An Experiment in Deriving Story Structure from First Principles

Stupid sexy structures

context.

Learning to write is a harrowing journey. Over the years spent writing a trilogy, my greatest struggle proved to be structure and pacing. My plots sagged in the middle, and the character arcs felt rushed and unconvincing. Worse still, I was arrogant about it. I believed a few things:

1. I understand pacing and structure.

2. Even if I don’t, I incorporate them intuitively.

3. And if I don’t do that, they’re archaic concepts anyway, not applicable to the character-driven epics of my ambition.

To be fair, overwhelm played a large part in this too. If anyone actually wants to learn anything about story structure, there are countless opinions, diagrams, and perplexing terms like ‘falling action’ or ‘reversals’ to wade through. Much of the writing on structure can also feel awfully prescriptive or genre-specific. They refer to the slaying of dragons, to calls to adventure, or they decree overly specific character moments, like—and this is a real quote—‘the protagonist learns that everything is the opposite of what he thought’. That’s meant to happen at the 81% mark, apparently. It all raises the question:

What if I’m not writing a fucking fantasy novel?

I’ve grappled with this for a while, and today I intend to strip story structure down to the essence—devoid of undue prescriptiveness, genre-specific terminology or moralistic overtones. My goal is to be brutally pragmatic, to build an understanding of narrative structure up from first principles, so that we might come to understand structure intuitively—no dragons or pyramids needed. Has this been done before? Probably. Has been documented? Not that I’ve seen. At this point, my sources of research are too numerous to name, but, contemporaneously, Lessons from the Screenplay and LocalScriptMan both deserve honourable mentions. That said, I am here to try outdo them.

Of course, it may be tempting to dismiss what I’ve assembled here as yet more prescriptive advice on structure. To which I say, que será, será. I have written this diatribe and designed the illustration herein to explain my thoughts back to myself. I’m sharing it online for posterity. If you are anti-structure, I’m not asking you to agree, just come with an open mind. So, without further ado: narrative structure can be divided into two halves.

The first half is plot.

conflict.

Plot, described as reductively as possible, is ‘shit happening'. Well, it’s a start, isn’t it? That immediately gives us three plot points—shit starts happening, shit stops happening, and somewhere in the middle, shit changes to connect where shit started to how shit ended. If you've fallen off the wagon at this point, I can’t help you. Okay, but my gym plan is ‘shit happening’ and that’s not making a bestseller list, so we need to take this a step further.

A better reduction of plot might be ‘shit happening that matters’. This refers to the ‘stakes’ of the story. Metaphorically, if plot is a baker, stakes are the dough. And without audience investment in the stakes, no one’s gonna finish our Sonichu fan fic. This view also puts more meat on the bone of the middle plot point. The middle is no longer merely connective tissue, now the middle plot point meaningfully impacts and develops the stakes. This keeps the audience engaged. Keyword: audience. This is important—now we’re thinking about plot in terms of the experience of our audience. Through plot, we communicate implicitly with them. That’s why we end chapters with small cliffhangers. We’re telling them you wanna see what happens next, buddy.

Truly, a perfectly functional definition of ‘plot’ is ‘a series of promises we make to our audience’.

Okay, so now we have three key narrative points: stakes are established, developed, and resolved. Are those three plot points enough? Let’s see. Say we’re reading a romance, the stakes might be ‘will they get together?’ After some setup and middle act conflict, they meetup one day in a coffee shop, say ‘fuck it, let’s date’—and the story ends. Satisfied? Of course not. It feels abrupt. We’ve been cheated. We were invested in the stakes of the relationship, and now it’s just suddenly resolved without any fanfare whatsoever. The writer has not treated the stakes, nor their audience, with the appropriate respect. Fortunately, fixing this is simple. Before the stakes resolve, the plot can signal to the audience when they are on the home stretch toward a resolution. Altogether then:

1. We convey the stakes to the audience, promising a future resolution.

2. We develop the stakes—through escalation, complication, or subversion—thereby further engaging the audience.

3. We signal the resolution of the stakes; the audience locks the fuck in.

4. We resolve the stakes, fulfilling our original promise to the audience.

If our story lacks these elements, then we're either writing a vignette or some sort of more experimental, avant-garde fiction. Both are perfectly valid. When I publish flash, it’s usually as a vignette. There’s nothing wrong with a 120,000 word vignette, of course, but this is where, as writers, we should be very honest with ourselves about who we’re writing for—the 0.1% or the 99.9%. If we’re interested at all in mass appeal, then structure matters. That said, of course, plot only gets you so far.

The other half of the narrative pie is character.

change.

In a purely plot-driven story, there is no character arc. In a purely character-driven story, the character arc is the plot. Many stories, however, feature both, where the plot is an external force that pressures characters into change. In this way, plot and character structure are not mutually exclusive forces, but intertwined elements of the same narrative. They mirror one another—the same melody on a different instrument. With that established, let’s start with the basics:

In a character driven-story, the protagonist must change—that’s our most basic, indisputable understanding of a character arc. Even in a classical tragedy, where the character ultimately chooses ‘not to change’, that choice is still a change. They have chosen to remain themselves. They were brought face-to-face with their flaws and decided to keep them. They’re operating from a new mental framework. So, if we accept that our protagonist must change in some capacity in order to qualify as having an arc, then we need to see a few things. We need to see:

1. Who they were before—so that the reader has standards for comparison with which to appreciate the scope of the change.

