Icon by Peg Ihinger
So I had half my playing around with structure post done for this week, and then Kevin said this:
“Pat, do you think a preset structure likely makes a story more predictable, or are structure and predictability unrelated?”
There are a couple of things to consider here. First, there’s the fundamental assumption that predictability is always and everywhere a bad thing in a story, and should therefore be avoided. This happens not to be the case. Predictability (or not) is a tool in the toolbox, which can enhance or detract from storytelling depending on how the writer chooses to use it. An uncommon structure can lend interest to a story that might otherwise be unsurprising; a common story structure can provide an element of familiarity that keeps readers hooked on an otherwise confusing or uncomfortably different story.
Second, in order for a structure, even one of the really common ones, to be predictable, readers have to recognize it. Common story structures are predictable because they are common, familiar, and/or so general that they apply to many different, more specific structures. The most fundamental story structure is Aristotle’s version of the three acts: Beginning, Middle, End. It’s fundamental because it’s observational and descriptive: every story starts somewhere and ends somewhere and has other stuff in between. It’s like looking at skeletons: they all have a head, a spine, and an end, whether one is talking about snakes or elephants or birds. Ignacio Miranda did a chart that fits nine supposedly different story structural approaches into the three-act fundamental structure, and it works fine.
What this means is that it is really, really hard to avoid having any structure in one’s stories. If one deliberately doesn’t pay attention to structure, stories almost always revert to basic three-act beginning-middle-end and there is nothing wrong with this. It’s a perfectly good basic structure that works for practically everything, and a lot of writers have other things they need to work on (like characterization or dialog or plot…and no, structure is not synonymous with plot, even though a lot of the metaphors used to discuss it are similar). But if one really wants to avoid predictability, using an uncommon structure is one way of doing so. An unfamiliar structure can make an otherwise predictable story surprising, because many readers won’t know what to expect when.
Third, predictability in structure does not mean predictability in content. A reader may spot a “hero’s journey” structure early on, and therefore correctly predict that the next thing that will happen is “Hero meets mentor,” but who the mentor is and exactly how the hero meets them are not predictable just from knowing the meeting happens. The meeting can happen in jail, or in a crowded market, or in a hermitage on a mountaintop, or not even be a meeting at all (because the mentor has been on stage since page one, and it’s more that the hero has just realized that this person gives really good advice). The mentor can be a fellow prisoner, a random shopper or food vendor, a classic wise man/woman/hermit/monk, the best friend’s Mom, an experimental AI, or the newly discovered journals of a long-dead philosopher/con artist/teacher. A predictable structure can provide readers with an anchor in a totally gonzo story.
Fourth, playing with or against structure can be extremely useful, but it’s not the sort of thing that happens by accident. Setting up a structure and deliberately breaking it mid-book can heighten tension, emphasize characters and/or plot twists, and allow for unexpected presentations. For instance, in Lois Bujold’s Mirror Dance, the initial structure alternates unfailingly between two viewpoint characters…until suddenly, in the middle of the book, it doesn’t. It’s extremely effective in bringing the main protagonist forward and upping the suspense. Robert Bolano’s literary novel The Savage Detectives has what appears to be a three-act structure…but the “middle section” contains most of the story, from forty-some different narrators over twenty years.
“Playing around with structure” can be done on a macro, whole-book level—the kind of thing Ian Banks did with Use of Weapons, where alternate chapters move forward or backward in time, or Italo Calvino did with If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, which is in part composed of different opening chapters, or the various books in which each chapter is told by a new and different viewpoint character, or stories in which events in different sections or viewpoints circle back or echo prior events that happened elsewhere or to other people who handled them differently. Braided plot or plot-and-character structures can elevate two threads that aren’t quite strong enough on their own. Parallel running scene structures that alternate between a tense climax and the long, slow build-up that preceded it can keep a reader hooked in a way that the more common chronological/linear structure wouldn’t.
Playing around with sections or chapter structures can also be interesting—Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand experiments with opening each chapter with a cliffhanger, and then doing a flashback that solves the previous chapter’s cliffhanger; Steven Brust’s Taltos uses a chapter-specific structure to create an overall-novel structure (each chapter has three sections; the first sections describe the protagonist casting a complex ritual spell; the second, the protagonist’s childhood; and the third, the current events leading up to the protagonist having to cast the spell, so that the three timelines come together at the end). Much later in the series, in Dragon, he deliberately echoes (but does not repeat) the chapter structure when the protagonist is facing a similar-but-not-the-same problem. Many books alternate viewpoint characters chapter to chapter, or rotate chapters or scenes among many viewpoint characters according to a specific structure. There are non-linear stories that would be totally pedestrian/predictable if they were told in a common linear structure, but are really interesting when past incidents are shown right next to a present or future story event that parallels or predicts them.
