Shape Your Story
"I know a lot of people in the business recommend the many Story Structure seminars being offered here, but I point to them as the single biggest contributor to lousy scripts." Douglas Wood
There are lots of different approaches to story structure out there, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to pick and choose which shiny bits we want from them.
They all have something to offer, and are often very good analytical tools for looking at different stories. Understanding them can help us to fix our broken stories during revision, or can help when we get stuck writing an outline of a first draft.
I wouldn’t actually START a new novel with any of them, though. More on that later.
Three Act Structure
You can read more about this over on the Reedsy blog Three Steps to a Powerful story Structure.
I think of this one as very much more suitable to screenwriting and to playwriting - although some novelists do depend on it too.
Check out some of the links below for more information.
Although I haven’t tended to use it deliberately to shape any of my stories, I do think some of the terminology can be helpful however you structure any particular novel.
I reckon there always has to be some kind of Inciting Incident for example, and most stories need a Climax and a Resolution.
For the rest I think a novel can take much more variable path, and there’s room for some flexibility - but there still has to be a structure that works, even if it is of our own devising.
The Hero’s Journey
Those of us of a certain age probably know of this in reference to the original Star Wars film, back when George Lucas talked about how the story was inspired by Joseph Campbell’s great work on mythology, The Hero With A Thousand Faces.
It’s a great book and Campbell’s work is fascinating as long as we close our eyes to his rather old fashioned views on the role of women… Do not let me get started. Actually, perhaps I will - but not here, and not now.
Christopher Vogler wrote a book on how the Hero Myth can be applied to storytelling - The Writer’s Journey. It’s a good book of its kind and I certainly found it helpful when I was writing my first novel, but luckily for us, the good volunteers over at Wikipedia have provided us with a summary - enough to let us know if it might help us as we plan and write our novels.
Stages of the Journey
The second part describes the twelve stages of the Hero's Journey.
The stages are:
The Ordinary World: the hero is seen in their everyday life
The Call to Adventure: the initiating incident of the story
Refusal of the Call: the hero experiences some hesitation to answer the call
Meeting with the Mentor: the hero gains the supplies, knowledge, and confidence needed to commence the adventure
Crossing the First Threshold: the hero commits wholeheartedly to the adventure
Tests, Allies, and Enemies: the hero explores the special world, faces trial, and makes friends and enemies
Approach to the Innermost Cave: the hero nears the center of the story and the special world
The Ordeal: the hero faces the greatest challenge yet and experiences death and rebirth
Reward: the hero experiences the consequences of surviving death
The Road Back: the hero returns to the ordinary world or continues to an ultimate destination
The Resurrection: the hero experiences a final moment of death and rebirth so they are pure when they reenter the ordinary world
Return with the Elixir: the hero returns with something to improve the ordinary world
When I got stuck in the middle of writing my first novel, it was turning to this structure that helped me find a way through. And luckily no one told my textile artist Kate Savage that women are’t allowed to be heroes - although it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had.
Again, I think the overall shape of this archetypal pattern of story, based on Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, can be very useful. As Campbell shows, it’s a structure which has served mythmakers and storytellers very well, in lots of different times and places.
Remember we can use what once was literal as a metaphorical device, and we can pick and choose which parts of the journey make the most sense in our own stories.
I am planning to read this book by Maria Tatar - The Heroine with 1001 Faces.
Her book on the Bluebeard story, The Secrets Beyond the Door, was a huge help when I was writing my first novel.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories
Vonnegut analysed a whole lot of stories and pinpointed a handful of different ‘shapes’ of stories which we can all recognise as fairly common.
This is worth a watch for a quick introduction. I’ll link to a more detailed article below, which includes a brilliant diagram of story shapes and a much longer lecture.
Of course, these story shapes are huge over-simplifications, but they can help when we are trouble shooting our own over-complicated first drafts.
But for now, think about the shape your story might have, and keep writing.
The Six Act Structure
This one is completely new to me - I discovered it via a brilliant online workshop with Anne Lamott, who wrote Bird by Bird.
