Structure

When a writing nerd asks another writing nerd to nerd out

Dear Sonal,

When I was writing creative nonfiction I was really into structure, thought about it a lot, and did a lot of experimentation with things like lyric essays. I would also get really excited when I came across authors who used non-traditional structures--like how Sheila Heti’s organizing principle for Motherhood was based on the menstrual cycle. Now that I've returned to writing fiction though, I've realized that what I need is a sturdy, traditional Western story structure. So, I finally read Save the Cat Writes a Novel to brush up on what that is. 

Save the Cat is the kind of book that would’ve been sneered at in my MFA program and I was led to believe that books like that were “formulaic” and beneath literary writers. But now that I've read it and learned all about the 15 story structure beats, I'm a convert. It's been fun to see how nearly every book I've read and every TV show/movie I’ve watched since have adhered to the beats. The beats will absolutely work for the novel I'm writing too. (although, I'm mapping the beats onto a four-act structure instead of a three-act structure). I'm not even getting caught up in making it all fit perfectly. So, great!

Why I'm writing though is that I'm hungry for more conversation around traditional story structure and I bet you have lots to say on the topic. I'd be delighted if this letter serves as a way to pick your brain. Are there any pitfalls I should be watching out for? Any other sources you recommend? Any tips or thoughts in general? I’m all ears!

Sincerely,

Just a writer, standing in front of another writer, asking her to nerd out with me

Dear Just A Writer Who Makes Rom-Com References,

You may regret asking me to nerd out with you on structure, because once I get nerding, it’s hard for me to stop. And I’m most nerdy on the things I’ve struggled with, and since I kind of forgot to have a plot for the first few drafts of my novel…. yes, structure is where I nerd out the most.

What Are We Nerding About?

First of all, what is structure?

The tricky thing with asking writers and literary people this question is that everyone has a slightly different answer, and the truly nerdy people will get into all kinds of debates on the exact wording of the thing, trying to figure out what counts and what does not count, and getting deep into the technicalities. But I am nothing if not a pragmatic nerd, and so to my way of thinking, structure is the shape of the story.

This brings me to my favourite video on structure, which is the Kurt Vonnegut video on the shape of stories. If for some reason you haven’t seen this, go watch it now. It’s 5 minutes. I’ll wait. Honestly, this is probably all you need to understand structure—at least in most cases—but I had to learn a lot more about structure before I realized that.

For most stories, the story structure is essentially the plot. Doesn’t matter if you are doing a plot-driven story or a character-driven story, and frankly, I don’t think there’s really much difference between these two ideas except that some people like to subdivide writing for mysterious reasons that probably have a lot to do with power and arbitrarily claiming superiority… I mean, isn’t a story where stuff happens and characters evolve a good read regardless of which element the writer focused on? Isn’t a story where one of these elements is largely ignored a bit meh, unless somehow the writer manages to brilliantly pull it off in a non-meh way? Why categorize?

But in any case, it’s the what-happens that creates movement and shape. A static situation isn’t a story; something has to happen.

Now, for every rule about stories, there’s some brilliant story out there that challenges that rule. Rather than get into a whole thing about edge cases, I’m going to post this article from LitHub which you can read later, and will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about structure. (Also, despite having read this LibHub article numerous times, I only just realized that it’s by Lincoln Michel, who is one of my favourite newsletter writers for nerdy writing craft stuff.)

The LitHub article is about short stories, since it’s easier to get wild and experimental with structure in a short story, literally because it’s short: you don’t have to sustain the device for very long. There’s no reason why you can’t try it out with a novel, except the challenge of doing so might break your brain. (It would certainly break mine.) But for some writers, that’s the only way they can write, so hey, go for it.

A Quick Note

I’m probably going to contradict myself a million times in all of this, but that’s because, there is structure as it typically manifests in a story, and then there is structure that manifests in wild ways because some writers can’t leave well enough alone.

Some writers see a rule and then have to figure out how to break it. I understand the sentiment, since I am much the same way, although less in the sense of “I can brilliantly subvert expectations in this story and make others think deeply about structure and form and literature” and more in the sense of “Yes, I can eat the cookie I was saving as a reward for writing even though I watched TV instead of writing, because I am an adult, dammit!”