Not everyone wants to do this kind of thing, of course, which is fine. But there is a difference between wanting to write stories that fit seamlessly and nearly unconsciously into common story structures, and avoiding conscious use of structure out of fear that one can’t make it work the way one wants to.
Thank you! Predictability is a bugaboo for me.
I rarely read romance novels, because the structure readers seem to demand has the hero and heroine show up early on, and then, ***for me***, the rest of the novel is just waiting around for them to get past the obligatory obstacles and get (it) together.
On the other hand, in striving not to be predictable, I don’t want to overdo and give readers something unwanted. I mean, consider “I know, Act 3 can be the protagonist getting captured, then thousands of words of torture porn, and finally dying. The end!”
No one would predict that, but who would want to read it? Not me!
Few things are more predictable than stories I’ve read many times before – but this doesn’t bother me when I reread a story.
What bothers me about romance novels isn’t the hero and the heroine predictably overcoming obstacles, but the very common structure of the main obstacles they have to overcome being each other. This often comes with a large side order of poor communication or lack of communication, which I also cordially dislike.
Aye. I hate most romance-genre romance novels for that reason. Anything close to Hallmark in plot is an automatic put-down book for me because Hallmark annoys me. However, a well-done romance such as the one in “The Goose Girl” from Shannon Hale, or in many other fantasy novels where the romance is not the main concern… that I do like!
Deep Lurker: “The main obstacles the have to overcome being each other” isn’t a structure; it’s content (even with a side of poor or lacking communication). Structure is the organization and presentation part–not what happens, exactly, so much as when and how.
The common structure for romance novels is “Two people overcome obstacles to come together.” What the obstacles are is the content. If what bothers you is the specific type of obstacle, it’s not the structure that’s the problem. You’d theoretically be bothered just as much by a frame structure that opens with preparations for the inevitable wedding and then flashes back and forth between that and the various miscommunications the characters have been through, or a multiple-viewpoint structure that tells the story of the couple’s growing relationship from twenty different viewpoints as the wedding guests are interviewed for a memory book.
Next week is an Open Mic, but I might have to come up with a “What’s structure and what’s content” post for after that, if people are interested.
PS-I agree with you about the perpetual miscommunication content; it’s very annoying.
I’m simply failing to understand what you mean by “structure” then.
If a protagonist has to both slay an inner demon and defeat an external dragon, then I see a plot change from slaying the demon first and then defeating the dragon to defeating the dragon first and then slaying the demon to be a structural change, rather than a content-change.
Are you saying that demon-first or dragon-first is a matter of content rather than structure? Because I can’t unsee it as being a matter of structure.
Likewise I can’t unsee “characters work together against an external obstacle” and “characters clash against each other as obstacles” as being a matter of structure rather than content.
I’d point out that romance story miscommunications happening or the problem being each other’s personality or actions is content. What order they figure into in the plot is structure. But since your complaint was about miscommunications or “each other” being the obstacles at all, it wasn’t really about structure to the person reading your comment.
Like I could write either of those kinds of stories in a N+1 format or a 3-act and the structure would change but the obstacle types would remain the same.
Exactly.
Lurker: I agree that putting the demon first vs. putting the dragon first is a structural decision. The protagonist has two different obstacles (or perhaps goals) and the writer has to decide which to put first in the story. But that’s true any time a protagonist faces two different obstacles in the same story. It could just as easily be slaying the dragon as one obstacle while a personality clash with another character is another obstacle, or working with a team to defeat an external obstacle while overcoming an inner demon. The structural question is, does Obstacle A come first, or does Obstacle B come first?
“Characters work together against an external obstacle” and “characters clash against each other as obstacles” are not comparable. In the first, there is an unnamed external obstacle, Obstacle A. In the second, you’re describing the content of Obstacle B (a personality clash). As soon as you specify the content of Obstacle A, this becomes clearer: “Characters work together to defeat a dragon (Obstacle) so that they can achieve Goal X” and “Characters have to overcome personality clashes (Obstacle) in order to achieve Goal X.” are pretty clearly the same structure (Characters overcome obstacle to achieve goal). (It would actually be pretty easy to fit both obstacles into the same plotline, with the same problem-obstacle-solution-problem-obstacle-solution structure: Characters have to overcome personality clashes (obstacle A) in order to work together (preliminary goal) so they can defeat the dragon (obstacle B) and rescue the princess (final goal).)
Um. Does it help to think of structure as the pattern, and content as the specifics?
@Kevin–Yet other plot-patterns are equally predictable (“Hero goes on a quest, faces obstacles, and inevitably saves country/world” and “Detective is called on to investigate murder, collects clues, and successfully proves whodunnit”) because they share the same basic structure: protagonist faces obstacles to achieve goal. Again, I’d argue that you and Deep Lurker are both confusing content with structure. Lurker’s point about re-reading being both predictable and pleasurable is spot on; it’s not the predictability that’s the real problem. It’s whether the content is fun/interesting. And that is largely a matter of personal taste, not structure.
