Every good story follows a specific structure. Think of it like a backbone–we all have one, even though we can look totally different on the outside. The thing is, a person without a backbone would be a weird-looking blobby mess.

So how can we use Universal Story Structure to keep our stories form looking like weird, blobby messes? Check out the latest episode of the Story Coaching podcast to learn more.

For a deeper look at Story Structure and help planning your novel, check out the free Story Planning Guide.

The Transcript:

Hello, everyone and welcome to the story coaching podcast. And today we are going to be talking about story structure.

Story structure is really, to me, it’s the backbone of story. There’s two ways, when we sit down and think about it, there’s two ways to write a story or two ways that are often put forward.

The first is, make it up as you go–what’s often lovingly called pantsing, and it’s just fly by the seat of your pants and see where the story takes you. Then there’s the other half of that equation, which is knowing where you’re going beforehand, and that’s what we call plotting.

Plotting, at its purest is writing down point by point, every beat, everything that’s going to happen in the story. We think of there being these two different ways, and I want to share with you this idea of story structure, which to me is kind of a nice in between.

Structure to me means that we know where we’re going, it means that we know the big points that we have to hit. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not able to take a detour and in a little bit, I’m going to show you how I use story structure to actually make it easier to follow those moments of inspiration, those pantsing moments where we are taking a bit of a detour, and we’re gonna explore something else. With a story structure, we can make sure that that still fits into our plot.

Now, when I say story structure to a lot of people, some people like it, and some people kind of turn their noses. I think that story structure, the word structure is being confused with formula and formulaic writing is typically what I think of anyhow, is when we’ve got something like a Harlequin romance. Romance novels got a bad rap for this, when it seemed like, really, all the authors were doing was changing the name of the character, maybe a few details, and then they were just putting them into the same story. It was boy meets girl, boy and girl aren’t together, then boy and girl get together and then there’s challenges and that was the formula.

A structure to me is very different. I know a lot of people too, they don’t like the word structure in general. Maybe they want to be that very openly creative person that is following their inspiration. They just want to see what happens, I just want to see what comes out of a story. I think that that’s great and like I said, again, I love doing that, too. I think I’ve talked about before, I used to be that diehard pantser that would just love nothing more than to sit outside in the summer and just let the story take me wherever I wanted to. Since I’ve started using a structure, that process has become even more rewarding. So we’ll talk about that again in a little bit.

I think other people, once we start talking about story structure, we start talking about “rules”. It just feels like it’s too complicated, just feels like it’s too much. It’s a lot to take on and they just want to tell their story. They don’t want to have to worry about the rules. Am I hitting all the right things at the right time? And story structure? It doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s pretty straightforward. I’m going to show you how.

I’m going to talk to you about how I actually use it and how I think it’s really sped up and made my writing process easier.

The last thing that I think people get worried about with story structure that we’ll talk about today is they feel like how can a story structure apply to every single story? Aren’t stories unique? Aren’t they different? Aren’t all the genres different? They have these different conventions.

When I’m talking about story structure, I’m really talking about a universal story structure, a backbone that underlies all stories.

So the big things that I really want you to pay attention today and take away from this episode, when we talk about different genres, we talk about stories being unique. We also have to recognize that storytelling is something that humans have been doing for a very long time and we’re getting better and better at it. But it does mean that readers have an expectation. They expect certain highs and lows. They expect a certain flow to a story. Once we know what those highs and lows are, it makes storytelling so much easier. It means that our stories are going to be that much more relatable.

Having a structure can also challenge us to be more creative. People are always worried that if I have a structure, I’m going to be locked in, I’m going to be sort of forced into this narrow formula if I can use a word. It’s really been so fascinating for me as I’ve built out my story structure that I use, to see how it challenges me to be more creative, and how the stories that I’m producing are coming out better, are coming out faster, and I’m ending up spending much less time editing, even if I am following some of those inspiration moments, taking a detour or taking a little side trip down to explore something here or there, adding something in halfway through.

I did that just the other day while I was writing and having the structure there was perfect because I knew exactly how this added information that I was putting in. I knew exactly how it fit into the rest of the story.

Last thing that we really need to think about, and the reason why I really feel that story structure is so important, especially to new writers, is because readers have this expectation of how a story is going to be told when we follow the structure, when we show them that we understand story the same way that they do. We earn their trust and that’s important because it means that when they trust us, they’re willing to enter into that suspension of disbelief. They’re willing to commit themselves completely into the story and then we are able to take them on these wild and crazy adventures. We’re able to take them places that normally they would not believe in, they would not follow. But when we earn their trust, through showing them that we understand story structure, we can take them anywhere. We can take them on the most unique adventure you could possibly imagine. 

Alright, so let’s talk about structure. Let’s talk about what this actually looks like, what does the backbone of a story really look like? I’m going to invite you to download the Story Planning Guide, it’s free and in there is a copy of my big story planning structure graph. This goes through kind of eight phases, seven turning points, everything that happens in a story, again, on that really general level.

