Weekly Writers: The Structure Of A Good Story

A useful recap for authors, and maybe interesting for readers, too!

A good book needs solid and competent storytelling. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Great ones have a gripping opening, unputdownable middle, and amazing ending.

Much of the talk about plotting is related to the middle, and how it connects the beginning to the end.

• The beginning is important, but not in the way some people think. A good beginning is certainly not all the boring stuff that leads up to the story (sometimes referred to as infodumps). Cut as much of that out as possible. People want to be pulled into a character’s story, not the character’s (or world’s) history. The true beginning of a story is the crisis situation, the “inciting incident”, the thing that triggers the story. It’s the bulldozer turning up to demolish a woman’s home. It’s being sacked for something you didn’t do. It’s the demon crawling out of the wardrobe into the child’s bedroom. It’s the moment when the man locks eyes with the person he falls in love with. It’s waking to find yourself in a coffin. It's the point when everything changes, and your life can never be the same again. (Of course you can have a bit of stuff leading up to it, to establish the scene and create a bit of empathy with the character, to create context; just don't drag the back story on and on. Use your skills to keep any prelude interesting, lively … and brief.)

• The middle is where momentum builds. I'll expand on that below, when discussing structures.

• The end is when things get resolved, for good or ill – what everything up to then has been leading to. If you do your job well then the reader will not be able to stop before they reach this point.

To give a practical example from my novel Lost Solace.

• We have an inciting incident: “Woman discovers a scary spaceship full of horrors; she overcomes her fears and boards it”. Her life will never be the same again.

• Then there are a series of challenges of increasing tension and risk as she fights to survive and make her way to the command centre (with a goal that is hidden from the reader until the end, even though that breaks a key rule: but as I say to writers, any writing rule can be broken, as long as the end result works. That is always the key test. It’s a good idea to write that down on a sticky note and keep it in full view while writing.).

• Then there is an ending, when we find out if she survives, and if she succeeds in attaining what she sought.

Stories can be plotted onto graphs. The story's plot becomes a visual thing. Stories have shapes. Before I go any further, it's worth thinking about this, and the best way is to watch this short and entertaining video where Kurt Vonnegut talks about the Shapes of Stories.

I never tire of that. Then look at the description of Freytag's pyramid. Okay, now you're an expert at visualising a story on a 2D graph. Well done!

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