In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I discuss a multitude of macro-level story structures, including three-, four-, and five-act structures, as well as circle structures, and more.
Understanding story structure is like pulling the curtain back on storytelling.
When we understand that stories aren’t just birthed from the imagination, but rather engineered using story physics, we can utilize recognized frameworks and structures, allowing for the ultimate freedom of creative expression while building upon a sturdy foundation of story craft.
To learn all about macro-level story structures, listen to the episode now!
The Writing Coach Episode #182 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #182 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
I hope that the holiday season is treating you well this far, and that you’re making big plans for 2024.
If you’re looking to do some incredible work on your creative journey as an author next year, I encourage you to think about joining the January 2024 edition of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE.
STORY PLAN is my four-week program where I email you a new writer’s craft training video each day of the week, Monday to Friday, culminating in a creative homework assignment on Friday that you can do over the weekend. If you watch the videos, if you do the assignments, by the end of January, you will have a rock-solid outline for your novel.
Obviously, if you’re in the early stages of a book, the planning stage, now is the time to take this program. That said, if you’ve perhaps discovery-wrote a portion of a book but now you find yourself stuck or unable to finish it, or if you even have a first draft completed, STORY PLAN can help you finish that half-completed draft, or it can set up the revisions process really nicely by allowing you to create an evergreen tool via the outline that you can use to analyze and revise your manuscript.
If that sounds good to you, get signed up for that month-long program with over 30 training videos for free.
One of the things that we talk about in STORY PLAN INTENSIVE is story structure. I’m a big fan of story structure. It’s where I start with a lot of my analyses of my clients’ work, and it’s also one of the early stages I recommend writers take a look at when they’re planning a novel.
I know there are people who start with character, perhaps, and I think in the world of comedy, this makes a lot of sense. But I think about something like K.M. Weiland’s great book Creating Character Arcs, and in her character arc book, she basically maps the stages of the character’s emotional transition, their character arc, to story structure. So at least in Weiland’s mind, things don’t start with the character arc, rather they start with standard story structure, then we map that character arc to the structure.
I agree with her and a lot of other folks, that structure is really a great starting point. Once you have determined the genre that you’re going to be writing in. Genre is something we touched on in last week’s episode, so it made sense to move on to macro level story structure this week.
When we’re talking about macro level story structure, what are we talking about? We’re talking about the shape of your entire book. We’re not talking about scenes; we’re not talking about sequences; it’s what needs to happen in your book, and how can we divide your book up in such a way that ensures effective pacing in its storytelling.
And where this all begins, really one of the first writing coaches, one of the first writing instructors was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his work Poetics. Aristotle said that the structure of a dramatic narrative (of course, this is pre-novel, so he was largely talking about theater, but the theory remains the same) needs a plot with a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s what Aristotle said we need for the structure of a story.
It might sound obvious, but a lot of discovery writers, for example, don’t know when the beginning of their book becomes the middle and they’re not sure when the middle becomes the end. So while it’s obvious that the story needs these things, not all writers are necessarily thinking about them when they’re planning and drafting their book.
It makes me think about when I was in university, I took a lot of cinema courses. I had an undergrad in cinema. I remember one class we were talking about, it might have been DW Griffiths, I forget who it was, but the professor said, “Oh, and here is the scene where he invented the close-up.” You’re like, wait, what? And prof says, “Yeah, he’s the first person who ever thought of moving the camera close to the actor’s face.”
Early American films were largely just filmed vaudeville pieces. The camera was often positioned as though it was sitting dead center in the audience, looking at a stage, even that stage was a set, and we see the vaudeville performance play out. Someone had to invent the idea of a close-up, even though today, it seems so obvious. It is the same thing with the beginning and the middle and an end; at some point, someone needed to say stories need these three things, and it was Aristotle who did that. In doing so, he influenced stories for centuries to come because what is a beginning and a middle and an end other than a three-act structure?
We’ll get to that three-act structure in a moment, but before Hollywood embraced the three-act structure and after Aristotle, there was another author and theorist who did some intense thinking about story structure. Gustaf Freytag, in his book, The Technique of Drama from 1863, he laid out something now known as “Freytag’s pyramid.” It’s a pyramid-shaped story structure, which kind of makes it unique unto itself, because it seems to suggest the high point of the story is midway through, which normally most of us would think of that as much later in the story. But ignoring the pyramid structure of it, it’s essentially a five-act structure that Freytag laid out that involved a beginning portion of exposition where we’re setting up the story, rising action where the story’s plot and tension leads towards the story’s climax, we then get to the climax is often the most intense moment in the story, then We then enter a period of falling action and then we get our resolution or our denouncement, where whe outcome of the story is resolved.
While I think pyramid might look a little outdated or strange, given its pyramid structure, ultimately, this five-act structure approach is pretty solid and still continues to be used today. And we’ll get to the five-act structure in a moment, but first, let’s talk about the Hollywood three-act structure.