I confess, I do rather like this structure - which you can read about here
I suppose in a way it’s an elaboration on the more familiar Three Acts - which here would be Setup, Confrontation and Resolution.
Act One - dealing with an imperfect situation
Act Two - learning the rules of an unfamiliar situation
Act Three - stumbling into the central conflict
Act Four - implementing a doomed plan
Act Five - trying a longshot
Act Six - living in a new situation
The article goes on to discuss each act with reference to well known stories - such as The Hunger Games, Avatar etc.
I suspect I liked it because that whole doomed plan part resonates with what I’m writing at the moment.
But still, it’s an interesting variation.
Examples of novels with different structures.
Sophie Hannah’s crime fiction, her Charlie and Simon novels, have a unique structure - or at least it was when she published the first one, Little Face. In fact, it was so different that it was initially difficult for her to convince agents and publishers, but now it’s difficult to understand what was so revolutionary.
There are two main narrative strands in each one of this series of novels. One is always in the first person, and tells us about the crime from someone who is caught up in the middle of it all. The other strand is written in third person, and follows the investigation of the crime by a group of police officers who we come to know and love over the course of the series.
This structure works really well as it can be exploited to create tension and suspense. So often one of the strands leaves us with a cliffhanger and then we are forced to wait while the novel travels off in a different direction. Sometimes the reader knows that the first person character has been lying to police, and we may or may not know what about and why. Then we move on to see the police struggling to make sense of incomplete information. Sometimes we know the clever clogs policeman - my favourite series character, Simon - has worked something out that he is keeping secret from his colleagues, and from us, as the narrative viewpoint changes.
It’s fun for readers who like a puzzle to solve, as well as those who are interested in the psychology of it all - and those like me who love to have both in the same novel.
I can imagine it takes a long time to get the structure and the storylines to work together - and I imagine this is why Sophie Hannah does extensive plotting.
Val McDermid’s A Place Of Execution is one of my very favourite crime novels, and it has a very unusual structure.
I’m going to try very hard to avoid spoilers, because if you haven’t read it you really should. That said what I have to say about the structure will undoubtedly spoil to an extent. Hmm. Perhaps I should keep the title secret?
The structure itself is very simple. It’s divided into two parts of equal length, with a prologue showing us an investigative journalist writing a book about an old case. Each part could almost work as a stand alone novel. Only the second part completely transforms the meaning of the first part.
The first part of the story was set in the 1960s and a details a police investigation of a case of suspected child abuse and murder, which leads to a conviction and the death penalty. The second part shows the journalist’s story about the original investigation fall apart.
There are probably other ways to tell this story - but I can’t imagine any way as brilliant. As readers we find ourselves misled much as the original investigation was.
Creating a structure for your own story
I hope that these theories and examples are of some use, even though there’s no simple answer to the question of what structure a story should have.
In fact, I suspect that there simply isn’t one story structure which matches the Platonic idea. I bet it’s possible to analyse a really good story and find within it more than one story structure.
I am rather in favour now of writing a detailed outline, which gives us a chance to take an overview of our actual story and work out if there are are any parts missing, or if the balance is wrong in some way, and to consider questions of pace and suspense.
With my first two novels I simply wrote and wrote, and in both cases had rambled on for 130k words before I worried if my story had any shape - beyond beginning, middle and end. I may write a post soon on Beginnings and Endings, which is where I started revising!
I do think we have an innate sense to story, and that for a first novel simple is often best - so don’t assume that you have to make it very complicated.
If you can see similarities between the shape of your story and any of the definitions above, that may help you to diagnose any problem areas.
Story structure really matters and I suspect that every story has its own natural story, and you don’t necessarily have to pick one and try to force your story into it. It may just be a bad fit!
And whatever you do, don’t let looking for the perfect structure become another excuse for procrastination. Start writing. You can fix the structure later - once the sand is in the sandbox, you can move it around to make a castle.
Just keep writing!
Ann
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LINKS
Wikipedia on The Writer’s Journey
Various stories (mostly films) analysed from a Six Act perspective
Maria Tatar Interview on The Heroine with 1001 Faces