How Perfect Does Your Story’s Structural Timing Have to Be?

Structural timing is one of most prominent features of story structure. This positioning of a story’s important turning points is one of the keys for creating a story that feels right to audiences. As often as not, when something seems off about a story, the problem can be narrowed down to wonky structural timing. This makes structural timing one of the most accessible tools writers can use to troubleshoot weak areas of a story.

However, structural timing is also an aspect of story structure that many writers find frustrating or confusing. How are you supposed to time a story when even you may not be sure how long the finished draft will be? Doesn’t following a precise map for a story’s timing mean your story is more likely to feel formulaic to readers? And, perhaps most commonly, just how precise does a story’s structural timing have to be?

I hear these questions often, particularly that last one. Here’s an email I received recently from reader Teresa Kline:

I have a question about the length of each act in a novel, that I’m hoping you can answer. I’m revising my book plot in prep for my second draft, and I find that my First Act is probably about half the length it should be, compared to how long everything else is (more like 12.5% of the total word count, rather than 25%). So my question is, does it ever work to have three acts that don’t stick super close to the 25%/50%/25% breakdown, or should that be my signal that my First Act isn’t doing everything it should be doing?

Today, I want to take a closer look at the mechanics of structural timing. What is it? Why is it important at all? And, finally, how can you hack your story’s structural timing to make the most of this super-useful storytelling metric?

What Ideal Structural Timing Looks Like

Structuring Your Novel (Amazon affiliate link)

To get us started, let’s take a quick refresher on what structural timing is. If you’ve hung around this site much, you probably know that whenever I discuss the beats of story structure, I almost always reference the beat’s timing within the story by indicating at what percentage of the whole that beat should ideally fall.

We come to these percentages by realizing that the arc of a story can almost always be naturally divided into eight equal pieces. Although there is much discussion within the writing community about the various merits and distinctions of stories that are composed of “three acts,” “five acts,” or even more, I find that these “eight sections” can almost always be identified regardless how the acts are analyzed.

This is how I break down these eight sections within a Three Act system:

First Act – 1%–25%

Hook – 1%

Inciting Event – 12%

Second Act – 25%–75%

First Plot Point – 25%

First Pinch Point – 37%

Midpoint – 50%

Second Pinch Point – 62%

Third Act – 75%-100%

Third Plot Point – 75%

Climax  – 88%

Resolution – 100%

These major structural moments within the story are spaced approximately 12% of the story apart from each other. This means that in a film of 120 minutes, each section (such as that between the Inciting Event and the First Plot Point) will be given approximately 15 minutes. In a novel of 150,000 words, each section will represent approximately 19,000 words. (When analyzing structural timing in a published book, you can break it down using page count instead.) The easiest way to arrive at these figures is simply to take the overall running time or word/page count and divide it by eight.

Why Does Structural Timing Matter at All?

At this point, many organic or math-averse writers may start freaking out a little. (If you’re like me, you probably became a writer in part because you got along with words way better than you did numbers.) All this talk about structural timing just seems so… clinical and precise. Why does timing even matter all that much to a story? As long as you have a beginning, a middle, and an end—and stuff happening in every scene—why do you need to worry about getting a turning point in there every eighth of the story?

Here is possibly the single most important thing to understand about story structure: it is all about pacing.

That’s it.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

Structure in itself, of course, also offers a guideline for creating the actual arc of the story, in which the “stuff happening” is meaningful and creates a psychological journey. But the timing? That’s all about pacing. And pacing, ultimately, is all about keeping your audience’s attention (I like to think of pacing as a writer’s version of superpowered mind control).

Pacing begins on the sentence level of your story, which indicates to readers whether any given moment in the story is tense, important, and fast—or relaxed, low-key, and leisurely. Pacing then becomes even more powerful and crucial when you move it up to the scene level and then to the structural level.

Nothing affects your story’s overall pacing more than its structural turning points. Those nine beats listed above, and the eight sections they create in their interstices, control the pacing of your entire story. They determine whether enough is happening in your story and whether or not it is happening at a rate that honors plot and character development while also preventing tedium.

How Much Wiggle Room Do You Have When Timing Your Story’s Plot Points?

Now let’s get down to the main question writers ask. When we say your Midpoint, for example, needs to take place at the 50% mark, how precise does that really have to be? Does the Midpoint have to begin at the 50% mark, end at the 50% mark, or should the 50% mark take place in the middle of the Midpoint? What if you’ve examined your story’s timing and realized you’re off by 2%? What about 5%, 10%, or even more?

The easy answer here: the timing doesn’t necessarily have to be precise.

The more complicated answer is that it depends on the overall length of your entire story. The reason for this is that in a very long work (such as a novel), timing and pacing don’t need to be as tight as they do in a shorter work (such as a film or short story). A good rule of thumb is that the longer the work, the more wiggle room you have. In very long novels (such as, say, epic fantasy), the pacing won’t necessarily suffer even with timing deviations of as much as 15%.

And that’s really all that matters. As long as the pacing works, so does the structural timing.

However, there are some big caveats here.

