On Storycraft: Part 3 - Story Structure (Part 1 of 2)

Ah, story structure. The architectural design of your story. Whether you plot and outline or write organically, you can't ignore this aspect of development. Well, you can... but it's going to make your story seem poorly paced, either rushing forward too fast or slogging along and never really getting anywhere. Story structure provides a general guideline for several aspects to a good story and deciding on it early on is a good idea. But what exactly is 'structure' in a story, and how do you keep it from 'killing your creativity' or 'stifling your art'? 

To the first part of that question: Story Structure is the skeleton of your story onto which you graft all the muscles, hang all the organs, and wrap all the nerves and arteries. Abstract, huh? You should see some of the other similes I've come across. Try this: Story Structure is the platform and strategy which allows you to deliver your story in an ordered fashion (not necessarily in order, mind you) that optimizes the reader's investment, empathy, and sense of expectation to keep them engaged and lead them from point A to point Z under your careful guidance. 

With a solid structure in place, you have control not just over your story, but over the reader. For all those out there who eschew story structure as the tool of hacks and n00bs, think on that for a moment. I combed the internets for any reference to a book or author who claimed to entirely lack structure and found this many: 0. (if you know of one, comment below, I'd love to take a look). Now, this would seem like 'writing 101' or even '100'; how can you write a story that doesn't have structure in the first place?

Well, you can't. Not if you can call it a story. At bare minimum you've got to have beginning, middle, and end, right? The penultimate structural template. Unless the point of your story is to force the reader to ask a critical question... and then leave them to contemplate the answer on their own. In that case you have a beginning, a middle, and a place where it stops. I actually saw a play recently called 'Our Country's Good' which seemed to me to use this... technique, we'll call it. It's a great play, but it ends at the end of the second act (story-wise, not stage-wise.) A great claim is made that the play is not Aristotelian in it's structure and that kind of holds up--but there is your classic inciting incident, development following because of that, and a final consequence. In this case, the consequences, however, are up for debate--the third act effectively happens in the minds of the Audience afterward. It was a pretty wildly famous play, too; so think on that. It's a big risk, though, and a book is not a play, nor visa versa. 

But, although virtually all (professional, paid) writers will agree that these three bits are necessary to a story, there's a lot of argument about what are called 'Acts'--the distinct phases of a story. There's also a lot of confusion between what are 'acts' and what are 'beats', because they are not the same, and have very different uses and purposes in a story. One is a hammer, the other a screwdriver, and your metaphorical house is going to kill someone if you get them confused.
Three Acts: The Darling Arguably the most popular structure, Three acts reflects nearly everything about life--beginning, middle, end. We wake up, live our day, go to sleep. Breakfast, lunch, dinner; we're born, we live, we die. The sun rises, arcs over the sky, and sets. The moon does the same thing. (There's a seven act analogy in there, that's later though, stay with me.) This Act structure (again, different that beats) is classic, well known, and reflected in every single story ever told. Even if the end is disappointing or unresolved, there's still an end.  

The three acts of this structure are broken into their very widest parts--Setup, Confrontation, Resolution. They go by lots of other names as well, but those are the ones you're likely to run into again and again, and they describe them pretty well. In act one you introduce the protagonist(s) and hurl them into the conflict of the story, in the second act you build that conflict and have your protagonist confront it (with beats which I mentioned before and will mention again in a moment), and in the third act you resolve the conflict in some way (not always happily--look at The Empire Strikes Back, right?) In this model, the second act is generally the longest, and is where almost all of the important development of the story takes place. Experts have some range of theories as to what the proportion should be, but the most common model seems to be that the first act takes up the first fifth (20%) of the book, the second act lasts until the last quarter (middle 55%) and the third act is in the last quarter (25%). You'll see this a lot in commercial genre fiction, so as a 'formula' to use the term loosely, it does work. Five Acts: The Classic A little after Aristotle claimed the primacy of the Three Act structure, a guy named Horace proposed a Five Act structure as ideal. He didn't invent it, but you could say he wrote it down and popularized it--and believed that a play should have no more or less than Five Acts. Shakespeare agreed and although most of the literature revolves around the Dramatic Arts, a play and a book are not far apart--in one, you put the actors on the stage, and in the other you put them in the reader's head. 

Five acts are classically labeled Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Denoument (or sometimes Resolution, Catastrophe, Catharsis... the fifth act is a little like Satan--known by a hundred names.) Like I said, this is most often seen in Dramatic productions rather than books... or is it?

Examined closely, the 'Exposition' is the introduction and set up--the Players are revealed, and a glimpse of what life is like for them initially is demonstrated. This set-up is necessary to show the first change, which leads into the Rising Action--the series of events starting from that first incident and escalating to the climax. Classically, the Main Characters (MCs, I call 'em after this) or protagonists, etc., struggle and generally have things not go their way, until the Climax. 
We're trained to think of the Climax as the final confrontation, the point at which everything comes to a head. In a five act structure, however, the Climax is said to be merely the turning point for the MCs; the point at which things finally begin to go their way (mostly), and which ultimately leads them proactively toward the Falling Action. This fourth act is when the Antagonistic and Protagonistic characters (or forces, good luck with that) collide and the readers or viewers are often caused a final moment of suspense as they wonder what the outcome will be. That outcome is both delivered, its consequences displayed, in the fifth act, or Denoument (or one of a hundred other names--Old Scratch, the Beast... oh, wait, right; not those.)  Other Structures: 7, 9, hell, 11! There are structures with more 'acts' but I'm not going to lay them out. 7 and 9 acts seem to be popular mostly with television, especially television movies, because they allow for commercial breaks and are broken up in such a way that the movie will keep viewers watching after the show breaks for commercial. Yes, you can apply them to a novel but... let's talk about acts themselves instead. (Also good luck finding a real comprehensive resource about what makes a 7 and 9 act structure actually work...) What the heck is an 'Act' anyway? I'm going to offer a somewhat radical opinion here, and you can take it for what it's worth. I'm no James Scott Bell--but I gleaned something that I believe to be fundamentally basic to story theory that for some reason I haven't seen written down anywhere, in large part due to JSB's books. It's the nature of an 'Act'.

