Story structure – the essential fundamentals of every good story

I review and critique a lot of books, pre and post published. Most of the authors write well; good grammar, reasonable diction, understandable. What they don’t do well is structure their stories.

This is often evident in the first few paragraphs and certainly by the end of the first chapter. It’s the main reason readers abandon a book even if it has a good story premise.

Here are the essential fundamentals of every good story. Disregard them at your own risk.

Begin in media res – in the middle of the action.

It’s not uncommon for an author to begin a story and realize the first three chapters are backstory – laying groundwork for the beginning. This is a mistake and a big one. The solution is not to take an action scene from the middle of the book, put it at the beginning and call it a prologue. This only postpones the inevitable – three subsequent chapters of boring backstory.

All this information is valuable for you to understand your characters and how they think, feel, look and react. However, it’s not necessary for the reader to know all of it.

Identify the inciting incident and begin there. Remove everything that comes before it.

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Now insert only what is necessary to give the reader context. Avoid anything that distracts from the story experience even momentarily. Ideally, facts and information the reader needs should not be forced on him, but be inserted subtly and always be timely, relevant, motivated and, above all, minimal.

The inciting incident

This is the moment when your protagonist’s status quo is upended, a situation takes place that must to be resolved. Something important, dramatic, serious has taken place that propels your hero into action and sets the story in motion.

From this inciting incident, the reader must learn three things about the protagonist:

His Goal – what he wants.

His Motivation – why he wants it.

The Conflict – what is preventing him from attaining his goal?

Write down the GMC and refer to every time you begin to write. It will keep your story focused.

These four elements need to be introduced very early in the story, the first page, even the first paragraph, but certainly in the first chapter so the reader understand what’s at stake. It’s always best to open with action. Action that hooks the reader and keeps them turning the pages to find out what happens next.

Don’t begin with:

• Backstory. The history of your characters, the town, the country, the political climate.

• Character Description. The features of your characters; his height, hair and eye colour, that crease between his eyebrows.

• Setting description. Use just what’s needed for context: This world or on another planet, day or night, inside or outside, and a clue as to whether the story is happening now, in the past, or in the future.

The Story Arc

Once you have established the four story essentials, challenge your hero with one obstacle after another as he tries to achieve his goal. Stories are about conflict, intense conflict that is either life threatening or threatening to a way of life. Keep the conflicts coming and increase their severity and importance. As the tension climbs so does the story arc until it peaks. At this point you’ve reached the climax of the story, the ultimate battle, life or death, love or loss. The hero either wins or loses.

The Denouement

Following the climax, the story quickly winds down, tying up loose ends until it ends.

– Don’t leave the reader with unresolved issues.

– Don’t introduce new characters or plot threads.

The Ending

A good ending doesn’t have to be anticipated, but it must feel appropriate. To be satisfying, the goal the protagonist was after has to be resolved, though not necessarily successfully. This is the physical journey. Furthermore, the protagonist must have changed internally (spiritually, emotionally, morally) during his pursuit of the goal. This is the internal journey.

TIPS

Write for the reader. Get rid of author indulgences – those things you find really interesting but have no relevance to the story or the character.

Less is better. Try to write your story with as few words as possible.

Eliminate:

– Redundancies

– Unnecessary description

– Unnecessary actions

– Unnecessary speaker attributions

– Most adverbs

– The words “that” and “just”.

The cardinal rule is, if it doesn’t develop character or advance the plot delete it.

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