2 Caveats to Consider if Your Story Has Less-Than-Perfect Structural Timing

The first caveat is that the longer your story, the longer the sections between structural turning points will already be. In a 300,000-word fantasy, we’re talking huge stretches of story in between the main events. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. If every scene is truly interesting and is moving the plot forward toward the next important structural moment, then these wordy expanses can hold readers’ attention just fine.

However, in analyzing super-long fiction, I’ve noticed this is often not the case. Quite often, there really isn’t that much happening to justify the extra length in these stories. When this test of the readers’ patience is then exacerbated by late (or weak) structural beats, the difference can mean tens of thousands more words before something interesting happens. This affects pacing which can in turn affect reader patience and interest.

The second caveat is that when you mess with the ideal structural timing of one structural beat, this affects the timing of all the other beats. Even if you get the timing back on track later, at least one structural section will inevitably be short-changed.

For example, let’s consider the First Plot Point. This beat should ideally take place at the 25% mark, bridging the Normal World of the First Act and the Adventure World of the Second Act. If this beat takes place noticeably late—let’s say at the 32% mark—this means one of the later sections will necessarily be 7% shorter. That’s more than half its allotted space within the story.

Now sometimes this won’t matter. Sometimes you can distribute that 7% across all the remaining structural sections, preventing any one section from feeling short-changed. It’s also possible you might be able to accomplish everything that needs to structurally happen between the First Plot Point and the subsequent First Pinch Point without making it feel rushed. Again, it’s all about pacing. If the pacing works, the structure works.

Bottom line: make sure enough important development is taking place in overlong sections to keep readers reading, while also making sure all the necessary structural development is present in any shortened sections that follow.

5 Tips for Massaging Your Story’s Structural Timing

Are you ready to start examining the structural timing in your story? Here are five tips to help you balance ideal structural timing and realistic development within the constraints of your story’s unique needs and challenges.

1. Figure Out Where Your Percentage Marks Fall

For starters, evaluate your story’s “ideal” structural timing by dividing its total length into eighths. If you’re working in Word, you can add in a Track Changes comment with a note where each beat should be; if you’re working in Scrivener, you can divide the story into folders. Then examine how closely your existing structural beats line up with this timing. (If you’re wanting to estimate structural timing before you finish the first draft, see this post.)

2. Examine the Pacing in Each Section

Maybe your timing is already pretty close to perfect. In that case, congratulations, you’re probably a natural-born pacer! If the percentages fall within a range of 5% in a long work, that’s probably close enough to not even worry about. After all, structural beats don’t happen in isolation; the story builds into them and out of them. It’s not even that important to identify exactly when a structural beat begins and ends.

However, if you find any of your structural beats significantly off the ideal mark, the first thing you’ll want to do is examine the entire structural section that precedes it.

How’s the pacing?Does it feel rushed?On closer examination, it it obvious a lot of words or even scenes are spent on moments where not much happens?

Now look at the section(s) that follow.

Do they seem too long or too short?Too slow or too rushed?

If the timing problems compound the deeper you get into the story, you have consider at which particular point the bill comes due. If you end up with a Climax that’s only 5% of a very long book, that can feel anticlimactic to readers.

On other hand, maybe your timing isn’t perfect throughout, but there’s no obvious moment where this becomes a problem. In this case, your pacing is probably fine.

3. Lengthen Short Sections by Looking for Missing Pieces of Plot or Character Arc

If you find yourself identifying problematic sections that are too short, the main problems will probably have to do with “missing pieces” of causal development. Examine the purpose of that particular structural section. Does it have enough space to do its job?

For example, if the short section is the very first one in the book, this means there will be little build-up to the Inciting Event, which is meant to be the turning point halfway through the First Act (ideally, at the 12% mark). In this case, you can ask yourself if you’ve included enough set up. Have you introduced or foreshadowed all the important characters, settings, etc.? Have you established your protagonist’s Normal World and set up the thematically important Lie the Character Believes? Go back to the basics and make sure they’re all there.

4. Shorten Lengthy Sections by Cutting Unnecessary Scenes and Trimming Word Count

On the other hand, if you find yourself recognizing sections that are longer than the ideal, the culprit is often simply wordiness.

Are there scenes that could be cut, condensed, or combined with other scenes to progress the plot with a surer hand?What about words?

Sometimes just doing a thorough search for unnecessary “filler” words can help you dramatically streamline your story and its pacing.

5. Bring In Your Beta Readers

After doing everything you can to bring wayward structural timing back into alignment, you may find that some sections are still significantly off from the ideal. That means it’s time to bring in the big guns: the beta readers.

Send your story to a couple readers and get their take on whether or not the pacing works. The only two questions you really need to know the answer to here are:

Were you ever bored (i.e., did the story feel slow to you anywhere)?Were you ever confused or disoriented (i.e., did the story rush through crucial development somewhere)?

If readers are happy, it’s a solid bet the pacing is good, and if the pacing is good, it’s a good bet the structural timing is just fine. If you find readers aren’t happy, examining your story’s structural timing against the ideal is a great way to find and strengthen weak sections.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you find structural timing a useful tool when writing your stories? Tell me in the comments!

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