An 'Act' in a story is a section of the story which leads to a critical decision or turning point for the MC, after which there is no going back--the decision cannot be unmade, the consequences of the decision must be faced, the change that occurs because of it is permanent and can only be overcome by going through, not around. Whether that's internal or external, that is the essence of an 'Act'. Each portion of the story that shows this journey can be considered an Act, whether you have three, five, seven, nine, or any other number of them. 


Now, in a standard length novel of around four hundred pages or a hundred-thousand words, like it or not you'll most likely end up with three or four acts. What, four acts? Yes--in his book, "Write Your Novel From the Middle", JSB talks about the critical middle point of a novel which he boils down to "The Midpoint Moment." Read the book, it's very good, and it's friggin' three dollars. You don't have an excuse. 


The Midpoint Moment that he talks about is the point at which the MC transitions from being re-active to pro-active, often due to a moment of reflection, an inner confrontation, an external revelation, or some other device which galvanizes him or her (or them) to pursue the goal intentionally. This has the potential to be a "never going back" moment, and if it is, then surprise, your story has four acts. The essence of the story is changed after each act, and if it has changed then you've entered a new act. 

Your epic eight-hundred page fantasy sci-fi extravaganza may have a dozen acts (don't underestimate how little story actually fits into a hundred thousand words; really, three or four acts barely fits, and you come to those critical points faster than you think.) In each act there's a kind of mini-story at play; an introduction, some rising action, some conflict, and a climax that ultimately culminates in the decision the MC makes, from which they cannot return or run away from. How to plan wisely Thinking of Acts in this light allows for something neat when it comes to planning your story. You have the freedom to look at the character's relationship to the story in phases that give you the barest essence of a good story, and a context by which to enter the process of writing each Act--whether you do them in order or not. 

But, you don't need to pick an arbitrary number of acts ahead of time. Instead, think of a beginning, and an end (it's worthwhile to think of an end in terms of "how things are afterward" instead of an event--stories have a way of changing as you write them), and then think of the turning points and decisions that drive a character to that end over the course of the story. Points which force the MC on that journey--not just the decisions mid-act which determine how the act plays out. How many critical decisions and changes are made from which the MC cannot go back?

Let's go back to the example we worked on before, the death row inmate asked to assassinate a senator, who finds a devious genie on the way. Let's rough out an ending and say that ultimately his actions alter the fabric of international relations and (now, wait--do we want a standalone book or a series? Ah hell, let's go all in and plan a three book series) sparks a world war. Kind of a dismal ending. BUT! He won't have killed the senator. No, instead, he's inducted into a secret cabal that has been passing the Genie around for generations...

Great, so, what decisions force him to this point? Well of course initially he'll accept the job (the moment he does, we're in act one, assuming he can't go back--so, we'll say that he makes a choice between life and death right off. And, he's being tracked and monitored to make sure he doesn't try to run. Can't go back from this, so there's our act one.) 

From here he's going to go about the process of making the kill... except, when he gets to the senator's home, where he plans to do the deed, he sees a plain looking oil lamp that seems to call out to him. He has a moment of temptation in which he struggles with whether to pick it up (it's magical, of course, and wants to be used for mayhem) and ultimately fails to resist. The decision to give in, to pick up the lamp, will alter the rest of the story and perhaps once you pick it up your life begins to go very badly until your wishes are spent. Here's act two; after this, we're writing in context to that decision, so act three begins. 

Though our Hero fails to assassinate the senator, he does make off with the lamp, perhaps driven by its magic to take it somewhere and start making wishes. Shenanigans ensue, he encounters the genie, and it presses him to make a wish. We can build to this decision in a million different ways but our Protagonist of course wants one thing more than anything else, doesn't he? He wants his wife and children back--who wouldn't? Whether wishes can bring back the dead (and how they  come back) we can work out later but lets go all monkey's paw for the moment and say he makes this wish after struggling with the idea. Maybe earlier in Act 2 there was an ominous warning of some sort, maybe delivered by the senator's wife as the MC stole the lamp and made his escape. The moment he makes the wish, again, the story is forever altered and the MC is committed to the consequences. Act three ends, act four begins. New context. 

I'm going to stop there for now, and in the next post I'm going to talk about plot points, and how they fit into an act structure, and what the differences between them are. For now, take a look at your story, and start thinking in terms of these big decisions--just for an experiment. All of this is just theory, strategy, and opinion, of course, but try it out as an experiment and see what crops up. You might be surprised! I certainly was.

Exercise time!

Take a look at your story so far. Consider the points above regarding how you want to begin structuring your story. Keep in mind that this isn't yet the entire structure, just the major turns. I recommend planning the midpoint first, then the ending or climax, and lastly the beginning. Then fill in the plot turns from there. Focus on major plot elements--the "A Story" elements. No subplots or character plots just yet, those will come later, and you'll use them to force the character from one plot point to the next.