The Bones of Story Structure

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Stories are strange, fantastical creatures, built on bones called story structure. They can be any shape – though some shapes are more easily accepted than others. Sometimes only their authors can see the beauty in them.

My stories tend to be commercial in that they follow a popular structure: a hook into the characters and action of the novel, an event or reveal that kicks the plot into full swing, followed by a pinch of trouble, then the big midpoint plot twist, a giant heaping or more trouble, the final piece of the plot puzzle that brings it all together, then the big showdown.

Or that’s the structure I’m aiming for, more or less. My first drafts rarely emerge that recognizable.

If that structure is a fish, my first drafts have fins sprouting from their heads and gills not at all connected to the respiratory system. They flop and wriggle and gasp and die, leaving me looking at this . . . thing that might resemble a fish if I took it all apart and reassembled it from scratch.

I’ve done that, and find it infinitely rewarding to draw a fish from the previously unviable, mutated thing. Maybe the fins aren’t all in the right place yet and an eye ended up in the belly, but revision will fix that.

In the end, I’ll have a fish. As long as the underlying story structure is right.

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