Beyond Plotting and Pantsing -- Creating and Maintaining Your Story Structure

Okay, writerly types, it's time for another Writer Roundtable here on the blog. For this one, let's talk about story structure and how you build your stories.

Instead of rehashing the same old plotter vs. pantser argument, let's talk about how to work your plots regardless of which method fits you. 

How do you store ideas that you want to work into your stories? How much detail goes into plot "nuggets" when you store them?

Sheela Chattopadhyay: I either write ideas down in a small nugget/trivia like form or I record a voice note for later on to add into my writing notes for later. The detail level varies by the idea's depth at that moment in time.

Duane Laflin: I simply have a file on my computer labeled "Book ideas." When I see something that might work in a future story, I put it in the file.

Nancy Hansen: I don't outline, but I generally start something with a vague concept of what might happen. Now and then I will get a good idea that I can't work on now, so I'll shove it in a file for that particular story, which are all in virtual file folders on my PC, and backed up elsewhere on thumb drives or a portable hard drive. With AI out there, I'm not into cloud backups. I just get enough of the general notion laid out in a few sentences so that when I pull it up again, I have something to go with. Sometimes it's just a picture I saved that sparked an idea. That goes in the file too.

Klara Schmitt: While formatting goes out the window, I do try to be pretty detailed in my idea chunks. I do not bother trying to account for redundancy (e.g., when one idea undoes another), though. I'll sort that out later.

Tony Sarrecchia: Story ideas go into my Notes app with a hashtag Story Idea. This is my clearing house as I also have notebooks where I capture ideas in greater detail, but eventually move them into this file. Some notes are detailed down to dialogue and actions, while others are ‘guy discovers a pack of werewolves live in his garage’.

Sean Taylor: Pre-structure, I use speech-to-text to store any ideas that hit me from out of the blue. I keep them in a file on my phone. Eventually, I cull what doesn't work and write the others into plot points in my plot document in Word. Sometimes, these nuggets can be very details, with word choices and beats and what scene they lead into. Other times, they may just be a kernel of an idea that isn't fully popped yet, just sitting there waiting for another new idea to help it make sense and fit it. 

Van Allen Plexico: My outline and first draft is in a Google Doc, and I just add stuff as I come up with it, in order, while writing the actual draft from the top.

Brian K Morris: Little bits of business or scraps of dialogue are dutifully scribbled onto a small notepad I keep by my laptop for when these ideas occur. However, if I know exactly where one of these nuggets can go, I will stop what I'm doing and insert it into the story. As I work, I tear off the paper where the event/special words waited for me. And yes, I know I shouldn't edit as I go, but this works for me.

[Link] Understand Story Structure to Develop Your Novel Idea

by Rob Bignell

When writers come up with a great story idea but don’t know how to develop it, usually the problem is one of plotting.

Understanding story structure – i.e. plot – would be extremely helpful in developing their story. For example, they might realize that their kernel of an idea really is a great concept for a scene but not for an entire story. Knowing how that scene might fit into a full story would allow them to start writing.

Many fiction writers eschew the idea of following any general structure, believing that the story should grow organically, that following some kind of blueprint would result in tales that are all the same, like so many ticky-tacky houses in a cheap suburban development. But understanding story structure isn’t about following a blueprint. Instead, it’s like knowing the basic rules of structural engineering in construction. If you don’t understand tensile reinforcement, loading conditions, and distribution reinforcement, your building probably will be substandard and collapse. Likewise, if you don’t understand plot’s relationship to the other elements of a story, the parts of a plot, and conflict’s role in storytelling, your story probably will be substandard and quickly fall apart. And just as those engineering rules can lead to an infinite variety of structures, from pole sheds and 2-bedroom homes to airport terminals and skyscrapers, so the general rules of plotting can lead to an infinite variety of stories, from epic poetry and novels to short stories and screenplays.