It’s a few hours to really go through story structure. But we’re going to just talk about a really brief kind of overview right here. Like I said that that resource is available to you for free so you can get a much better picture of this. If you go to theWritable.com/story-planning-guide. But the really basic idea of story structure, and there’s lots of different story structures out there, different models, you’ve got three act structure, you’ve got hero’s journey, you’ve got like story gridding. There’s lots of structures and over time, what I’ve done is I’ve studied all of them as I’ve really just sort of compiled them into one.

What they all have in common is you’re going to start your story and your character is going to be in what we call the the normal world. Normal world is a hero’s journey term, because the hero would always go somewhere but the normal world is just where things are normal for the character. Doesn’t mean that they’re going to travel to a different physical location, but everything is running in their world the same as it would normally. They’re living their life. Now this means that they have goals that they want to reach. They have obstacles, they have things going on in their life.

We’re dropping people into the middle of the story or into the middle of the character’s life. They’ve got regular things going on the same as we, regular people have things going on every day. But where we’re at with this is that they’re kind of stuck. They’re kind of status quo, but they’re not really being challenged to grow necessarily in any way and that’s important, because at some point, there’s going to be the inciting incident.

That’s a moment where an adventure is presented. They don’t want to go but all of a sudden, the inciting incident is a turning point where it becomes the least bad choice for them to go and do this thing that they didn’t really want to do in the beginning.

After that, they’re still kind of in their normal world. They know that they’re going to go on this adventure, they’re thinking that they’re preparing for it, they feel like they’re prepared and we’re gonna have another turning point. It’s usually called the key event and this is the introduction to the adventure world. Again, the adventure world is not necessarily a physical place. If you are writing fantasy, or science fiction, or even contemporary, you might have a change in physical location. But mostly, what we’re really looking at is a change in circumstance.

What that change in circumstance is it’s challenging the character’s thoughts, their beliefs, their values. It’s challenging who they are. What’s really interesting is that, when we focus on so in that key event, I should say is, is the split between what would traditionally be called act one and act two.

In act one, in that beginning part, the conflict and the tension is mostly coming externally so it’s mostly about the things that are going on around the character. A lot of writers have a much easier time writing this sort of external stuff than they do the stuff that’s going to come in the middle and I know a couple episodes ago, we did talk about the middle builds, and we talked about what makes it special and how to actually work a middle build.

The big thing is that a lot of your attention, in the middle of the story and through that whole act two, which is 50% of your story, all of the tension is going to be coming internally. That’s because the character is in a new circumstance, and they’re being challenged in how they think and there are lots of ups and downs, and there’s lots of different notes that you want to hit in the middle there. But at the end of the day, it’s all about putting the character in situations that challenge how they think, and how they feel, and how they evaluate their choices, to the point where we get them all the way towards the climax.

The climax is a very interesting point that I think a lot of people get a little bit wrong. Because when we read a climax, we’re switching back into that external tension, that external excitement. But what really makes it pop, what really makes it important is the internal belief change that has to happen just before that. I’ll talk about climaxes more in depth in another episode.

The overview of story structure is, we start them in their normal world, they’re facing challenges, something they know that they’re going to have to go on an adventure, and then boom, we drop them into that second act, and we show them that their old way of being is not going to work. And we show them that repeatedly through lots of trial and error, through lots of failures. We get them, we put them through the wringer on an internal emotional mental level, all the way until we get to that third act, which is where your climax is normally going to sit. Or where your climax should sit.

All of that internal tension that’s been building through the entire middle is going to come to a head and the character is going to have to switch something about themselves. This is what we talked about when we say character driven fiction, where we have a normal person who is stepping into being a hero, as opposed to that more event driven fiction where someone starts as a hero and then they’re just successful at whatever.

Whatever the external storyline is, this is about someone becoming a hero and they have to shift something about their thoughts and their values in order to be successful.

So we’re moving again. The middle was all about internal tension, we’re moving back out into external tension, because actually, we’re gonna resolve that internal tension that’s been building within them for the entire story.

Story planning structure is hours to really go through in depth. But that’s a very broad overview. You can check it out more in depth with that story planning guide, but what I really want to drive home is that it’s about the emotional highs and lows, it’s about the challenges that a character has to face. It’s really about how the inner and the outer conflicts are interacting and it’s understanding how we, as writers need to build those interactions. We need to stack them on top of each other.

This type of story structure, when we think about it, it really is innate, it is that pattern of ups and downs that readers expect. So I’ve got little kids, and we read a lot of picture books. Picture books also follow this pattern. There’s a challenge, they trial and error until the character realizes something acts differently and is able to be successful in whatever the challenge is. So we understand this type of story. From the time we’re little, and our parents are reading us picture books. It’s also how we share events that have happened to us. 

For example, you encounter some situation at work, you talk about it, you talk about it, you talk about it, and you realize something new about that situation, or you realize something about yourself, or you realize some new way to move forward. Then you might tell somebody about that later. That’s how we share stories. That’s how we share our ideas and our concepts. The personal growth that we’ve gone through as adults, when we’re even just talking to each other.

