Story Structure: Overstated

From Mythcreants Blog: The Problem With Following Popular Story “Structures,” or, A Dark Night of the Soul for Made-up Nonsense.

I laughed, and I’m ready to agree. Not sure I WILL agree, but that’s my first reaction, because I do think all these notions about “The inciting incident should happen at the 10% mark, you have to have an intimate moment at the 40% mark,” and so on are seriously overstated even for Romance, which is where a lot of this comes from, and worse for other genres. Not necessary wholly and utterly wrong, but not to be taken very seriously.

At Mythcreants, we have written a lot over the years about how popular story “structures” don’t work as advertised. We’ve covered The Hero’s Journey, Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Three-Act Structure, Kishōtenketsu, Virgin’s Promise, and Save the Cat, both Blake Snyder’s original flavor and Jessica Brody’s attempt to repackage it for novels. There are many more we haven’t directly mentioned, usually because we don’t want to give them free publicity. 

While those articles remain useful for showing why these arbitrary pseudo-structures don’t work, there is something missing. Our previous coverage can give the impression that there’s merely no benefit to the structures in question, which can leave them feeling quality-neutral. But after watching multiple clients actively make their stories worse thanks to these structures, I’m confident in saying they’re not neutral at all. Arbitrary requirements are negative across the board, and I’m happy to explain why.  

Whoa. Okay, so they’re way past my “overstated” and into “harmful garbage nonsense.” Fine, Mythcreants, explain why …

When authors try to follow these supposedly all-encompassing structures, they have to discard any ideas that don’t fit. Which will be most of them, since even a really long advice book can’t begin to capture the countless options at a storyteller’s disposal. … [Big Snip Here] … If you can get past the concept phase with your story intact, the next problem is that a lot of the advice in these structures is just silly. If you follow it, your story will be a strange read indeed. 

Okay, now I’m really interested. Silly how?

One of the pseudo-structures we haven’t mentioned before is Story Grid, but I have to break that silence now because it is such a perfect example of giving nonsense suggestions. Story Grid has something called a “polarity shift” or “value shift” in which characters completely change how they feel about something, which according to the book is supposed to happen in most scenes, or maybe every scene! Did you write a scene where characters don’t completely change their mind about something? Better go back and change that. … [Big Snip Again] … Why do pseudo-structures give this kind of bizarre advice? I can’t say for certain, but I suspect it’s because when a problem is complex and stubborn, there’s a powerful allure in doing something, anything. Stories are difficult to understand and even more so to write. Polarity switches are a terrible idea, but they’re easy to identify as action. This is very tempting to new writers who are feeling overwhelmed. 

The thing is, to me, this sort of advice seems largely harmless because it would never occur to me to try to follow it. However, the author of this post … looks like Oren Ashkenazi … seems to work with aspiring authors who have frequently screwed up their novels because they were trying to force their novel into some structure or other. Maybe he’s an editor or “writing coach” — not a term I’m all that fond of — because otherwise it would be strange to see this a lot. He says, When I work with authors, there’s one sign above all that they’ve been misled by pseudo-structures: they try to add scenes that have no reason to be there. So it must happen quite a lot?

Regardless, here is the basic argument that Ashkenazi is presenting in this post:

What do you think makes a story good? Is it creative wordcraft? An exciting plot? Deep and believable characters? What about insightful political commentary or the communication of authentic life experiences? For our purposes today, those are all equally valid measurements, and pseudo-structures almost never help with any of them. Syd Field’s three-act structure can tell you that act two should contain confrontations, obstacles, and tests of character, but it can’t tell you how to make any of that matter to readers.

Bold is mine, and I think this is basically a true statement, and I think Ashkenazi is making a persuasive argument that structural frameworks, presented as prescriptive straightjackets, are harmful. Here is what I think is much more harmful:

A tendency to take writing advice seriously.

And offhand, I think most of the time an aspiring author would be better off if they turned off the internet, ignored all writing advice, read a lot of novels. Then, when they want to learn how to do something — anything, basically — they should open a novel where that thing is done and see how it worked in that novel.

This is because even advice that’s good for some authors is terrible for other authors [Here is where you can insert the continual drumbeat of outline, outline, outline, you should outline, you’d be faster if you outlined]. And most advice isn’t good for some authors; it’s just wrong [avoid adverbs, avoid adjectives, avoid passive voice, “said” is invisible, don’t use dialogue tags, on and on forever]. To this, I guess we can add advice that the inciting incident must happen at 10% or whatever else is indicated by story structure guides. The thing is, if you’ve read a thousand novels, shouldn’t you have noticed that there are lots of counter examples to every possible story structure you can find? And doesn’t that indicate that these things are gentle guidelines at most?

Okay, here’s my actual advice: If you’re looking at ANY story structure, such as Save the Cat or The Hero’s Journey or this Story Grid thing or any other possible structure, the FIRST thing to do is think of ten novels you like and see whether those novels fit that structure. And if ANY of them don’t, there you go, you don’t have to take that structure seriously and treat it like a straightjacket. Whatever is useful in it, use that part. Anything that’s not useful, throw it away.

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