Read the full article: https://inventingrealityediting.com/2024/01/13/understand-story-structure-to-develop-your-novel-idea/

Sunday Funnies: You've heard of the dramatic plot structures... Well...

 

Motivational Mondays: Narrative Structures

 

[Link] Teaching Creativity & Structure in Writing

by Laurisa Reyes

When it comes to writing well, two things are essential: creativity and structure. These work side by side to construct any piece of good writing, be it a poem, a story, an essay, or an instruction manual.

Let’s begin with structure. Structure isn’t so much the shape or the organization of the writing as it is the rules that govern how we write. It includes spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, as well as things like thesis statements, plot progression, argumentation methods, poetic patterns, and so forth. Structure is HOW words are put together and HOW they function within a sentence, a paragraph, stanza, or so on. Without structure, things simply don’t make a lot of sense. Also, the rules that form the structure of writing apply the same to everyone.

Creativity, on the other hand, is the freedom to sculpt language the way an artist sculpts a work of art. Every individual creates his/her own style of expression and language patterns. Each person is capable of tapping into his/her imagination to craft a unique written work. The possibilities are truly endless. New songs, poems, stories, news articles, and books are brought into existence by the thousands every single day. In fact, it is practically impossible for two people to write the same story or poem — unless they intentionally copy each other.

In order to write well, which means to express one’s ideas in a way that they can effectively communicate those ideas to others, kids need both the rules that govern good writing and the freedom to explore their own imaginations. To focus solely on spelling and grammar and such is boring and can discourage the budding writer who may struggle to learn those concepts.

Likewise, to allow unfettered freedom without also teaching structure gives kids a false sense of confidence and dooms them to mediocrity in a world where employers and college professors expect quality writing skills.

Read the full article: https://www.goread.com/buzz/lwreyes/article/teaching-creativity-structure-in-writing/

Unconventional Structures -- Revisited

Okay, here's a follow up question for the unconventional narrative roundtable. For question three about when to use an unconventional narrative, everyone basically said the same thing -- when the story calls for it. Since it's no fair to answer a question like that, let's dig deeper, shall we?

How do you know when the story calls for something different in terms of narrative? What are the clues in a story that say it's time to branch out from the norm?

Mark Bousquet: It's two fold: Part one is the mood I'm in. I usually have to actively want to write something different and then look for a story to fit it more than the other way around. In regards to part two, as for what to look for in a story that lends itself to something unconventional, I often focus on scope. The larger the story, the more I want to try something a little more ambitious than a linear narrative. (Those books that slog through generation after generation of a family's history bore me.) I've also long been fascinated by stories that take place around the stories we normally get. So, for instance, my Disintegration of Dragons serial from Pro Se focuses not on the big important war, but what happens a year after that war when the daily grind of eking out an existence has taken over. I'm working on another story about life on a big spaceship that's involved in a big important space war. Instead of focusing on the fights and the battles and the pilots and the officers, the book will focus on the mechanics, the nurses, the janitors that keep the ship moving to allow for the big space battles to take place. Although, we're writers so some days thstrocyue wind blows in a certain direction and you end up doing something new.

Marian Allen: When the story JUST DOESN'T WORK with a standard narrative structure. Or when a story would be more interesting told in a different way. Read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily". A pretty straightforward sad, sordid tale. But Faulkner chose to tell it a piece at a time, out of chronological order, so that each bit is like one petal of a rose that only reveals the flower when they're all in place.

R.J. Sullivan: Sure. In Haunting Blue, I wanted the story to be first person, a high school age punk girl. But it's also a mystery, involving the solving of a crime that happened before she was born. I tried to stay conventional and not break the first person narrative. I had the character read old newspaper articles and do research to try to find out what happened. The problem was that it was complicated and BORING. I had to step away and realize I had to cut out the research stuff and do the flashback third person interludes. What happened was too important not to include it, and it was the most dramatic way to present the information.

Percival Constantine: When I say the story calls for it.

Building stories on unconventional structures -- breaking the rules for fun and profit!