This is mean, but I had a friend when I was a kid who would just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and it was very boring to listen to, and I remember if she’d call me on the phone, I could set the phone down for 15 minutes and go back to it and she’d still be talking. We know when something is not hitting the right pace, is not hitting the ups and downs, because we lose interest in it. We can leave and we can come back and not really have noticed that anything has passed.

So we have this innate story structure that we understand. I think as writers we get too close to the story though, and we can’t see it, which is where a story structure like this comes in handy and the story structure, it really does apply across all genres, all topics, all stories. It’s just there and it’s not a pervasive thing, it’s not something that you would pick up on just by reading stories.

It’s something that really, I believe, has to be studied so that we have this deep underlying knowledge, because we don’t look at it and study it independently. We just take it for granted. We just think that we know it because we’re natural storytellers and we understand the story. And we can see when story’s done well, and we can see to when story’s done poorly.

What I have noticed, because I do like to pick apart stories is that when we follow the story structure, the story is better, the story is tighter. The other thing is that when you follow the story structure, it really does allow us to be more original.

We talked earlier about creating trust in the reader and when we create trust and the reader, we’re really generating this feeling of safety for them so that they’re willing to follow us with a story. They’re willing to stay with the story. It doesn’t mean that character A is always going to do this and that they’re always going to do this specific action on page six, and they’re always gonna do this on page 10.

It really is about the highs and lows, it’s about how things twist and how things interact and how what happens in your beginning is so important for an impactful ending. It’s about how all the pieces of the story really mesh together and for me, when I started using something like this, it really opened up my creativity, not only was I able to feel, I was able to feel more comfortable going to all of these crazy places, because I felt that I had a story structure. I had a map that I could follow.

But when we have a story structure and there’s eight sections with seven turning points between them. Those seven turning points, those are big kind of dramatic moments, and each with a different goal or meaning. If you would have thought to put in seven big twists in your story–we know that we need a twist, but would you have thought of seven? Would you have thought of that many on your own?

And what’s really fantastic is when I’ve got a new idea, I start jotting down all of the events that I think are going to happen in this story. I think of everything that is exciting and interesting. I go through my planning process, which is also in the story planning guide. I pick apart all the details, I need to know about the character in the world, and then how the conflicts are going to work.

And I get all of these events, and I just start plugging the events into the story structure and when I do that, I’m able to see, hey, I’ve got a piece here that I’ve got too much happening in this section. But I’m missing something here, and when I’m missing something, it forces me to be creative and think about how I’m going to fill that section. When I’ve got too much, it forces me to really think about what’s important, what’s at the core of the story.

The insights that I’ve had just from filling, trying to fill these eight sections and seven turning points have really just been completely eye opening sometimes and have created these much richer stories that really do challenge my creativity.

They say that the more you’re challenged, the more creative you’re forced to be, and that’s exactly what something like the story planning structure can do for you, while also giving you the freedom to be more creative, because you’ve got that backbone. You’ve got that map that you can always go back to to figure out how to get yourself back on track.

When I’m actually writing a story, I use story structure as well, I’ve always got it in the back of my mind because like you probably, I also might plot out a whole story, but I’ll get halfway through a scene and add something new.

I mentioned this happened to me just the other day. I was writing and I added in a whole new, like resistance movement into my world. When I want to add something new like that, I can really evaluate it. I can see immediately how it’s going to affect all of the other parts of my plot and my story structure. I can see where all of the different pieces, maybe their foreshadowing, maybe their action cycle follow through of the storyline, I can see where all of that is going to fit in. It just allows me to be so freely creative.

So really, what I want to drive home for you today is that, you know writing, as we’ve talked about over and over writing doesn’t have to be a struggle. We can create a plot and we can create a really good exciting book. We actually do this pretty quickly once we understand story structure.

I’m going to encourage you to download that free story planning guide. I mean, it’s there, I put that together for you to help you plan your story and start putting a plot together and you really just go through the workbook.

You come up with different events, you come up with different things that are going to happen and you can literally just drag and drop them into different sections. It’s not a fancy computer program so it’s more of a manual drag and drop, but you put them into different sections, then we start filling everything in between, and I guarantee you, your stories are going to be more robust, you’re going to be able to put more things in, and you’re going to be able to do that without compromising excitement and readability.

You are going to find like a whole new level of story and you’re gonna find how everything clicks and matches together. That really is the power of story structure. And whether you’re somebody that identifies as a plotter, or someone that identifies as a pantser.

It’s going to help you see, again, what all those interactions are, all of the different pieces that you need to have and how all of the different pieces fall together. That’s whether you’re writing romance, or horror or adventure. It’s really about the internal story. It’s about the emotional highs and lows that those readers, the readers that we want to read our books expect.

So again, you can get that story planning guide, theWritable.com/story-planning-guide, or there is a link in the comments below the episode.

So I really do hope that you download that and enjoy it, work through it. Drop me a message and let me know what’s working for you, and what new and exciting things you’ve been able to put into your story. I would love to hear that.

So thanks so much guys, and I will see you next week.