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 common structures: the act structure (whether they split into three, four, or five acts, and however many “beats” are included in each act, the structural shape is still the same), and the Hero’s Journey. And at least thirty to forty percent of such discussions never mention alternatives at all – they begin and end with the notion that the act structure/ Hero’s Journey is the best – or even the only – story structure possible.
News flash: there are a lot more than two structural patterns available to novel writers. Further news: Stories and plots do not all follow the same structural pattern, nor do they all need structural patterns based on when things happen. When a story gets turned into a novel, the most effective structure is the one that will enhance the themes and connections the writer wants to present. Defaulting to an act structure or Hero’s Journey is not the only choice, much less automatically the best choice.
The act structure, the Hero’s Journey, or some combination/variation of the two is probably the most common novel/plot structure in modern Western fiction (especially genre fiction), and I’ll talk more about that next week. But there’s a difference between stories that fall naturally into that structural pattern and stories that don’t.
Both the act structure and the Hero’s Journey structure focus on the order and the spacing of the plot events on a chronological timeline. Discussions of them often focus not just on the chronological plot, but on assigning key events to particular points in the total word count: an Inciting Incident or Call to Action at 20%; a Crossing The Threshold incident, reversal, end of Act I, or Plot Point I at 25%; a pinch point, midpoint, turning point, twist, or end-of-Act II (if more than three acts) at 50%; a Temptation, Dark Moment, Plot Point II, or End of Act III/II at 75%; a Climax or Final Battle; and the Resolution, Return Home, or End of Act IV/III/the story at, well, The End.
Constructing a story plot in chronological order with a series of specific events in a predetermined order and set spacing has at least two major problems. First, there are stories that fit this structure well … and there are stories that don’t. A writer who wants to tell the latter sort of story will end up having to put a lot of work into making their story fit the structure. It’s like the stepsisters in Cinderella cutting off pieces of their feet in order to fit into the glass slipper. Heaven forbid that their Inciting Incident happen 22% of the way through the word count rather than 20%! Not to mention the angst that happens when the writer calculates everything on the assumption that the story will be 100,000 words, and it ends up being 120,000 or 80,000 instead, throwing off all their act endings, pinch points, etc.
Second, starting from the assumption that the most common structure is automatically the best structure (and especially the “best” structure for all stories) makes it more difficult for writers to consider alternative structures, even when one of those would be a far more effective and interesting way of getting at the story/themes/ideas they want to tell. Worse yet, some folks not only limit themselves this way, but go to extremes to limit everyone else. I’ve see people in a critique circle practically froth at the mouth in their attempt to make someone else “straighten out” a nonlinear story by removing all the flashbacks and putting everything in “proper” chronological order. Instead of being one of many choices, the most common options become a formulaic straightjacket.
Thinking about more advanced aspects of structure is frequently best left for after one has a first draft. This is because structure is not really a plotting tool that’s useful in advance for most writers, most of the time. It’s a skeleton.
Most people, writers or not, do not begin to construct a character (or describe a person) by describing their bones or saying “They had two legs, each with a knee-joint about halfway between the foot and the hip…” unless they’re describing an extraterrestrial who may have two knee-like joints on each leg. Even in the case of extraterrestrials, I do not know of any writers who begin making up a character by considering what their skeletal structure is like. They all start with other factors: height, weight, hair and eye color; fur, scales, feathers; compound eyes, sonar, infra-red sight; wings, tail, claws, fangs. Then they research what kind of skeletal structure that sort of being might have. The only time most of the writers I know consider their characters’ skeletons early in the process of making them up is if there is something unusual about it – they lost a leg or an arm; one wing is twisted and unusable; their exoskeleton has an obvious and unsightly patch where it was cracked and repaired.
Story structure, for at least 99% of the writers I know, works the same way – that is, most writers do not start with structure, or even consider it early on, unless they are consciously and deliberately doing something different with it (like strictly alternating present-day chapters with flashback chapters). Most writers start with the story they want to tell, and work out the “how they want to tell it” part as they go along. And yes, in a lot of cases that means they end up with an act structure – it is, after all, the most common structure in modern Western fiction (especially if one includes TV and movies, which have a four-act structural formula baked into their requirements).
So next week I am planning to talk about using (rather than misusing) the common story structures.
/unlurk
I’ve been finding more and more books and movies boring due to the use of a rigid structure that so many others do. As a reader the experience is ‘ho-hum, here’s the first obstacle; here comes the twist; the race against time… so on and so forth.” THey can (probably) still be used, but they’ve gotten incredibly obvious and I would love to see more variety in ways to structure the narrative.
