narrative. But of all

the many aspects of scene structure, those that are among the most powerful are also the easiest to overlook.

I'm talking about scene dilemmas.

Now, first let's do a quick refresher on classic scene structure which of course I discuss in much more depth in my book structuring your novel.

So scene structure is divided into two halves. The first half we call scene

and this is focused on the action of the scene and that's further divided into

...