I am going to try to avoid writing in absolutes through all of this, but frankly, it’s sometimes more confusing to keep allowing that all rules in writing can be broken, so like, understand that anytime it sounds like I’m saying “always” I mean “most of the time.” Because no matter how necessary something seems, somewhere out there, a writer has challenged this and pulled it off.

Introducing 3 Act Structure

I haven’t read Save the Cat Writes a Novel, but I have read the classic Save The Cat, which is aimed at screenwriters; the novel version is essentially the same thing, different audience. I have an Extras column coming this month with a little more detail about why you can skip most (and possibly all) of this book, but despite that, it’s still one of my favourite references for learning the 3 Act structure.

It’s not the only one though. Writers being writers, there are a million different guides or explanations to the 3 Act structure, all subtly different, but all essentially the same. You can get a half-dozen screenwriting nerds together and they will argue over exactly what each beat is called and what its function is (and some will even argue that 3-Act structure is really 4-Acts with the midpoint turnaround really being an act break) but such distinctions are only important if you’re looking to impress screenwriting nerds at screenwriting nerd parties. The shape, the concepts, the way in which the structure functions is all essentially the same.

There are also a million different ways of describing structure: the Hero’s Journey, the Heroine’s journey, Freytag’s pyramid. All of these are essentially still 3 Act structure. There may be some differences, but for the most part, they describe stories that are pretty much the same sort of shape. A person wants something and something happens such that they actually go after it instead of thinking about it, then a bunch of stuff happens that gets in their way, and in the end, they either get it or they don’t, or sometimes they realize that they never truly wanted it anyway.

As writers in the Western world, we know 3 Act structure even if we haven’t studied it. Every movie we’ve ever watched is 3 Act structure, and probably most of the books and stories we’ve read are too. Ever watch a movie and feel like it drags, or it’s taking too long to get to the end, or that everything wrapped up too quickly? Likely, this movie messed up its 3 Act structure a bit and intuitively, you knew that. There’s no reason why things have to happen at a certain speed; we just have a bunch of ingrained cultural expectations about it.

If, like the people you refer to in your MFA program, you are deeply offended by the formulaic-feeling nature of 3 Act structure, feel free to call it The Hero’s Journey a la Joseph Campbell or something else, but as I said, it’s the same thing.

I had a student once who was similarly offended, and determined to prove that real literature was not formulaic like this. She took on an Alice Munro story (you heard that Alice Munro is a shitty person, right?) for her ‘break down a story’ assignment, and much to her surprise, every single beat from Save The Cat was there. Some of them were subtle, but they were there.

Did Alice Munro read Save the Cat before writing this story so she could structure it accordingly? I’m betting no.

But her intuitive sense of story structure was similarly formed by every story she’s heard or read before, which would largely be Western literature. So really, 3 Act structure is not so much a formula to produce a certain kind of story as it is a description for how we frequently tell stories in our culture. It’s the skeleton pulled out of the body. No one made up an arbitrary skeleton and stuck the other body parts on it.

As such, the 15 story beats that make up the Save The Cat beat sheet are helpful to know and understand. Don’t get too fussed on the details, though, because those can change without fucking up the overall shape of the thing. In short fiction, for example, the final beat is often implied rather than written out explicitly, which probably contributes to the sense many readers have the short fiction feels unresolved.

If it’s too much to wrap your head around, focus on the major beats: the inciting incident, the Act breaks, the midpoint turnaround, and the climax. Focus on the major purposes of each Act: the set-up, the complications and turnaround, bringing it all together.

By far, the best way I’ve found to learn 3 Act structure is to watch a movie, especially a popular commercial film that is familiar to you that you can stop and start. Write down a very short summary of what happens in every scene. See how it lines up with the 15 beats—because virtually all Hollywood movies are written to 3 Act, and in big commercial films, the beats should be very clear. I did this with The Devil Wears Prada, and then later with Legally Blonde, because apparently, I cannot learn things once and get it.