/unlurk too
Same here. In fact it has started putting me off formerly-favorite authors, as once I became aware of their invariant plot-and-pacing structures, it kept intruding: eg. this here novel’s pacing has accelerated thusly, therefore we’re entering the final battle, during which I shall be confused as it rushes past what I wanted to see.
Same applies to “twists” — increasingly, I-as-reader find them tedious. I’m tired of being “surprised” by what in hindsight was the prescribed twist, and how every scene’s gotta have one. This often deflates whatever tension has built up, because that prescribed twist is a sort of relief valve: “What I feared won’t happen, cuz it’ll be something else!”
/rant
I find it useful when faced with a gap between the beginning and the end that needs turning points.
I’m at present faced with a gap between the beginning and the end that needs *words.* What I have right now is about 65 kw. I know (or rather, I hope) the battle at the end will come to about another 20kw. This is not enough.
I looked in some of the old rasf-c posts I saved to disk long ago, and found Mary Kay Kare complaining “Why aren’t there any short novels any more?” and Teresa Nielsen Hayden saying, “They don’t sell.”
(That was in 2001. So have salable novels gone down in length, or risen to even more terrifying altitudes?)
I can probably find something else to happen between the existing text and the exciting battle, but I fear it would look like what it would be: something shoved into the middle for the sake of length.
My alternate path is to give up on making it the first volume of a trilogy (yes, yes, I know) and making it the first section of three, same protagonist, three different planets.
Anybody have any suggestions?
Any possibility of adding a sub-plot? That way you could add length throughout the story, rather than in a chunk at the end. It would need to tie into/contribute to the final battle so it’s not floating loose.
Maybe the Hero’s younger sibling/sidekick/ sweetheart decides to quietly follow him/her, and shows up holding a weapon at the final battle. (I am terrible at out-of-context ideas.)
The hero has a couple of sidekicks, actually, one a teenaged boy, the other a robot. But they’re in one place, the Hero’s in another, and a couple of kilometers of (a) vacuum or (b) tunnel they can’t get into lie between.
Hm. There’s a powerful official in the same place where the boy and the bot are, and he’s a good guy in this volume (he will fall from grace in Book 3; think of Saruman before and after he fell). And the official has met the boy and knows about the bot. Hmmm. I would have to plant their cooperation in earlier chapters, which might generate more sub-plots than one.
Thanks!
Glad to help.
Personally I would be delighted to see a return to ~85K novels. IMO, the reason they don’t sell is because there aren’t any on the shelves to buy.
I fear the standard salable length has risen to positively nosebleed levels. Which may explain why I so frequently find myself bored at about the 3/4 point of novels these days; they may be decently well-written, but I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of “Are we there yet?” It’s not impossible to write a consistently engaging 120K+ book, but most of the new stuff I read would be better if it was shorter.
Which I recognize is no help to you at all, as I am not an acquiring editor. *shrug*
Length can be shorter for indie published books—I’ve seen authors coming in closer to 60-80k words. I think it’s more acceptable for indies because ebooks can be priced lower and there’s no overhead for print.
I intentionally put the Big Action Scene at the “wrong” place in the novel I’m currently finishing revisions on. It doesn’t fit the classical structure(s), but I wanted to emphasize what came after.
Besides, I’m with Elaine Thompson. I don’t want to bore anyone following anything rigid. And as a writer I certainly don’t want to be predictable.
In the interest of playing devil’s advocate, I’d like to voice an idea I’ve heard a lot lately, that many readers (including “whale” readers that read a book a day or more) like the familiar structure—they like to read a specific kind of thing and want each book to be “the same but different.” I’ve personally found it comforting, at the “black moment” of a romance or somewhere in the middle of a mystery, knowing that it will play out a particular way and everything will end happily.
That’s not to say that all books should follow the same structural pattern (I get bored with predictability too), but I do think there’s value in the familiar.
Oh, absolutely. It’s just not what I want or want to write, that’s all.
But I think that “telling the familiar” in a new structural pattern could be exciting to read! E.g. see Patricia’s recent blog post about how the Cinderella story could be told in different structures. That’s another way to be “the same but different” as you put it.
I’ve found Patricia’s most recent half-dozen posts really helpful for thinking about how we put together stories. I think that the rigid story structure issues she raises tend to be a particular problem in books aimed at middle-grade readers,likely because writers or editors assume (wrongly) that they have to keep things simple and straightforward.
I’ve been reading a lot of new MG fantasies lately, because that’s what I’m working on; and I have to say that even a lot of the well-written ones show a paint-by-numbers consistency in their structural design.