Base Your Story Structure on Principles, Not Systems

Today’s guest post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her on Wednesday, March 18, for the online class Story Structure & Momentum.

Here’s one of those bedeviling contradictions that can make writing feel so hard: Authors embark upon a craft that’s based on creativity and imagination and originality … and then are bombarded by strictures, guidelines, and systems to squeeze all that infinite individuality into.

Yet these storytelling and writing concepts can be immensely valuable to authors; I use and teach them myself every day in my editing career. (Two things can be true at once, as our ambivalent world likes to remind me.)

Authors can reconcile these two seemingly antithetical concepts by learning the tools and ideas that underlie successful story, but regarding them not as an inviolate set of “rules,” but as a wide data set of knowledge from which you can draw.

Think of these techniques as circuits to connect your intentions with reader impressions—and just as with most circuit boards, there are many different ways to make the thing light up.

This is never truer than with structure.

Try searching for “how to structure a story” (or just ask anyone in our field) and you’re likely to get a panoply of instructions for the “right” way to structure a story:

• Hero’s Journey
• Three-act structure
• Save the Cat
• Snowflake method
• Freytag’s Pyramid
• Fichtean Curve

And more … It’s enough to make a creative’s poor free-spirited right brain explode. Not to mention the potentially stifling or homogenizing effect of trying to cram your individual, organic narrative into a prescribed mold that may or may not be right for your story.

Still, many of these systems offer valuable, useful concepts—if you think of structure not as a set of rules or rigid steps you have to follow, but as an underlying set of story principles to help create the experience you envision, based on the three main functions of story structure:

1. How does the story’s structure advance the events of the plot?

Structure’s most obvious function is to serve as a framework on which to hang the plot: in other words, how you decide to unspool events on the page.

The human brain is wired to react to rising action that builds to a climax and resolves into falling action. These core storytelling elements—an inciting event that kick-starts the plot, advances and setbacks toward a goal (ups and downs), turning points, climax, resolution—create a framework to build the story around.

Many stories unfold on the page linearly or chronologically within this scaffolding: events occur on the page in the same order the characters experience them, for the most part. Some come together more like puzzle pieces dropping into place, where the reader gets the full picture through gradually piecing the story together. Some do it with a single storyline or perspective and some with multiples, some from the direct POV of the protagonist(s) and some from an indirect perspective.

But analyze most effective stories, regardless of how the plot unfolds, and you’ll likely find they encompass those same basic structural concepts: A character stuck in a status quo (point A) ventures beyond or is forced out of it (inciting event) and experiences setbacks and advances in pursuit of something they want, need, or lack (ups, downs, and turning points). They ultimately succeed or fail (climax) and suffer or enjoy the consequences (resolution), and in the course of navigating the story’s events they are meaningfully changed by the journey (point B).

2. How does the structure reflect/advance the character’s journey?

That last bit—that the character is changed—is what makes story story. It’s more than just the sum of its events, but how those events impact the main character(s) and bring about some change within them.

Structure allows an author to combine these two main storytelling components—plot and character—and show how that change comes about as a direct result of what happens in the story.

It’s not enough that readers see that the change has happened by the end, the character’s point B; we want to live the how along with the characters: scene by scene, event by event, beat by beat. How do story events affect how they feel, think, react? How does each step of the journey affect their perspective, their attitudes, beliefs, and misbeliefs?

Knowing how your character is changing can help you decide what needs to happen next on the page. Just as we’re not the same today as we were 20 years ago, or ten, or five, or last week, your character is evolving over the course of the story as well. That can determine not only what they do in pursuit of their goal, but how they are affected by it, and how you might structure the story to most effectively illustrate that change.

3. How does the story’s structure affect the reader’s experience of the story?

Structure is why some people can tell you about an incident or encounter and make it engaging, and others can take even the most exciting events and make them a snore: The plot may be the same, but the way the storyteller unspools it determines the reader’s experience.

So how do you want the reader to travel through your story? How will you entice them not to put the book down? How do you affect their investment and emotional engagement?

Where do you begin your story? Does it serve your intentions to plunge them immediately into powerful or high-intensity action or conflict, or does it fit the mood to start at a simmer and gradually turn up the heat? How does the point of view—both its narrative voice and the perspective from which you tell your story—affect the way the story is told?