This is certainly my introduction to writer’s craft was actually via screenwriting books and books about cinema history. I was a huge movie buff in high school and it was through wanting to learn about cinema wanting to learn about writing movies that I learned about writer’s craft, and that I learned about the three-act structure, probably largely through Syd Field’s book Screenplay, a very famous, well-respected book on the art of screenplay writing.
In that book, Field talked about how a Hollywood script needs to be 120 pages long, we need to be able to split that 120 pages up into three acts, which is essentially a beginning and a middle and an end, with the middle being twice as long as the beginning and the end. And perhaps that’s where we start to evolve from Aristotle’s concept of a beginning in the middle and an end. In the three-act structure, we get three sections of the story a beginning and a middle and an end, but not of equal length. The middle portion is twice as long as both the beginning and the end portions in the three-act structure.
The three-act structure continues to this day in Hollywood. We’ve had a Hollywood cinema for over 100 years now and for the most part, most big mainstream blockbusters are still using a three-act structure. even when I think of something like Charlie Kaufman’s, Synecdoche, New York, his very kind of self-indulgent arty film with Philip Seymour Hoffman, about creation in art, I bet you if we took a look at it, it’s still very much a three-act structure story even though it is a pretty wild out there film for Hollywood.
If we look at something like Mad Max Fury Road, that movie is just a structural masterpiece. And you can absolutely see the three acts playing out in it, though, I would argue it’s probably using a four-act structure. So maybe now it’s time maybe to move on to that four-act structure concept.
Where I learned about four-act structure and where I think it’s most articulately laid out is in Larry Brooks’s fantastic book, Story Physics: Harnessing the Underlying Forces of Storytelling. He also has a book called Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing. And I think those books work really nicely in tandem, to help perhaps a new writer, or writer new to writer’s craft, understand the importance of the four-act structure.
One of the reasons a novelist, as opposed to a screenplay writer, might want to start thinking in a four-act structure is in cinema we’re looking at a 120-page screenplay. That’s 30 pages for Act One, 160 pages for Act Two, and 30 pages for Act Three. Whereas a novelist, we’re looking at, say, a 400-page book. Iif we’re just thinking of our book in the three acts, that middle act is hundreds and hundreds of pages, and tens of thousands of words long. It can become a bit overwhelming. It can also become a bit of a slog for both the author and the reader, if we’re trying to approach the middle of the story as one big long chunk. What Larry Brooks does, and what I tend to do with my clients, is break that up into a four-act structure so that we’re looking at four acts, all of which are of equal length. So we’re looking at about 25% of the book’s word count, in each of those four acts.
And what happens here, when we break the story up into a four-act structure, is we now have something called the midpoint shift, which is a really important point in the story at the 50% mark, where something changes, and Larry Brooks talks a lot about the importance of the midpoint shift. And James Scott Bell and another great writing instructor has a really nice short book, it’s almost more of a pamphlet called, Write Your Novel from the Middle. That book is all about that midpoint shift. Bell actually argues that not only is the midpoint shift massively important, but it’s actually where you should start the planning process with your book. It’s where you should start thinking about your story, not the beginning, not the end. But in fact, the middle
Probably most writing instructors you hear about are going to be using the four-act structure; certainly myself, K.M. Weiland, James Scott Bell, and Larry Brooks. We all agree the four-act structure is really nice for novelists.
That said, of course, we don’t have to stop at the four-act structure. Shawn Coyne, author of The Story Grid kind of conceptualizes things in a three-act structure in which there’s an initial hook and an ending payoff. But the middle portion, he actually recommends breaking up into three big events. And so essentially, what Coyne is arguably presenting is a five-act structure. And so for a while now, I’ve been thinking about the five-act structure as being Coyne’s structure in terms of we have our normal opening act, but then we have these three big set pieces basically in the middle of the book leading up to the ending payoff.
However, at one point, it occurred to me: “Wait a minute . . . that’s just five-act structure!” And so you know, we see the Hollywood three-act structure, we see people like Larry Brooks and James Scott Bell, KM Weiland, pushing it to a four-act structure, and what Coyne is talking about is essentially a five-act structure, which actually takes us back in time to Shakespeare.
Of course, every Shakespeare play is written using a five-act structure and so clearly a massively useful and successful way of structuring a story. Shakespeare did it for all of his plays. While the four-act structure is probably the most prevalent in literature and in modern commercial storytelling, you might want to think about that Elizabethan/Shawn Coyne five-act structure where you can think about the middle portion of your book in three big chunks.
Now, not all story structures are presented in a linear diagram. While the three, four, and five act structures are all generally presented as an almost bridge-shaped diagram going from left to right across the page. There are other approaches largely a spiral or a circle.
One of the more modern story structures that you might see out there is Dan Harmon’s story structure, you can call it the Harmon circle in which rather than going in a straight line from left to right, the story actually the story structure is presented as a clock shape, where you’re going around the clock. And Hartman’s approach to story structure involves an eight-staged process that is the characters in a zone of comfort, but they want something, they enter an unfamiliar situation. And they adapt that, to that unfamiliar situation. They find what they wanted, but they pay a price for it. And they’d go back to the starting place of the story, now capable of change.
