Scene by Scene breakdown

I learnt the original form of the scene by scene summary from the UBC novel writing courses on EdX and it has the following elements:

• One line summary of events
• What do each character want in the scene? 
• The emotion transitions for the characters involved (you can do the full transitions if you are really up to date on character feelings or you can just do the opening and closing emotion in the form of A goes from feeling A to feeling B)
• The direction of emotion movement (does this scene go from positive to negative or vice versa or positive to more positive etc.) 

As time goes by and I read more writer craft books I had come to think that for me at least, what the characters want is often not foremost on my mind and I have to do really hard work to dig it out. So I’ve switched to replacing character wants with stakes for the scene- what the character stands to gain or lose, which is a concept I can relate to far better. 

So in my recent attempt to downsize my WIP back into index cards again, I have changed the breakdown to having the following elements:

• One line summary of events
• Stakes for the protagonist
• Emotion transition for the protagonist, just the opening and closing emotions. I had previously tried to track the moment to moment or at least broad feeling transitions. But to be honest, even with the help of a feelings wheel which gives a set of predetermined words to summarise a broad range of feelings, I’m using apprehensive as a feeling most of the time whenever I’m really stuck. So I think just tracking the opening and closing emotions for me personally is probably the best I can do. 
• Movement the scene goes in terms of emotions 

Now there are other ways you can break down a scene, this is just one method. Drop me a comment if you want to discuss alternative methods or just want to hear about alternative frameworks I have come across.