The Story Comes First: Where to Start with Story Structure

I’m a discovery writer: my preferred method of storytelling involves as little outlining as possible. I usually like to start with a group of characters in a situation, and let the characters dictate where things go. When I realized this as a novice writer, I embraced it and actively shunned any form of outlining. That wasn’t a terrible decision, I don’t think, but it was limiting, and I felt those limits quite starkly while writing book two in the Chaos Queen Quintet, Dark Immolation.

I first approached writing Dark Immolation as I approach writing most things: I started with characters in certain situations (which was easy, considering I’d already set all that up in Duskfall, the first novel of the series) and a vague idea of where I wanted them to end up, and went from there. I explored side plots, new characters, and interesting locations. That’s how I discovered some of the most compelling parts of Duskfall, after all, so why wouldn’t the same strategy work here?

Because sequels are different, and early installments in a series even more so. Long story short, what I intended to be a 150k word manuscript had bloated to 275k words, and I wasn’t even finished with it yet. The story’s momentum quickly drained. I had a long chat with my agent about my troubles, and he suggested I take a step back and do some outlining. After some initial huffing and puffing (I was a discovery writer, I didn’t do that), it worked, and with each book in the series I’ve outlined more and more, and it’s been awesome.

I’m a changed writer, and I’m going to share a few things I’ve learned, and some worthwhile resources, about outlining and story structure. This information may be obvious to some of you (and to you I say, what are you doing here, go write the next great novel), but if anyone else out there is remotely as clueless as I was, some of this might help.

Story is everywhere.

Joseph Campbell shows us this in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The guy studied myth and religion for a living, and noticed the same archetypal patterns continually popping up in the narratives of just about every culture he studied. He discovered common denominators in the way we tell stories as a human race, basically. Campbell was very smart, and his book is dense, but I’d recommend it to any writer. It’s fair to say that his anthologized history of storytelling jumpstarted my intuitive understanding of story.

That said, if you want roughly the same thing but specifically catered to storytelling, check out The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. If you want roughly the same thing but with less passive misogyny, try The Virgin’s Promise by Kim Hudson.

These are all worthy starting sources in a beginning study of story structure, but perhaps my favorite is Dan Harmon’s Story Circle technique. He distills the Hero’s Journey into a circle with eight points, beginning at the top and moving down, around, and ending right where it began. “Get used to the idea that stories follow that pattern of descent and return, diving and emerging,” Harmon says. “Demystify it. See it everywhere. Realize that it’s hardwired into your nervous system, and trust that in a vacuum, raised by wolves, your stories would follow this pattern.”

We tell, hear, and live stories every day of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Because of this, we all have an innate connection to the act of storytelling; that’s why even the most untrained reader can tell when one story is off, or when another is working.

Structure isn’t necessary, but understanding it is.

It took me a long time to realize that, even though I didn’t outline much, I used structure when writing all of the time. I’d absorbed tens of thousands of books, television programs, films, songs, stories told at parties, and all sorts of other things that had slowly, layer by layer, imprinted the basics of storytelling and story archetypes in my mind. When I sat down to tell a story, I subconsciously drew on all of those stories I’d experienced throughout my life, and because of that, I could spin a decent yarn without necessarily having to do an extensive outline. I think most writers have this potential. We’ve usually read a lot of books, consumed a lot of media, and–whether we realize it or not–have absorbed the basics of story structure. We do at least a small amount of outlining subconsciously.

That said, intuitive understanding only got me so far. As I shared earlier, the farther along I’ve gotten in my series, the more outlining and deliberate structuring I’ve had to do. A lot of this is because my writing has become time-sensitive: I have deadlines, and my former method of discovery writing everything simply won’t fit into the timeframe I’m working with anymore. Outlining expedites that process by helping me reach significant structural milestones more quickly than I would by simply meandering my way there. It’s a direct flight, rather than taking a road trip along the scenic route.

Every writer could benefit from a study of story structure. Being able to label and identify the tools we use subconsciously only helps us–more options is always a buff.

Story Knowledge is Versatile.

I used to think structure and outlining were synonymous. I’m now quite confident in saying that isn’t true, but my misunderstanding stemmed from a misconception of outlining in general: I thought it was something some writers did before writing a story or novel to help guide them through the major beats of the piece. While this is generally true, outlining is much more flexible than that.

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by long-time editor Shawn Coyne is a fantastic resource. Coyne’s methodology offers two major tools: (1) The Foolscap Global Story Grid, which divides a story into three acts, and in turn splits those acts into five points (Inciting Incident, Progressive Complication, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution), and (2) the Story Grid Spreadsheet, an extensive, multi-column document that takes a story scene by scene and evaluates everything from word count to characters present or mentioned on the page to how scenes turn and shift.

The Global Story Grid is generally a pre-writing tool, as most outlines tend to be. The Story Grid Spreadsheet, on the other hand, works best after a first draft in the revision phase, helping a writer analyze how well a story works scene-by-scene in preparation for a second, more polished draft.

This was revolutionary to me. I never seriously considered structure or outlining as anything other than pre-writing; using them in a revision seemed almost counterproductive until I tried it, and discovered how effective it actually was. Especially for me, where even my most heavy outlining is actually very light on the relative scale–just pointing out major beats, really–looking at my draft with a critical structural eye in revision really worked wonders and allowed me to pinpoint structural bests I might’ve missed and make sure they’re present in a revised draft.

The truth is, the more I’ve written, the less I view myself as necessarily a discovery writer or an outliner, and the more I see these two labels as simple tools, both useful and appropriate depending on the situation. Sometimes a piece I’m working on calls for the looseness and raw creativity of discovery writing (although the more I understand story and story structure, the more powerful and effective my discovery writing seems to be). Other times my work needs a more overtly structured approach at some phase of the writing process. Just having the option gives me an advantage, and I’ll take any advantage I can get.