The circular story structure can be really helpful for thinking about stories where our hero returns to where they started, at the end of the story changed. Stories are about change. We want to emphasize for our reader, how the story has changed how things have changed how the character has changed at the end, otherwise, they feel like it was all pointless. And one of the most effective ways to demonstrate change is to return the story return the character back to where it started, only clearly the world or the character is different due to the events of the story.
The Harmon cycle makes a lot of sensed, and it is building off probably one of the most famous story structures of all time: Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth.
Campbell was an academic who studied story and who came up with this concept that is known today as the hero’s journey. He looked at hundreds, if not 1000s, of stories from all sorts of different cultures. And what he found was that there was a core story, a mono myth being told in all cultures, and that’s what was dubbed the hero’s journey. You hear the hero’s journey, probably thrown around a lot in writers craft circles in film analysis, circles and whatnot these days. But the thing to note is that the monomyth was discussed and introduced to the world by Joseph Campbell, in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. When you hear about people like, say, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, drawing from that work, while creating the original Star Wars film, it’s really that Campbell book that’s being referenced.
That book is a little bit of a slog to read. It’s a fairly academic piece, so when you hear people talking about the hero’s journey these days, they’re actually usually talking about a modernization of Campbell’s monomyth by Christopher Vogler, as outlined in his book, The Writer’s Journey.
Vogler worked for Disney in the 80s. And he was obviously familiar with Lucas and familiar with Joseph Campbell’s work. What Vogler did was modernize Campbell’s story structure for modern storytellers and largely for modern Hollywood storytellers. Vogler was trying to create a system that Disney screenwriters could use to effectively execute on Joseph Campbell’s theories, but in a more modern context, and Vogler’s theories were hugely successful throughout the 80s. And then he eventually published his book on the topic, originally in the 90s. Vogler adapted the language of the hero’s journey, so some of the things that Campbell called one thing, Vogler has a different name for it. And Vogler’s terminology tends to be what you hear about in modern conversations about the hero’s journey.
Okay, now this is just the beginning of an exploration of the concept of macro level story structure. These ones that we’ve looked at so far are really looking at the big milestones, the big plot points where your story transitions from act one to act two, those sorts of things. But there are also story structures out there that are a little more detailed, and they’re really going down to the beat level where they’re suggesting, not just what are the big milestones where a story goes from beginning to middle and middle to end, but really what needs to be taking place within each of those acts.
If you’re a romance writer, you should definitely be taking a look at the book, Romancing the Beat, in which the author lays out a story structure beat by beat for the romance genre. The author and cover designer and writing instructor Derrick Murphy has his own conception of a four-act story structure that again, he breaks down beat by beat. It’s great so you should take a look at Derek’s work.You might also have heard of Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel. In that book, she takes the original Hollywood save the cat story structure and transitions it over into the world of novels and literature. Again, it’s more of a beat-by-beat breakdown of macro level story structure.
I love nerding out on this stuff, as you might have picked up. This stuff, I find so fascinating. I feel like as a kid, when I discovered story structure, it was like the curtain had been pulled back on storytelling. It really completely revolutionized the way I thought about films and literature and stories. And that, as Larry Brooks would say, there’s story engineering involved, there’s frameworks and structures that we can build our creativity upon. If we use the house metaphor, if our story is a house, well, if we build our house upon these proven, sturdy structural foundations, it gives us the confidence to know that our house is going to stand and we can go as crazy as we want with our creativity because we know that the fundamental structure of the story is there and we’re building upon it. That’s why story structure is one of our key focuses in week two of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE.
As I talked about last week, one of the topics we touch on in the first week of the program is genre. One of the topics we dig deep into in week two is macro-level story structure. So if you would like to learn more about these structures that we’ve just touched on here, if you’d like to see diagrams of each one and perhaps some templates that you can work from for your outline, I highly encourage you to join STORY PLAN INTENSIVE now.
We kick things off January 1, the first day of the new year, the first video will go out. You might be recovering from a wild New Year’s Eve night, so you can lay in bed, pull out your phone and watch the first training videos for the course that first day of the year. Kick-off 2024 with some intense focus on learning your story craft but also learning a process that you can replicate time and time again, for producing an outline for your book quickly in a concentrated period of time.
This is the problem that I see: we have discovery writers who aren’t planning their novel at all, or we have planners who never start writing because they’re still planning, they’re still researching. They have to have the perfect story Bible laid out before they ever start writing.
I’m somewhere in between. I’m saying you should spend an intense month planning your story. That’s why it’s called Story Plan “Intensive.” We do a ton of learning, and we do a ton of work, but we keep it to a four-week window so that we can then get to the real work and the real fun, which is writing your novel.
If you’ve perhaps avoided planning in the past, I encourage you to give the program a shot and see if perhaps you can learn anything from the planning side of things. If you’re someone who perhaps overly plans or who isn’t producing your books as quickly as you would like because you’re spending too much time in the planning phase, join STORY PLAN INTENSIVE and get a system that you can replicate time and time again for outlining a novel incredibly quickly. I can’t wait to see you inside of STORY PLAN.
That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, hit that subscribe button so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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