McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Structure...?

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blgarver:
Okay.  These replies have softened some of my fears about my story.  I guess now that I think about it, I do have a series of plot points that I want to reach, and I'm leaving it up to the characters to make it happen.  So I'm using some sort of structure, though I'm not sure what it's called or if it's called anything at all.

I have a degree in Video Production, which is the baby brother of a film degree.  Part of the coursework was screenwriting.  I had a couple of screenwriting courses...Video Film Scripting and Script Analysis.  These classes destroyed my ability to write a screenplay.  Because you can't teach someone to be creative and come up with a good, original story.  But you can teach someone the nuts and bolts of how you put a good, original story into a screenplay.  After those classes I was all about the character breakdowns and script breakdowns and the formulae for this and that, and the character arcs and the rise in action in the plot, yadda yadda.  Those classes got me thinking so much about the structure of the thing that I started to just fill in the blanks, thinking that once I got all the nuts and bolts together, I'd have built something that functioned.

But alas, that was not the case.

So, this is why I only write prose now.  Much more freedom.

Josh:
Two suggestions, worth what you paid for them.

One. Give yourself fluid structure. Outline a story to give yourself some initial momentum, and then shove the outline into a deep, dark cave and don't look at it again until you either finish the story or just want to look back on it and see how much it has changed from the original plot points. I do this a bit, and it helps me focus on the story, but also maintain that freedom.

Or, two, take it to a micro-level of structure. If you're having trouble with the story going all over the place for some reason, then maybe work on a scene by using MRU's. Motivation-Reaction units. Ask yourself at any time, "What's the motivation here?" and then, "How will this character react to it?" A motivation can be anything from unbearable thirst to a gun pointed in your face to that beautiful woman who just winked at you. Reaction can be...anything that the character might do that is in line with who they are. Do that once. Once they've reacted, then there's a new motivation and a new reaction. Repeat until the climax. Take it one tiny step at a time and build on each. Again, this is nothing that has to define your story or restrict its potential, it's just a rough boundary that can keep you from going crazy trying to rope in every potential thread of plot and subplot.

Hope this helps in some small way.

Abstruse:
There's a big balancing act here.  On one hand, you don't want to follow "the formula" and be completely unoriginal.  However, you also want to make sure you don't lose structure completely.

A few months ago, I read a book that was an autobiography of a young woman as a private detective, but she tried to structure it as a novel.  However, because she was sticking too strictly to the truth of what happened, there was no structure at all.  It was just a bunch of stuff that happened to her.  There was no story arch, there was a beginning in that she got hired by the detective agency, but beyond that there was nothing.  It was interesting, but it felt scattered and very unfulfilling.  And this was an autobiography, so I wasn't expecting a story.

It's one thing to throw a monkey wrench into the works and do something insane like killing off who the readers think is the main character on page 120, but try to pick some sort of very basic structure and stick to it at least, whether it's the three acts of a screenplay, the five acts/five parts/two scenes structure of a Shakesperian play...just pick something.  Otherwise, there'll be no real feeling of resolution and your readers will be left feeling blah at the end.

The Abstruse One
Darryl Mott Jr. 

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