2. Why they change—so that the reader observes a cause-and-effect to the character arc, rather than emotional change happening ‘because the writer said so’.

3. How they change—so that the reader feels the character grapple with their new self, making the evolution ‘believable’ or ‘realistic’.

4. Who they are afterward—so that the reader gets to feel the consequences of the character’s evolution, because change doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

And just like that, we’re back to our four points, just as with plot. Point (1) fits into the first act, points (2) and (3) fit into the middle act, and point (4) concludes the final act. We’ve built a justification for character arc structure up from first principles. This is not a formula anymore than the laws of nature are a formula.

Alright, let’s put it all together.

Click for hi-res.

consequence.

There it is—the aforementioned illustration. You’ll notice that I've named each narrative point. The labels are designed to be vague enough to broadly apply, but specific enough to still mean something. They are Initial Stasis, Catalyst, Midpoint, Convergence, Conclusion and New Stasis. In between them are the acts, which are labelled differently at the top and bottom. The top edge of the illustration represents the modern three-act structure, and the bottom edge represents classical five-act structure. I’ve displayed them this way to highlight their relationship to one another.

The three-act structure is just the five-act structure, but with groupings.

The five-act view considers the epilogue—‘Closure’—its own act, and splits the middle act into two halves around the midpoint. Fundamentally, however, they’re looking at the same narrative points. Just pick a style that speaks to you. Act structure doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. For my part in this, I’ve thus far structured my novels as four acts and an epilogue, because I rarely write much Closure.

Now, the illustration—stubborn in its symmetry—lines up the key moments of a character arc with the key moments of plot perfectly. This certainly can happen. In The Great Gatsby (1925), Gatsby’s character arc is the plot. They’re one and the same. As such, it follows traditional structure, with Gatsby’s catalyst coming in Chapter 4, when he enlists Nick’s help to win Daisy back.

In other kinds of stories, the storyboard can be a bit ‘messier’, as the plot and character arc aren’t consistently attached to one another. In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), for example, Puss’s personal catalyst (the bounty hunter) comes in hot in the third scene of the film, but the plot catalyst (the map to the wish) only comes in at the runtime's quarter mark. This gives the first act plenty of time to delve deep into Puss’ emotional downtime, before the plot kicks in.

Yes, I’m comparing Puss and Gatsby—don’t fuck with me, I’m clearly unstable.

While these stories treat their character arcs slightly differently, they both keep the key plot points largely equidistant from each other across the span of the narrative, for the sake of pacing. A well-paced story gives each point an opportunity to breathe. This ‘breathing room’ is how we could define an ‘act’. ‘Pacing’, therefore, could be defined as ‘the rate and regularity of the four key narrative points’. If there is minimal narrative space for downtime between them, then the story has a fast pace. A fast pace is absolutely fine. Irregular spacing, on the other hand, will likely create an uneven feeling, which isn’t usually desirable.

In short, arcs are for the character—plot and pacing are for the audience.

closure.

All stories, save for the most experimental of fiction, have structure. The problem is that good structure is invisible. Even Memento (2000), oft cited as the kind of story that freedom from structure can produce, still retains the basic elements:

STASIS: The protagonist has a condition of short-term memory and a mission of revenge.
CATALYST: A woman he meets starts helping him with his investigation.
MIDPOINT: The woman who’s been helping him has actually been using him.
CONVERGENCE: He’s confronted with the possibility that he’s wilfully deceiving himself.
CLIMAX: He sets up the conditions for an endless repetition of his vengeance arc.
NEW STASIS: The mission of revenge continues—he’s still lying to himself.

The non-linear execution of Memento is brilliant, but it doesn’t defy the experience of plot. The film is still arranged so that the audience is taken through a satisfying and interesting journey. If we don’t understand these principles, its easy to point and say, ‘look—that writer ignored structure, so I can too’, not realising the deft sleight-of-hand that the author is really performing. We cannot subvert what we do not understand.

Otherwise, we’re merely justifying our ignorance with the innovation of others.

In reality, the true source of our frustration with structure is usually with structural tropes. A trope of structure is a tired, familiar and stale execution of structure. The second act’s ‘crisis’—such as the death of a secondary character—is a trope. The third act being entirely consumed by the ‘big battle’ is a trope. If a story is popular, yet seems to defy all structural convention, we can quite safely assume that it is structural tropes, and not structure itself, being defied. If structure is the bones of the narrative body—invisible without an x-ray—then structural tropes are the botched cosmetic surgery.

Keep the bones, flay the skin.

So, that’s structure—in my view at least. If it’s not obvious after two thousand words, this subject is a passion of mine. I think, mainly, because it evaded me for so long. The goal today was to broadly lay out the principles, but in part two, we’ll shift focus onto practical application. What if our story starts off with a bang, like Crank (2006) or Buried (2010)? How do we know when we’ve written a ‘phantom midpoint’? How do we actually go about signalling the beginning of the end? How does ‘fractal theory’ help us structure the acts themselves? How does all this apply when we’re juggling multiple points of view? All that to come.

Hang tight!