The issue for me is that, since the pandemic, I haven’t had as much people contact as before, and it’s affecting characterizations and dialog, things I didn’t have to focus on so much before. What was pretty easy is now pretty hard.
So, fearing that my characters and their speech isn’t as original as it used to be – my content – I’m hoping to be more original in structure to compensate.
Maybe structure vs. content is something you could write more about.
What I enjoy about romance novels isn’t finding out what happens so much as how it happens. With an author who’s good at character development, it can be really interesting to see how these specific characters get to where we all know the plot is taking them.
It’s a matter of taste. It’s like a Shakespeare play. We’d like something to make this staging different, but fundamentally, we want it to be the play.
An example of alternating structure that I like a lot is the YA fantasy novel The Afterward by E. K. Johnston. It goes back and forth between chapters headed “After” (the two protagonists’ lives in the aftermath of their big quest) and “Before” (the events of the quest itself), with a chapter called “More or Less the Exact Moment Of” when the Before chapters reach the climactic moment of the quest.
One of Greg Egan’s novels has one of the most effective structure-breaks I’ve ever seen. It’s been established that what we are following is the POV of one of innumerable parallel-world versions of the protagonist, and we are following the one who gets the lucky breaks to succeed. And then there is a scene where we *aren’t*, and it’s like a kick to the gut when the reader realizes.
To return to genre romance for a moment — Sturgeon’s Law applies, of course. But the fact that we know the outcome is no more an automatic disqualifier than when we open a genre mystery and confidently expect the murderer to be disclosed in the end. I’ve found a comment by Lois McMaster Bujold to be very illuminating:
“Those who spurn romance stories because the outcome seems set are mistaking what the plots are about, I think. The question a romance plot must pose, and answer (showing one’s work!) is not ‘Do these two people get together?’ but rather ‘Can I trust you?’ Which is most certainly not a trivial problem, in art or in life.”
(Response to a reader question on Goodreads (10/30/2017) – https://www.goodreads.com/questions/1208063-hi-there-i-wish-i-could-rant-on-about-how?utm_medium=email&utm_source=author_blog_post_digest)
That said, I echo Deep Lurker’s comment about poor communication. The most annoying tactic, to me, in a romance is to gin up a misunderstanding that could easily have been resolved if the characters had just bothered to ask each other about it. (Unless the failure to do so is *itself* the comic factor — I did that once.)
There are two problems with the failure to talk.
One is when you haven’t set up the characters well enough. OTOH, I have heard this complaint about stories where it was clear that if the other person weren’t trustworthy, talking might be lethal to many characters.
The harder one is that it’s unprogressive. Unless you set it up that the stakes keep rising every time one character fails to speak — and even then, you probably want to reveal in time so that it doesn’t keep trundling onward but veers off into a new direction.
There are some writers that we don’t read for the plot but for the wonderful ways the author expresses it. (P.G. Wodehouse)
I was watching Last of the Summer Wine the other day and noticing a very standard structure, starting with the 3 guys lieing on a hillside, talking nonsense to each other, then going into town and getting someone or each other into a ridiculous situation/misunderstanding. There are standard scenes with other characters. The interest comes from the way it’s done each week.
Same here. I’d add Rex Stout to P.G. Wodehouse: I read Nero Wolfe stories not so much to solve the mysteries, but just to listen to Archie Goodwin talk.
On a random sidenote, I just read an article on story structure I thought you’d enjoy: https://bookviewcafe.com/boy-meets-girl/
Really enjoying this series. I’ve often found structure to be a slippery concept that always seems to make sense for the particular examples people use when illustrating it, but harder to pin down when I’m trying to write a new story. Somehow “We’re in act two, so what should happen next?” is not often a helpful question for me. I suspect this comes down to your point that content and structure are not the same thing, which seems obvious when you say it but does feel like something that gets mixed up a lot (certainly, I think it’s something I have often been confused about).
That is exactly why I don’t find structure useful at the planning-and-making-things-up stage, unless I’m deliberately using something fancier than a single-viewpoint linear structure (e.g., multiple viewpoints, parallel running scenes, nonlinear, etc.) The structure is like a skeleton–it can tell you to write a mammal-story or a bird-story, but it doesn’t tell you how long the fur should be or what color to make the feathers.
[popping the reply thread]
“Um. Does it help to think of structure as the pattern, and content as the specifics?”
Except that certain kinds of “specifics” strike me as pattern-like and structure-y.
It’s what I’d imagine you’d feel if, I dunno, a writing-advice blogger on another forum said “‘Structure’ covers only the number of acts, not the order events portrayed by those acts. That’s ‘chronology,’ not ‘structure.’ A three act story where the where the second act is a flashback, and one where the three acts are in chronological order have the same structure but are different in chronology.”
So I believe, well hope, that I understand what you’re saying, but I just can’t think of structure and content in that way.