As a structure-focused/structure-first kind of writer, I spend a lot of time before I really begin drafting on brainstorming and organizing scene ideas and essentially looking to see the larger patterns of the story emerging.
I’m essentially spending a lot of time upfront working with the story’s structure on a macro level.
I thought this month I would share a few of the ways that I tend to work with structure on a whole story or narrative arc level—and these methods can be used whether you want to start with structure work or if you’ve already done a lot of freewriting or generated a lot of material without any kind of frame and now you want to devote more time to developing the arc or larger structure of your narrative.
I’ve also used these techniques before starting on a later draft to help refine and solidify a piece’s structure so they can really be used at any point in your process.
And I also want to say that you can work with these even if you don’t know everything about your story yet. Often for a first draft I’ll only know about 80% of the arc, and I won’t really know the ending yet (it’s like a fuzzy kind of glimmer on the periphery of things), so I work by structuring what I do know, and then after creating enough of a frame, I give myself permission to start writing even though I don’t fully know the ending yet.
Strategy #1: Write down each scene idea on its own cue card or post-it and then play with different possibilities.
I jot down each scene idea on a post-it or cue card, and then I explore how to order them and experiment with different possbilities. I’ve also kept lists of scene ideas, but I find it helpful to be able to have them in a format that’s easily moveable so that as I explore different structural possibilities, I can easily shift the cards or post-its around.
If I know I’m working with two (or more) different timelines or types of sections (i.e. narrative-focused versus research-focused for creative non-fiction), I’ll sometimes use different colour post-its or colour-code the cue cards.
If you’ve already generated a lot of material first, you can create a cue card or post-it for each scene you’ve already freewritten or drafted, and then add more for scene ideas that come to you as you do this work.
This approach can be particularly helpful if you have drafted a lot without focusing on the larger structure as it can help you move away from tweaking and line editing what you've drafted or feeling overwhelmed with too much text, and instead see the larger image or vision of the work and assess what belongs in this narrative and what possibly doesn’t—and also helps you see any gaps that still need to be filled in.
Strategy #2: Map both the external and internal arcs alongside each other.
There are the events that happen in your story, but there’s also the meaning those hold for your protagonist and how what happens shapes the internal journey they’re on. As Lisa Cron writes in Story Genius, “Story is about how the things that happen in the plot affect the protagonist, and how he or she changes internally as a result.”
This mapping of the external and internal arc alongside each other is a strategy I tend to use for a second or third draft, basically once I reach the point where I have a sense of both what happens and what the overall journey or insight is internally for the protagonist. I list the external events, and then I also focus on why it matters internally to the character and what they’re learning from that moment, always keeping in mind what their overall internal journey is and where there is the desire for change but also resistance to it.
For the second draft of my novel, I followed the approach in Story Genius, using the template Cron gives to create cards for each scene that mapped what happens but also why each scene matteredto my protagonist.
Another way I’ve used this approach for a short story is with tracing paper so I could see the external and internal arcs layered on top of each other. In that case, I mapped out the external events, then created internal arcs on separate pieces of tracing paper for my protagonist and my antagonist and then a final one for the emotional journey of their relationship. I could then see in this layered way what happened and why it mattered to each central character and how it was a turning point in their relationship.
Strategy #3: Write a narrative outline.
An alternative to using point-form notes or cue cards is to draft a narrative outline for your piece. With this approach you’re writing down as a kind of condensed narrative what happens in the story—the main moments of action, challenge, and transformation. As Matt Bell describes in Refuse to Be Done, this type of outline is “a summary of the book written in an approximation of the novel’s voice.”
Strategy #4: Use an external structure model.
As I wrote about in a previous blog, I tend not to use external models when I’m working on early drafts. For a first draft, I often come up with scene ideas, but I trust my intuitive sense of how the scenes should be ordered and what the larger arc seems to be rather than forcing it to fit to any specific model.
However, you might be a writer who benefits from following a specific model during the early stages of a piece—and some of that may depend on the genre you’re writing in. For example, screenwriters often know and work within a more specific formula, so it can be helpful to work within that frame early on and find ways to both adhere to the expectations and still make the narrative feel surprising for your viewers.
I often find I turn to those models later in my process to see how what has come up intuitively aligns with a specific model—again, not to force the story to conform but to see how I can use what is anticipated from these structural models to create a more compelling narrative arc.
I also find the imagery that comes from some of the names given to key moments in these structures, like Crossing the Threshold or The Dark Night of the Soul, can help me understand the deeper significance of a specific moment or possibly discover a stage of the protagonist’s journey that I’ve missed or not given enough emphasis to. I often reference this Archplot Structure diagram by Ingrid Sundberg that maps out the three-act structure and some of the different terminology given to key narrative moments.
Strategy #5: Be inspired by a specific shape.
Rather than focusing on the traditional pyramid shape, you could envision a different type of shape for your story to embody.
Jane Alison proposes some different models Meander, Spiral, Explode, exploring forms like waves, spirals, explosions, and digressions—patterns, she writes, “that yielded connections and meaning, rather than anything linear.”
Another idea around shape I love comes from Alice Munro:
“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
It’s something worth considering: how would you structure your story if you were envisioning it as a spiral or a meandering or an explosion—or if you held in your mind Munro’s idea of it being the act of constructing a house for your reader to walk through and see the view outside from within? What different possibilities might present themselves if you had a different shape in mind for your narrative?
In one form or another, I feel like that’s what all of the strategies help me explore: what is possible for the narrative and what feels most true to the sense of the shape I’m sensing but maybe haven’t fully envisioned or been able to articulate yet.
