Structural Flaws
A post about stories and structures
Now, I don’t want to shock anyone, but when it comes to story structure, I’m a bit of a nerd. (And if this actually does come as a shock to you, go back, read a few of the stories, return here. I’ll wait.)
I like to plan my books out ahead of time. On the spectrum of plotters to pantsers (or “architects” to “gardeners” to use George R. R. Martin’s more flattering terms; or “people who plan things out ahead of time” to “people who make things up as they go along” to use the parlance of people who aren’t some variety of writing nerd) I am a hardcore plotter. For an average book of 100,000 words (about 285 pages for the non-nerds), my plan is about 8,000 words (about 23 pages) which is generally considered weird and excessive. And to get to my plan, I find a story structure is essential.
Now, there are about as many story structures out there as there are stars in the sky. The most well-known one is three-act structure, or “beginning, middle, end.” But there’s five-act structure, and seven-act structure, and twelve-act structure. There’s the hero’s journey. There’s Kishōtenketsu. And we haven’t even started to get obscure yet.
Personally, I favor seven-point plots. This is a fairly common screenwriting structure that I learned about from a series of excellent Youtube lectures by the author Dan Wells. The sequence goes:
Hook - introduce a protagonist and a world and an interesting problem for them to engage with
Turning Point 1 - the protagonist is propelled into the story and learns something which pushes them forward
Pinch 1 - something happens which applies pressure, making things more urgent
Midpoint - a minor confrontation, the protagonist learns something vital, and potentially a shift in the protagonist’s goals occurs
Pinch 2 - more pressure, more forward motion, more urgency
Turning Point 2 - the last necessary pieces of information falls into place, so we can proceed to the…
Conclusion - the big confrontation with the problem; maximum effort is expended and things resolve
To me, seven-point plots have a nice balance of structure and freedom. I’m not in a straitjacket but I’m also not wandering around wondering what the hell I should be doing. I like to have one plot for my main storyline, and then each subplot gets there own plot as well. Then I can line things up so that the pinch of the main plot is the midpoint of a subplot, and things like that. The more things come together at once, the more important a moment can seem, and the more impact it can have on a reader.
Now, if my high-level sketch of a seven-point plot felt a little familiar, well welcome to the main criticism of the seven-point plot. It’s been used a lot for a long time. It can feel a little formulaic.
And that’s a totally fair criticism, by the way. Because the truth is, you really don’t NEED a story structure. I like it because I appreciate a few sign posts to keep me on course, but that’s me. Some people prefer to kick open the doors of their story and to just start wandering (like that little-known author Stephen King for example).
There is also the sneaking suspicion in the back of my head that in most of my books I have actually failed to follow seven-point plots accurately. And also the suspicion that that failure has made them more interesting. I think my books MOSTLY follow the structure, but as soon as you’re trying to write 100,000 words, you realize seven points isn’t very many. That’s about 14,000 words a point. You’re going to need to add in some other stuff to keep things interesting. And so which scene exactly equates to a pinch or a midpoint or a turning point becomes a little abstract. Structure is helpful in the planning and in the editing, but in the actual moment of reading and writing… I’m still not sure it has as much value as I put upon it.
Ultimately, the only thing I’m really sure my books are built upon is the try-fail cycle. I write stories in the Western tradition. In other words, I write stories about people who WANT things. Typically external things because I like to write about jokes and explosions. Very few people in my books are looking for a sense of inner peace, or a resolution to a generational conflict. But those are valid things for a protagonist to WANT. And when we WANT a thing, we make a plan to get it. And if we’re writing fiction, we then write about how that plan fails. Because if a protagonist gets the thing they WANT the first time around then the book is very short and quite boring. Struggle makes books interesting. Conflict makes them fun.
So, when a protagonist’s attempt to get a thing fails, they then make a new plan and try again. And fail again. And try again. It’s a cycle. A try-fail cycle. Get it?
And that’s really it. And the more I write, the more I’m convinced that’s really all you need. Everything else is just controlling tempo. It’s altering the size of the failures (also referred to as “the reality gap,” i.e. the gap between what the protagonist thought would happen and what happened in reality—generally a gap you widen and widen over the course of a book until the reality gap is a gaping chasm almost impossible to resolve… and then the protagonist resolves it at the end of your story, and every is DEEPLY satisfied).
Perhaps other structures are just guides to that tempo. Pinches are more urgent that Turning Points. Conclusions are epic crescendos. But you don’t have to follow those rhythms. Not every story has to be a polished pop song with the first chorus arriving predictably within the first 60 seconds. You can find your own way, do your own thing.
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. In fact, I’ll be very repetitive and boring about it: there are no real writing rules. I like structure, but you don’t need structure. You probably don’t need try-fail cycles, although I haven’t quite figured that out yet (outside of a flash piece anyway, but those are strange little beasts of their own).
What I’m saying is, if this post is helpful to you, that’s awesome. If it’s not, more power to you—the metal-kid in me wants a little more chaos in this world, and a few less pop songs anyway.
Thank you for reading Something’s a Little Off. If you’re interested in sampling some of my stories, and reading an excerpt of my upcoming novella, why not check out the sampler linked to here?