This week we're going to talk about story structure. When do you stick to the rules of conventional structure, and when do you break them?

Editor's Note: For more information about unconventional story structures, click here.

When you create a story, how do you approach story structure? How often do you alter that structure with minor changes like a framing sequence, flashbacks, etc. and how do you know when one is appropriate for a story?

Mark Bousquet: I find that when I get unconventional, it tends to be mood driven rather than story driven. That is, I decide I need a break from straight-ahead, linear style and jump into writing something that pushes me to get out of the linear comfort zone, and look for a story I can tell in that style. I wrote a Victorian horror novel in the form of a journal (The Haunting of Kraken Moor). I've written a superhero novel called USED TO BE (not out yet) which jumps narrative tense with nearly every chapter. When my main character, Kid Rapscallion (Jason Kitmore), is in the present, I write in first person, present tense, but when I flashback to the story of his life, I use third person, present tense. The book is divided into sections, with each section taking a different year of Jason's life (at the start of the novel, it's a decade since he stopped being Kid), and there's all kinds of news clips and video transcripts cut in to round out the story. It's meant to be unconventional because I wanted to write something that jumped around and shifted perspective because that's how we tend to remember our lives, I think - in bits and scattered pieces, where something we do at 28 might be because of something that happened when we were 18, even though there were lots and lots of things in between. It was a blast to write.

Robert Krog: I approach structure instinctively most of the time, which means I usually tell stories with a pretty conventional or natural feeling structure; that is, what feels natural to me. I rarely make a conscious decision about it. I’ve written several stories that match up with items on the list at litreactor, and, of these, two were consciously planned as being unusual types and one was just a moment of inspiration. The first one of this type is “Guirsu’s Story” from the unfinished, collaborative effort that is forever stuck with the working title The Eden Charm. In it, the title character is magically entrapped in a state of sensory deprivation and subject to subtle, psychic attack for years. His story is told in random bursts, out of sequence, and with an unreliable narrator. So I get a twofer for unconventional on that one. The demands of the story seemed to require both, and my collaborator and I, a pox on him for not finishing his part, decided on that before I wrote a word of it. I wrote a story in second person for a specific story call. “The Guy that the Other Guy Fell on, or Vice Versa” was published in You Don’t Say: Stories in the Second Person. I approached it that way because the guidelines said to do so and the editor asked me so nicely to contribute. The last one that is clearly unconventional is a story titled “Other Songs.” It told from the point of view of a piece of rock, because I was inspired that way. You may find it here.

Percival Constantine:I start with a collection of ideas jotted down in a notebook, then I form these into a coherent story by writing up a synopsis. But I don't think of things like framing sequences and flashbacks as something to alter a structure, rather they're part of the structure.

R.J. Sullivan: It's all about what best serves the story. I can think of two instances where I ignored convention and in both cases it worked better for the story and as far as I can tell, it hasn't confused anyone yet. The majority of my first novel Haunting Blue is a first person tale from the POV of the teenage protagonist. There is a flashback incident that takes place before she was born, but vital to the tale. I inserted three lengthy third person "interludes" between chapters that go back and tell that story. So there's three chapters in the present, an interlude 15 years earlier, three more chapters in the present, a second interlude (picking up from the previous interlude) then repeat one more time. By the end of the third interlude the reader knows where the money is hidden and how it got there, just as the protag is planning to go out and find it.

Another time I broke tradition was in the short story "Robot Vampire," which starts out telling the story in deep third from the point of view of the inventor, At a key point, the robot gained sentience, and I broke the narrative and began again first person from the robot's perspective, taking the reader through the 'awakening" and going forward to the end of the story.

Lance Stahlberg: Would in media res be considered "unconventional"? I also tend to weave in a lot of flashbacks, which seems a lot more common in TV scripts.

With the success of unconventional structures as in movies like Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive, and Memento, and books like They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Gone Girl, and S., do you find your work more or less open to embracing an out of the box approach to the narrative structure?

