Why do novels have chapters, and how do you figure out where to start or end them? Well, not all novels do have chapters ( see most of Terry Pratchett’s books and John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless for example). Most do, though, and have since the
Read more →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.
Read more →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
Read more →Back when I still had a day job, I was a financial analyst. It is therefore really unsurprising that I enjoy looking at writing systems that are very structured and involve analyzing stories to pick out what works or doesn’t work. There are, however, a couple of
Read more →Back in high school, I took a semester of journalism. The teacher focused hard on the “5 W’s and an H”—Who, What, When, Where, Why and How—and also on the structure of a news story (most important stuff in the first paragraph, steady increase in interesting-but-less-important details
Read more →Like setup and foreshadowing (see last week’s post), payoff and consequences aren’t quite the same thing. If you look up the definitions, the writing-relevant one for “payoff” is “a final outcome or conclusion,” while the one for “consequences” is “the result or effect of an action or
Read more →Multiple viewpoint stories, especially the sort that are occasionally termed “bestseller style,” have become increasingly popular over the past couple of decades – popular with would-be writers, at least. Some people hear the saying that “viewpoint solves everything” and assume that it means all they have to
Read more →I’ve talked a bit about the difference between plot and structure, and some of the ways structure is currently being misused (in my opinion). But structure is still a massively useful concept, and that usefulness is the reason behind the huge focus so many how-to-write books and
Read more →Almost all of the references I can find on structure start by talking about the order things happen in. They basically approach structure as playing with chronology through flashbacks and other not-strictly-linear storytelling techniques. Once they’ve said that, 98% immediately revert to talking about one of two
Read more →Structure and plot are getting confused with each other more and more lately. It isn’t surprising. As I’ve pointed out before, writing terminology has never been truly standardized. Many terms, like “viewpoint” get used for more than one thing, and “plot” and “structure” are frequently treated as
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