the craft. story structure.
Remember in school when you learned the structure of an essay? It was all so simple then. You had an introduction, your thesis to end, three supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion. It gets a lot more convoluted when you start writing 80,000 word manuscripts, but the need for organization of your plot points does not go away.
There are many different elements to look at for revision and the organization of your story should be one of them whether you’re writing a shorter essay or your full-length manuscript. As a refresher, many books follow a three-act structure, which can help you with organizing your book.
Act One
This features the exposition. Typically, we are grounding the reader in the character’s everyday world. A day in the life so-to-speak, but by the end of this act, the character will have experienced an inciting incident. This incident is what propels the rest of the story forward. This turning point, pulls the character into the main action of the story.
Ex. In Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go, when Yasmeen realizes Josiah is dating someone else, that begins the story of navigating their relationship now that someone else is in the picture after their divorce.
Act Two
This part of the story has the rising action that will lead to the midpoint of your story. This act comes up right against the climax but before the story actually does climax. So now we’re digging in deeper to what happens to the character now that their world has been interrupted by the inciting incident.
Ex. In the same book, I remember there being a somewhat predictable moment where they end up on a trip and there is literally one room left. HA! This is another turning point where they get to choose whether they want to revisit their connection.
Act Three
At this point we don’t know if the character is going to make it through whatever their new task is. We’re tight and tense as we go from the pre-climax to the climax in this part of the story. The big thing happens! The ex bursts into the wedding they’re crashing. The relationship comes to a head and the couple breaks up. After the climax is the denouement where we get back to the regular life of the character, but now something or someone is different.
I know it can seem boring to think that you’re going to write something in the same structure as one million other storytellers, but there is also a reason the structure works. When it comes to organizing our stories, so much can happen between the acts. There are one million different ideas for essays or novels. Arranging them in a digestible way, won’t make them the same.
Going back to Aristotle, another helpful tool to ensure that your story has a great flow is ensuring that your plot follows a chain of events that happen until there is a subsequent resolution. I saw something somewhere that put it as simply as after each event of your story, you should be able to say, therefore or because, then.
Carli meets Tau through work, therefore when he is throwing advances her way, she cannot indulge, because then her job would be in jeopardy, therefore she keeps it professional until they meet in a setting outside of work …
You get the picture. This certainly helps with making sure that you’re not just putting together unrelated events, but that each chapter of your story leads into the next. This is how we keep readers interested and turning the page.
This is also where outlines can help. Although I know not everyone will have this approach to their work and that’s okay, there is an element of organization that happens in this step. Maybe you can organize well in your head as you’re writing. I cannot. So with some type of written outline or beat sheet, I can move things around, try things on for size, and look holistically at the flow of my story.
I love this quote from Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words that says, “Your job is to arrange these moments into a beautiful or captivating or intriguing display.”
That’s the work of the writer. So often, I get a lot of words down on a page and then I have to arrange them to make any sense. I can’t tell you how many times I've written a whole piece only to move the third or fourth paragraph to the top. Or simply exchanged two paragraphs so that the overall story flows more seamlessly. I often remind writers that most of us don’t write our most prolific work linearly. In revision, we’re able to rearrange things to tell the most captivating story.
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