On Story Structure
Writing Craft Roundup is a series in which I gather thoughtful, interesting,
and generally good takes on writing in one convenient place. Enjoy!
Thinking about the shape of your story is important because it impacts the way the reader experiences the narrative—how the events unfold, the way the characters move through the story, the speed or the slowness, the moments of revelation. Having a structure to map your story onto helps all of the other pieces fall into place in a way that is intentional and has meaning.
In the Western tradition, the most common story shape that we learn about is one that combines symmetry with conflict and resolution. The story starts off with an inciting incident, followed by a series of obstacles that the protagonist must overcome before ultimately resolving the conflict that was introduced in the beginning. The narrative builds up to a climax before descending back down in the denouement. Riffs on this structure are found in the 3-act structure, the 5-act structure (Freytag’s pyramid), Save the Cat, and the hero’s journey. I haven’t linked to any of these because I’m positive that you can think of a metric ton of such stories, and it is also possible that you were told that this story structure is a) universal, and b) necessary.
But by now you may know or suspect that the pyramid structure is not the only shape a story can take. Story structure, like each and every aspect of writing craft, is a deliberate choice, not a foregone conclusion. There should be a relationship between the shape of your story and its content. “Form is the meeting point between a story and its reader” writer Shaelin Bishop tells us in their video The Importance of Form in Fiction. “The question is not, when you’re figuring out how you want to structure your piece, ‘How do I make my story fit this shape?’ It‘s ‘What shape is my story?’”
Eastern storytelling traditions offer up an alternative to the pyramid shape with the 4-act story structure, which you may know by its Japanese name, kishōtenketsu. Rather than relying on escalating conflict and antagonistic relationships, the 4-act story structure relies on curiosity and discovery.
The four-act story structure looks like this:
Act 1: Introduces the elements of the story
Act 2: Develops these elements
Act 3: Surprise! A twist, a brand new element, or a reversal.
Act 4: Ties all the elements together.
In his book Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling, Henry Lien describes an essential difference between this structure and the 3- or 5-act structures more typically found in Western tales: “The four-act structure is more interested in exploring the unseen relationships among the story’s elements than in pitting them against each other until only one stands.” Lien’s book is essential reading if you are interested in exploring this structure.
In addition to the 4-act story structure, Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird discusses circular or nested storytelling, a form that is also one of the many that Jane Alison covers in her lyrical book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. This book offers up a dizzying array of story structures that use patterns found in nature as their guide, including radials, spirals, fractals, wavelets, meanders, and networks and cells.
Alison pulls apart many different texts to show how they are using these patterns as a crucial element of the narrative, doing so organically and in tune with the content of the story itself: “a meander or net or explosion was simply the pattern the material needed,” she writes.
In “What Makes a Story,” Ursula K. Le Guin uses the metaphor of a story as a house to talk about structure. Sure, we can open the front door and speedrun the house to exit out the back door, but that is not how all stories have to be. The Western story arc puts a lot of emphasis on getting to the end, Le Guin argues, but unnecessarily so. “The end may be a climax or revelation, a denouement or end in the Aristotelian sense, or it may just be where this story stops being. If the house is soundly built, and what happens inside it makes sense, if the house itself is a memorable experience, the back door isn’t any more important than any other part of it.”
For those working in short fiction, story structure is a little different.
Roseanna Pendlebury for the Ancillary Review of Books has an excellent analysis of what makes a novella work in her article “Small Press Dispatch: Form and Function in Ursula Whitcher’s North Continent Ribbon.”
She considers the factors that prevent a novella from just feeling like novels that have been unsatisfactorily truncated due to their size limits. “The best novellas are ones whose authors understand what they need to cut and what they need to focus on, and let that dictate the shape of the story,” she writes, offering examples of different novellas (including a couple of my personal favourites) that make different structural choices but all work fantastically well to accomplish what they set out to.
Author Kathleen Jennings has an exquisitely dense and rich analysis in Story shapes—three mood stories in which she talks about story structure and mood: “Short stories can be held together by surface tension, and three moods is just enough to give one shape.” This is a little bit of a digression, because Jennings talk about how these shapes can map onto a variety of different structures, but it is still an interesting rabbit hole to go down if you want to reverse engineer some stories looking for shapes. To give you a taste, a couple of the three-mood shapes that she describes are “world—deeper—dissolve into it,” and “door—something through—pushed back.”
All this is to say two things, really:
The sky is the limit when it comes to story structure, so please do not feel like you need to glue yourself to Freytag’s pyramid to have a narrative that works.
The key to structure is to consider it as an integral part of the story. What shape does your story want to be, and how does that serve its purpose?
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