Uses of Story Structure, Part 1

icon by Peg Ihinger

Story structure is one of those perennial topics in writing advice, and I haven’t talked about it for a while. So it’s probably time to revisit.

I have two dressers in my bedroom. One was clearly made before the advent of mass production; the other was made after. Both have wooden drawer fronts that attach to the sides of the drawer with dovetail joints (where the edges had alternating pieces cut out, often with a bit of an angle, so that they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle). On the mass-produced dresser, the dovetails and sockets are clearly identical and evenly spaced along the edge. On the handmade one, the dovetails and sockets are unevenly spaced and of clearly different sizes. But in both cases, the dovetails fit the sockets perfectly, with no gaps. That makes them strong enough that when I yank on the drawer handles, the drawers open (instead of having the front of the drawer fall off).

Story structure works the same way—it’s about how all of the story elements fit together to make the story function the way the writer wants it to. The pieces don’t have to all be exactly the same size and shape, and they don’t have to follow the exact same pattern every time. They just have to fit this time, in this story.

Story structure encompasses all of the different story elements—plot, setting, theme, sequence, characters, you-name-it. It’s a framework that can help organize the elements so they’re most effective. But when you’re building a story, you don’t always have to start with the structure. Most of the time, writers start with something else—an idea, a character, a what-if, a plot twist, a setting…whatever tweaks their backbrain. Yet over and over, I see writing advice that advises starting with a three/four/five-act structure, or one of the innumerable versions of Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” so as to make sure a story fits the structure.

That seems backwards to me. Different materials require different structure. A wood-frame house has a different supporting structure than a cinder-block house. A house-sized building needs supporting structure that a dresser drawer doesn’t require. The structure of trees is different from the structure of volcanoes, and different trees have different structures depending on how they branch and what their root systems are like (pine trees vs. elms, for instance). I think the structure depends on the story and what the writer plans to do with it, rather than the other way around.

The different three/four/five-act structures were developed out of mechanical/technical necessity in writing for different performance media. Pre-electricity, half an hour was as long as the candles that lit the theater would burn, so a two-and-a-half-hour play had to have four breaks to change and re-light the candles, or five acts. With the advent of electricity and movies came the eight-sequence structure, also known as the eight-reel structure, because a 120-minute movie took eight reels, and the projectionist to change reels. Then came television, and since people were already used to having breaks every so often in the movies, the production companies used a similar strategy for placing ads. For a one-hour show, there was an ad break every fifteen minutes, so four “acts.” For a half-hour show, the ad breaks came every ten minutes, so three “acts.”

This means that if the writer is writing a script for a TV episode, a movie, or a theatrical production, planning the story development around an act structure is almost a necessity. Even there, however, the characters, plot, events, setting, etc. all still have to fit with each other, and then they have to fit into an act structure that doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room.

The various “hero’s journey” structures have similar issues. For one thing, they aren’t as general as the act structure, which means people keep coming up with variations. (I’ve seen people talk about the three, six, twelve, and seventeen stages of the hero’s journey structure, and if more than one person talks about x-many stages, there are good odds that they don’t call each stage the same thing.) As it turns out, it’s relatively easy for a new writer to come up with a perfect Hero’s Journey plot that doesn’t work at all, because the elements of the story don’t fit together properly. If their story were a dresser drawer, the front would pull right off the first time somebody yanked on the handles, because the sockets are too big for the dovetails.

Novels have different issues. There isn’t a set commercial break every 50 pages, where all the readers will put the book down to go get a sandwich while the commercial plays (though since everybody watches TV and movies, the three- and four-act structures are comfortable and familiar to most readers). There isn’t always a single heroic figure (ensemble casts are a thing). Short stories are even harder to fit into an act structure or a hero’s journey…there simply isn’t enough room for all of the detail.

The act structures and the hero’s journey are pre-set patterns, rather like the identical, evenly-spaced dovetail joints on my mass-produced dresser drawers. They work. They look nice, if you happen to look at the inside edges of your dresser drawers. But a novelist can get the same functionality with unevenly spaced, differently-shaped joints…as long they fit together. The weakness in the plot is supported by the strength of the character development. The characters are just comical enough to lighten up the grimdark plot and moody atmosphere. The fascinating setting and interpersonal tension makes the slow plot build work. The writer’s strong points fill in and support the aspects that the writer struggles with.

The novelist doesn’t have to force the story to adapt to a three, four, or five-act hero’s journey. They can combine and recombine different structures, taking elements from one or more of the presets and mixing them together into something that isn’t quite a five-act journey or a three-act five-beat open-ending. Or they can let the structure grow organically and not worry about it until the second or third draft. Next week, I’m going to talk about playing with structure.