Mark Bousquet: Even going back to my fanfic days, I really enjoyed writing narratives that jumped around. I think there's something powerful about the meaning we can derive from a non-linear look at a person's life. It's always taken me aback, a little, how a genre like New Pulp can be open to a social enlightening (going back to an earlier time and focusing on issues that were not popular in the pulps of the day) but that it often seems so completely closed to doing this aesthetically. There's a resistance in some quarters to telling non-linear stories.

Robert Krog: Eh, I hadn’t thought about it. I’m actually not inspired to write by most movies I see and haven’t read the books that are cited. It seems that Slaughter House Five had what qualifies as an unconventional structure. I read that long time ago. It may have unconsciously influenced me on some occasion, I suppose. It begins with the main character being unstuck in time or some such phrase. The situation of the character in my, alas, unfinished, collaborative work is similar. Generally, I tend not to follow trends, so seeing a movie or reading a book that is unusual in its structure isn’t likely to alter my habits, at least not immediately. Things do sink into the subconscious mind.

Percival Constantine: I taught a class recently on story structure, specifically focusing on the three-act structure and how common it is, and one of the students asked me about things like flashbacks or telling a story in a jumbled chronological order. And what I said is that structure doesn't have to follow a linear timeline. If you look at something like Memento or Mulholland Drive, even though the story isn't presented in a linear fashion, the elements of structure are still there, and they still hit the basic points in the format. But as for me, I don't really see the need for a lot of unconventional storytelling in the type of stories I write.

When and why would you use an unconventional narrative in your work?

Mark Bousquet: When the work will be better for it and when I feel like stretching my typewriter.

Robert Krog: I use unconventional narrative structure when the narrative calls for it, and, until now, I never called it unconventional narrative structure. I did think that writing a story from the perspective of a rock was pretty unique, it’s true. If the guidelines of a story call for it, of course, then that’s how it has to be if one submits. Otherwise, it’s a moment of inspiration thing or a what is called for thing. As I mentioned above, a character in an unhinged situation or mental state might well call for an unhinged structure to his narrative. I may, at some point set out on purpose to write something according to the suggestions at litreactor just for the challenge. That’s as good a reason as any.

Percival Constantine: When the story calls for it. Always when the story calls for it.

R.J. Sullivan: While I typically try to stick to the rules, I found that playing around in instances like this have paid off.

Which do you prefer to read, a regular narrative or something more outside the box? Why?

Mark Bousquet: I like the variety of jumping back and forth, the same way I like reading Faulkner next to Hemingway, or Twain next to Eco, or a horror novel next to an espionage thriller. I think reading, say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next to The Island of the Day Before helps me to see beyond the surface of the texts in a more vibrant way. It helps bring out the depth of Huck and Jim and helps to focus the memories of Roberto della Griva into something more understandable.

Robert Krog: I have a preference for good stories. The narrative style either works or it doesn’t. I don’t recall having ever thought upon closing the last page of book, “Wow, that story had really good narrative structure!” My response is usually more on the lines of, “Wow, what a good story!” I’m not unaware of structure, mind you, nor am I disdainful of it. It is merely that it is not usually at the forefront of my thoughts. My thoughts on structure come up when a story is bad and the badness stands out because of structural defects or much later upon reflection. It is not what I think about when choosing a book to read nor is it my first thought on finishing a book. When I do reflect on a book, after finishing it, I will sometimes include its structure in my reflections, if that structure was unconventional or just particularly well constructed.

Percival Constantine: I don't really have a preference one way or the other. Mulholland Drive is one of my favorite movies. But then again, so is The Avengers.

R.J. Sullivan: As for what I prefer, again, it comes back to the story. If the reason the writer did it is clear, and it helps me follow along, I'll go with them anywhere (Christopher Nolan's Momento comes to mind -- which worked surprisingly well) If it's just the writer goofing off, I get frustrated and quit.