Avoiding Story Structure

So is everyone back into a regular routine? Recovered from holiday fun and tasty treats?

I was laid up in bed yesterday, and while it might have been a good chance to get a lot of writing done, I didn’t have the energy. But I did read a great article in Writer’s Digest by Steven James called “Story Trumps Structure”, which reminded me that when I'm writing, even if my work has a beginning, middle and an end, that doesn’t necessarily make it a story. It just makes it, at best, a report. He says that “at its most basic level, a story is a transformation unveiled-either the transformation of a situation or, most commonly, the transformation of a character.” A real story needs tension (ie. Conflict), and the secret isn’t to make more and more things “happen” to a character, or follow some rules that other people wrote down somewhere about plot formulas (although I have to admit a list of “ingredients for baking a story” sounds a lot like following a formula to me—but these are fine distinctions that I doubt it’s that important to argue.)

He followed this with five ingredients for “baking up a story” and I was thinking about them as I lay in bed, trying to apply his ingredient list into my own work:

Ingredient #1: Orientation – This is our set up, the ordinary world, as it were. This is where we introduce our characters and with that glimpse into their lives, reveal all that might (and will) go wrong. I looked at my own story and although there’s nothing normal about my character’s life, we do indeed see what it has been like and get a glimpse of what her struggle will be.

Ingredient #2: Crisis—James says the crisis that “tips your character’s world upside down” must be an “unavoidable, irrevocable challenge that sets the movement of the story into motion.” My heroine’s world has changed drastically for her in the two weeks before my story opens but she moves forward, keeping a low profile. She’s looking for something but doesn’t realize the betrayals that put her in this position originally were nothing, not compared to what she will experience when she finds it. And of course, finding it is our crisis.

Ingredient #3: Escalation—I like the character descriptions that James uses here. He says there are two kinds of people in a story: “putty people” and “pebble people”. Of course, we want our heroines/heroes to be putty people, the kind of people that get smushed and deformed when you rifle them at a wall. Pebble people will bounce off the wall and land on the ground unchanged, but what good is that? When it comes to my own heroine, I’m still figuring out exactly how she will change by her experiences, but the changes is there, so I think I’m going to be okay.

Ingredient #4: Discovery—At the climax of the story, discovery comes. A discovery that changes the character(s) lives so thoroughly they can’t ever go back. I think the most important thing James’ article touches on is this one line regarding the discovery: “the reader wants to predict how the story will end...but he wants to be wrong”. This shouldn’t have felt like such a lightbulb moment because as a reader myself I’ve always felt the most satisfying books are the ones that end in a way that is both unexpected, but also unavoidable/fits the best. And now I’m thinking of ways to make sure that the ending which has to happen for my heroine is one nobody else will see coming.

Ingredient #5: Change—of course, this is our ending, and most stories end in new life. Having mentally followed this list from beginning to end with my characters, I know that I’ll have this last bit covered because there’s no way my heroine can come out of all this and still be a pebble.

In the end, I think the lesson is that the story is about character change and growth, and if you keep this in mind you can let your structure follow without worrying too much about whether or not you’re writing a proper three act novel, or following the Hero’s Journey. Just show that the stakes are rising. Show that your characters’ experiences are changing him/her. Make us care deeply. And end the story in a surprising yet logical way that brings all of this together.

Anway, it helps me clarify my work to sometimes see it through the "formulas" or "ingredients" that other people have devised, but in the end I can only write the story that makes the most sense to me. What works best for you when you're plotting out a story and trying to decide how it will play out?