Structuring Story
We are nature. We forget it sometimes, but there are everyday clues. The beads of sweat that form on our foreheads to regulate our body temps. The tell-tale scab that reminds us we heal. A lustful urge that strikes at an awkward moment.
We inhabit the natural world and respond to the cycle of the moon, the ebb and flow of tides, and the ripple of air waves around us. This is reflected in how we communicate and tell stories.
Different cultures have different ways of structuring their stories. For example, folk tales of Indigenous populations of Central America traditionally tend to favor episodic structures, often unique independent scenes that don’t necessarily lead to a climactic event. Vignettes. Western literary traditions favor the three-act story.
Regardless of preference, there’s always an inherent rhythm. The heartbeats in our chest, our footfalls on long walks. Even the rhythm of play with energetic bursts and pauses for rest. We love a steady beat. We live by rhythm.
The way we organize ourselves and how we create reflects our need for structure. Popular music has structural rhythm: Verse > Chorus > Verse > Chorus > Bridge > Chorus. Symphonies conform to a standardized four part pattern: a brisk first movement, a slower second movement, an energetic third movement, and the dramatic finale.
Visual art has structure. Artists use composition to guide their work. Let’s not forget the rule of three in photography. The rule of three actually makes an appearance everywhere.
My WIP is a dual-POV romance with intertwining plot lines. The main romance plot and a mystery subplot. I was struggling with the structure of the story, which was refusing to fall into any kind of stable framework. It had gotten unmanageable.
I wrestled with tracking the finer elements, the clues and threads, running throughout the story. Creating and refining the voice of my characters was crippling me. Yet my biggest challenge came with the timing of the inciting incidents. They were landing wrong in the narrative, too early or too late, which either dragged the story down or didn’t allow me to set the characters up enough to be likeable.
I reached out to the writers of Twitter, and I got a great piece of advice that recommended writing the synopsis. The idea behind writing the synopsis as a tool, is that it forces you to synthesize the novel into its essence, highlighting key plot elements and laying out it’s structure. It turns out, writing the synopsis is a task more monumental than writing the novel itself. But it forced me to look at the structure and helped me understand what I was doing wrong.
The rhythm was off.
Around the same time that I was dealing with the chaos of an unwieldy WIP, I came across an article that discussed five-act structure.
“Serendipity.”
I restructured the manuscript to reflect the novel in five acts instead of three. My romance and mystery beats landed more naturally and a rhythm emerged. It was a minor re-imagining—especially if you envision the three-act set up as Act 1, Act 2 /midpoint / Act 2.5, Act 3—but my story folded into this framework organically, and my issues of timing fixed themselves.
I am a linguist. I love frameworks and structure. I am human. I love to find order in chaos. I am nature. I love rhythm and a steady beat. Reframing my story into five acts allowed me to wrangle my characters and their intertwining plots into a story with a steady rhythm, and maybe even a jazz beat.
All images sourced from unsplash.