You can cheat and google the Save the Cat beat sheet for virtually any popular movie, and you will probably find it, but personally, I have found the act of breaking down the story to be the more educational part. It’s less about the answer as it is about process. But you can use Save the Cat as an aide to help you identify where beats typically are, e.g., the inciting incident is 17 minutes into the movie, the midpoint turnaround is at the halfway point. That’s helpful since sometimes these beats are subtle, and so you can take some time to inquire why this is that beat and figure out some of the essentials of how this structure works.

Now go do it with writing. You can try it with a short story. You can try it with a novel. If you want to start with something easy, pick a short story that doesn’t seem particularly experimental in form (I often use The Semplica Girl Diaries when I teach this) or use pick a relatively commercial novel: genre fiction, The Hunger Games, etc. My reading of romance is that often the midpoint turnaround is when the two characters have sex for the first time, which happens exactly halfway through the book; makes perfect sense, since sex can definitely change a relationship between two people.

Again, for very popular novels, you can probably google for the Save The Cat beat sheet and you will likely find it (which can be a helpful tool), but the actual act of summarizing the scenes so that it reads like a five year old telling the story (“Everything started like this, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happen, and then…”) is probably going to teach you a lot more.

If you have a draft of a story of your own, and you don’t know if the structure is working, try breaking it down in the same way. Save the Cat can be fantastic as a diagnostic tool. Yes, I literally do “and then…. and then….” It’s super boring and I avoid it as much as possible, but once I sit my ass down to do it, it’s almost always illustrative. For example, any time I find it difficult to say what then next “and then…” is, I’ve probably found a structural issue.

Structure is Not An Outline

Many writers, upon reading up on 3 Act structure, start thinking “Hallelujah, I have solved all of my writing problems! I shall take my idea, fill in these beats with some scene ideas, and then write out every scene and I shall have a perfect novel in one draft!”

Yeah, I wish novel writing worked that way, except it does not. If you are the one person for whom it did, either you’re a) a liar, b) an asshole, c) a shitty writer, d) extremely lucky and it will never happen again, or e) any or all of the above. I said what I said.

Fortunately, I already wrote a lot about this because this is getting to be a long-ass response, and I still have more to say, and might I remind you that I did warn you that I can go on for a long time.

My personal preference is to learn 3 Act structure really, really well, and then pretend you know nothing about it when you start to write. I almost never know where a story is going before I write it. But you can use the various beats of 3 Act structure to act as writing prompts to yourself. Write for a while and maybe that inner writing coach (not the same as an inner critic!) will be all, hmmm, not much happening here, might be time for some kind of inciting incident? Okay, that’s the story prompt, let’s see what kind of a choice the protagonist makes in pursuit of what they want, which is different from the choice that they usually make. Go wherever the story takes you.

After that, if something doesn’t quite seem right with the story, I can break it down into beats and apply 3 Act structure diagnostically. What beat am I missing? Where am I spending too much time? Why doesn’t this make sense?

It’s entirely possible that I will find that 3 Act structure doesn’t really work for my story, and that’s fine. But even still it can be useful to re-order the story—even very roughly—in this structure and see how it reads. Sometimes having the wrong structure illuminates some details about what the right structure could be.

Structure is Not an Organizing Principle

Some writers deliberately choose ideas or metaphors to order events in their book. In your letter, you mention Sheila Heti using the menstrual cycle as an organizing principle for Motherhood. There’s also Katherena Vermette, who uses a restorative justice circle as an organizing principle for her novel, The Circle. I’ve also heard other writers talking about using things like a house or something, although even when I’ve read those books I didn’t see what the hell they were talking about, but then again, the book I’m thinking of in this example isn’t one that I want to dive into to figure out how it’s organized like a house.

I’ve been using the word ‘organize’ very deliberately in the last paragraph, because many people would instead use the verb ‘structured’. Is an organizing principle the same as a story structure?

Yes. No. Maybe. It depends.

There isn’t always one structure to a book. Maybe the events of the story follow a classic 3 Act structure, but the book thematically is more like a recipe or something…. Act 1 is all ingredients, Act 2 is mixing them up, Act 3 everything bakes up. (Come to think, that could be a cool story: everyone is introduced separately, then all combine in various ways, and then they, uh, bake?)

