A scene involves conflict that occurs in (more or less) continuous time and space and turns the condition of a character’s life in a perceptible way (McKee, 1997, p. 35). Scenes can function as either:

  •  Kernels based on one of the following types – disturbance, obstacle, complication, confrontation, crisis, or resolution (Porter, Larson, Harthcock, & Nellis, 2002)
  • Satellites based on one of these types – exposition, dramatic question, character introduction, action, plan revelation, relationship affirmation, clarification, conflict continuity, relief, theme reinforcement, foreshadowing, or ambiance (Porter, Larson, Harthcock, & Nellis, 2002).

A beat is the smallest element of the story structure and consists of an exchange of behavior between characters that are paired in an action/reaction mode (McKee, 1997, p. 37). The structure of beats as described by McKee provides a framework that accommodates the limitations of texting, Twitter, and Facebook narratives. Scenes can emerge naturally from the assembled beats, providing the next level of McKee’s story hierarchy. The concept of the beat provides a useful framework for structuring storytelling using media like Twitter and texting in which the length of messages is severally restricted. Text messages, for example, are limited to 160 characters while Twitter limits messages to 140 characters (about the length of this sentence). These restrictions on message length impose significant constraints on an author’s ability to develop show settings and character development.

Despite those constraints, in Japan mobile phone novels called keitai shosetsu became so successful that they accounted for four of the top five works on the literary bestseller list in 2007 (Goodyear, 2008). A writer known as Yoshi was the first to bringing out a keitai shosetsu in book form. His narrative, entitled Deep Love (2002) was a collection of racy tales about a teenage prostitute in Tokyo. It first appeared online as a mobile phone novel, then appeared as a book, and was later developed into a manga, a TV series and a film (Day, 2008).

As dictated by the medium, the language of keitai shosetsu is simple and peppered with emoticons. Dialogue and description are sparse. Subject matter is predictable…Typically, a heroine loses her first love (in K, the male love interest dies in an accident), then later struggles to find love again. Obstacles can be gritty – rape, drugs, accidental pregnancies and prostitution are all common – but they are invariably overcome, and traumatic events usually serve as devices to bring the heroine and her beau closer together. (Day, 2008)

Barry Yourgrau, an American author of keitai shosetsu published in Japan, said the format he used for his mobile phone novels limited individual stories to 350 words to limit thumb-scrolling and 12-word opening sentences that would fit on a single mobile phone screen (Yourgrau, 2009). Yourgrau notes that one of the big mistakes he made when writing his keitai shosetsu was interaction with his audience.

I wrote my stories the old, author-as-god way: me writer, you reader. Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools where writers and readers engage each other. Yoshi shaped Deep Love based on ongoing hits and emails. (He even handed out fliers.) Keitai readers notoriously aren’t big book buyers – but they will buy books as mementos of their communal involvement. (Yourgrau, 2009)

The beat is the lowest level building block of the hierarchy developed by McKee (McKee, 1997, p. 37). It is an exchange of behavior between two characters that involves a series of actions and reactions that create dramatic tension and shape the turning of the scene. A beat occurs every time a character says or does something and another character reacts is a beat. A beat also occurs when a character sees, feels, hears, tastes, or smells something and reacts with a thought or action.

Many texted narratives are written from a first-person perspective, providing insights into the actions, thoughts, and emotions of the main character. The first-person approach is also commonly used in Twitter-based fiction. The microblogging (another term for Twitter-type sites) narrative Joy Motel (available in its complete form at http://joymotel.blogspot.com/2008/12/kindred.html) is a science fiction narrative about the “‘brainstream’ flowing inside the neural net of its lead character, Kindred” (Kewley & Sallee, 2009). Writing Twitter-based narratives means limiting not just the number of characters in a tweet to 140, but also limiting the number of sentences that are used to no more than 10 to avoid overloading the audience with dozens or hundreds of tweets (Miliard, 2009).

Facebook is also being used as a venue for the development of narrative works. Like mobile phone and Twitter narratives, stories on Facebook are writing in installments of just a few lines (Schaefer, 2010). However, segments of a narrative on Facebook do not have the length restrictions of texts and tweets, giving the author more flexibility (Schaefer, 2010).

From a transmedia narrative perspective, a potential use for first-person perspective and social media is to have character express aspects of his or her thoughts and feelings via short messages that are published in parallel with the action the character is involved in another medium.

Some story structures are more amenable to being played out over multiple media platforms or media than others. For example, a story structure that uses the main plot as the spine from which “side trips” branch and return would have less friction that a more linear story represented by the traditional structure of  Freytag’s Triangle. Similarly, the vertical story structure (in which the main plot holds together a number of narrative “shafts”) and the converging story structure (which consists of a number of different story lines based on individual characters) have less friction than more traditional structures.