Do you guide readers straight through the story in your characters’ footsteps, or offer a panoramic view that lets them view it from every angle?

How do you control the pace of it? For instance, is it stronger to let us know early on that will happen later—because readers are on the edge of their seat knowing it’s coming? Or should you let them be taken by surprise along with the character?

There’s no right answer: All the various approaches have merits and any of them can work; it just depends on the experience you want the readers to have.

Story structure principles in practice

Let’s look at some popular current books to see how these three central principles underlie various story structures.

• Rosa Kwon Easton’s White Mulberry follows the single linear storyline and perspective of Miyoung, a young Korean girl facing a bleak future in her small farming village under Japanese occupation (point A). She fights for an education and is sent to Japan (inciting event), facing culture clashes, prejudice, and hardship in her quest to create a life of opportunity for herself and eventually her son (advances and setbacks, turning points), culminating in a battle to reclaim him from her husband’s family and return to her homeland to raise him within his Korean heritage (climax, resolution). The straightforward structure lets readers live the events of Miyoung’s journey along with her, with all its uncertainties and challenges, and experience directly how she gains strength and agency for herself and her son (point B of her arc).
• In Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, the nonchronological, multiple-timeline, multiple-POV structure echoes the chaos and unknowns of the hostage situation the story revolves around; readers experience it through various character perspectives and piece the plot together even as the police officers investigating it do. As various characters—and the narrative—slowly reveal pieces of the full picture (ups and downs, turning points), little by little readers learn the characters more fully and see their relationships develop and deepen (arcs), just as the characters themselves experience it in the course of the plot, until the central mystery of the bank robber’s disappearance is solved (climax, resolution).
• In Nadia Hashimi’s Sparks Like Stars, the linear, single-perspective story is structured into two chronological parts separated by three decades, each section with its own mini-structure, and together forming one cohesive structure for the protagonist’s storyline and arc. The first half follows Sitara, the sheltered daughter of a highly placed Afghan diplomat (point A), when she is the only member of her family to survive a violent coup at the palace (inciting event) and eventually escapes to America (ups and downs, climax, resolution). Part two joins her thirty years later, now a successful doctor but still haunted by and stuck in her past (new point A) until she seeks and finally finds truth and closure about her family’s fate (ups and downs, second climax, final resolution). The story’s structure is how Hashimi illustrates for readers Sitara’s full character journey—the terrible event that shapes her life and keeps her “stuck,” and how she is healed—changed—by finally addressing that trauma (point B).
• Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life follows protagonist Ursula Todd in an omniscient perspective through successive alternate lives she leads (advances and setbacks, turning points): born repeatedly on the same day (inciting event) but with varying circumstances and outcomes (climaxes/resolutions). The narrative starts in 1910 and jumps repeatedly from timeline to timeline, but Atkinson does a masterful job of orienting readers throughout, and each timeline generally follows the core tenets of structure: multiple mini story arcs that also create a unifying overarching story arc as Ursula’s character incrementally changes over the course of her various experiences and deaths (arc), culminating in the climactic event that the story began on (climax) and how it affects her path (resolution).

Just as composing the notes doesn’t make a song, story is more than just the plot. Orchestrating a compelling tune lies in how you arrange the melody. An engaging story hinges on how it unfolds on the page: its structure.

If every song you heard strictly rigidly adhered to the same standard musical structure—intro, verse, chorus, bridge—we’d be robbed of thrilling and unique musical structures like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” or Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” We’d be denied much of the diversity and originality and delight of music.

Story structure isn’t one-size-fits-all either. Successful story isn’t about finding the perfect structural system to follow, but discovering what works best for the story you want to tell and the experience you want your readers to have.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, March 18, for the online class Story Structure & Momentum.

Tiffany Yates Martin

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent her entire career as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial (named one of Writer’s Digest’s Best Websites for Authors) and author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and her latest, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career.She is a regular contributor to writers’ outlets like Writer’s Digest, Jane Friedman, and Writer Unboxed, and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers’ organizations around the world. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she is the author of six novels.