Similarly, when I took a brief seminar with Henry Lien on Diverse Story Structures (more about that below), he taught the movie Parasite as an example of a Kishotenketsu. But if you go looking for it, you’ll find examples of it being broken down as a 3-Act structure. Both work. I suspect this was a deliberate choice on Bong Joon Ho’s part to make the movie more saleable in Hollywood, but looking at this same movie through both structural lenses to see how they both work was super-interesting, since not all Kishotenketsu can be easily remapped as a 3-Act structure. (Super-interesting in this case being defined as “I, too, am a story structure nerd.”)

I haven’t read the books mentioned above closely enough (or at all, although I’d been excitedly waiting for Kat Vermette’s book and bought it immediately and yet it sits on my TBR pile, what the actual fuck, brain?) to really be able to say if the shape of the story and the shape of the organizing principle match up, but the point is, you don’t need to invent some fancypants concept to have a story structure.

That said, if you do have a fancypants concept, it will work much better if it makes sense for the story. Organizing a novel about being ambivalent about motherhood around a menstrual cycle makes perfect sense to me.

Structure is Not Form

Other writers like to play with form. We see this more in short stories—there’s that Amy Hempel story that’s in the form of a letter of complaint; the Carmen Maria Machado story written in the form of Law & Order SVU plot capsules—but they also come up in novels, such as Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown which is a novel written in the form of a TV screenplay. (And no, it’s not a screenplay; you couldn’t film it as written and get the same out of it, although apparently they are making a TV series out of it.)

But form, also, isn’t necessarily structure. Much like an organizing principle, maybe it’s sometimes the structure, but also maybe a lot of the time it isn’t. The Hempel story is absolutely a 3 Act structure, but then again, a letter of complaint doesn’t really have a specific structure unto itself. The Charles Yu story probably is a 3Act as well, but screenplay form kind ensures that.

Still, sometimes people say ‘structure’ when they’re really talking about form. The story is the what-happens. The structure is the shape of the what happens. The form is how it is expressed.

Form can be something that drives the story forward and insists that the reader keep turning pages—what Lincoln Michel means when he talks about the different engines that drive a story in the LitHub essay above. Jennifer Egan has a story in the form of a Powerpoint presentation somewhere in the midst of A Visit from the Goon Squad which I recall being a pretty fun read, and I found myself wanting to see how she played with the presentation form. On the other hand, while there were some wild things happening in the Machado story, I did not get it. I love Machado’s writing, but I cannot tell you what’s going on in that SVU story, although there were a lot of things resonating throughout it. But that’s okay, we don’t have to get everything.

Structure is Cultural

I’ve made reference a few times to our culture and Western culture in talking about 3 Act structure, because indeed, other cultures have other story structures. No, I cannot explain them all because I don’t know them all, but a starting point I can recommend is the Diverse Story Structures course by Henry Lien, taught through Writing The Other. No affiliate link, I get nothing here; I had my mind blown via a compressed version of this course, and then I made a writing-nerd friend of mine take the actual course and she had her mind blown as well.

The structure I’m most familiar with (if ‘kind of understand how it works but have never actually tried it out’ counts as familiar) is the Kishotenketsu, sometimes called a 4-act structure, or referred to as a story structure that is devoid of conflict.

Kishotenketsu is also a really fun word to say if you can roll it smoothly off the tongue in front of the easily impressed. Try it out next time you’re around some literary snobs to really put them in their place, or even better, when teaching a lesson on structure so that your students think you are really, really smart.

Some writers who are really conflict-averse (in life as well as in writing) get really into this whole idea of a story without conflict—and then get confused by how to write a kishotenketsu. This is because they are often trying to morph their conflict-driven understanding of story—even if they hate it—into a structure that doesn’t work that way. ‘Devoid of conflict’ is not really an accurate way of describing a kishotenketsu. It’s not that the story is without conflict. Rather, it’s not driven by conflict the way a 3 Act structure is.

Douglas Glover had this excellent quote about story in Nineteen Questions, which is arguably an excellent way of describing 3 Act structure. “a story plot is a conflict structure, a desire meeting a resistance, once and again and again, then all you need to start a story is some conflicted situation. It could be any conflicted situation.”

This, however, does not describe a Kishotenketsu. It’s not conflict structure. A desire does not meet resistance again and again. Rather, it starts with a situation, which is developed in further detail. Then, a twist—something happens out of no where. We have a lovely, sweet, charming romance developing but then aliens land, for example. Then in the final act, somehow, all of this must be resolved in some way. The twist is somehow integrated into the past world of the story. The romantic couple dies in the subsequent intergalactic war but are combined together in some sort of alien soup.

There is no desire, no resistance, no conflicted situation, at least not one that serves as an engine for the plot. It’s not a requirement for the plot to work.

I’m not going to go deep into Kishotenketsu because I’m sure you’re all thinking I’m smart now and therefore I don’t need to demonstrate how thin my knowledge of this structure actually is (and also, you’re better off learning about this from people who use this structure well) but I bring it up to demonstrate a big point: most of the ‘rules’ of writing fiction are things that 3 Act structure needs to work. And so understanding how 3 Act structure works, and why, helps us understand where these rules come from, and how we can mess with them and still make them work.

The 3 Act structure is based in the idea that the structure of the story will draw the reader through to the conclusion. We have a character who wants something, and then stuff gets in their way. To draw the reader through, they have to get invested in the protagonist and want them to succeed. And so comes the whole issue of “this character isn’t likeable” or “I wanted to root for them, but I couldn’t.” It's the character's journey and experience that matters, and so forms the issues like “the character is too passive and needs more agency” or “the stakes are too low.”

What if your character is an antihero? By the end of Breaking Bad, we'd gone from “how's Walt going to get out of this one?” (the draw to keep us watching) to “Is anyone going to stop Walt?” He didn't need to be likeable anymore because we didn't need to root for him anymore. Now he could be thoroughly unlikeable because we're rooting against him; we're watching to see what brings him down.

You can break all the rules of fiction, but understanding the function of these rules can help you figure out how to make it work.

Decolonizing The 3 Act Structure

Some people who are smarter and more educated in such things than I am have argued that the 3 Act is a very colonial structure. I’m still not very good at teasing out the colonialism in things, but even I can see that in its most traditional form, the 3 Act structure is the hero’s journey of one dude going out and conquering everything and then everyone loves the one dude. Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars because farm boy used to shoot Womp Rats back home in Beggars’ Canyon and is rewarded with magic powers, never mind that Leia has been organizing and leading the rebels to free them from the oppressive Empire for years now.

In general, the thing in a 3 Act that the protagonist wants is get-able. The stuff that gets in his way is overcome-able. Not easily and immediately overcome-able like the story of how my kids struggle to find their water bottle when it's literally right in front of them, but not something entirely impossible. It's hard to get a person invested in a story that is obviously doomed from the start, like that time my 40-something overweight problem-drinking ex-boyfriend claimed that he could probably beat Serena Williams at tennis. Okay. Sure.

This becomes a challenge if the story you want to tell is about something like structural racism; it's not something that can be overcome by a singular individual’s desire overcoming a systematic resistance.

Sure, you can write a story about changing the minds of ignorant people, thus making it seem like racism isn’t so much structural or systemic as it is a few people needing to realize a few things, but what if you want to write something that isn’t a white person’s feel-good fantasy about the world actually being totally fine but for a few bad apples?

I don't have the answer for that. Maybe the 3 Act structure doesn't quite stretch that far. Maybe it needs to be adapted to focus on groups rather than individuals. Maybe it is a story of futility.

Maybe something else other than the individual’s struggle is needed to draw the reader through the story. Maybe it's a compelling character, or humour, or an irresistible voice.

This is tricky to pull off, because of how deeply invested we all are in the Western notion of the 3 Act structure. It's tricky for other writers to give good feedback on because it's outside of what they are familiar with.

But it's not impossible.

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Readers, this concludes all the thoughts I could think about structure, although I’m sure I will have more two minutes after this posts. What do you all think? Please nerd out with us.