Story Structure 1: Chapters, arcs, circles, storylines, and much bla bla
Disclaimers:
- This is based on OWaP, my AAR. You don't have to read it beforehand to read this essay (though it could help), and I don't expect this to have any significant spoilers (meaning: You should still be able to enjoy the story if you decide to read it afterwards).
- Deep down I kinda expect Derc to pop up at any moment and tell me not to be so hard on myself , but honestly, I like failure. Recognising one is an opportunity to learn from. Not recognising one means you either missed out on some opportunity to grow, or that there's no more room to become better at whatever you are doing. I think this here might be of special interest those who like to write, and maybe mildly interesting also to those who don't.
There are a great number of ways one can structure their stories. You can find them on the internet. Three act structure, 4 act structure, etc. etc.
Honestly, I have never understood what most of them are there for, nor how to use them. How is being informed that X needs to happen at Y% of your story going to help you, when you don't know how long your story is going to be? So I ignore most of them. My approach is mostly based on my experiences in real life. Any plan needs only to serve a function: Mostly to save time and tell me what direction I roughly need to go. It shouldn't be too complicated and be flexible enough for me to change things. As I'm more the gardener than architect type of writer (meaning that I don't plan the story and then write the bricks so they fit in, but make it grow naturally even if it's a bit disorderly), "plan" might be the wrong word here. "Expectations" is perhaps the better one.
There are, however, a few concepts I personally find useful.
One is the narrative arc, which depicts how the tension in the story increases and decreases over time:
Narrative arc |
- First you have the exposition, where the reader is introduced into the world, the characters and the situation/problem the protagonist will face. It's best to keep the exposition to a minimum, so that the reader doesn't get bored, but you won't get completely around it, as this is where he knows nothing and where you have to explain things (as they come up), and as the story progresses, less and less needs to be explained, as the reader is already familiar with what's going on.
It's also good to start with some tension to incite people's interest, so they don't throw the book after the first few pages. In that case the tension will take a dip before rising later. - Secondly you have that rising conflict (often beginning with an inciting incident forcing the character to go on that adventure in the first place). This rising tension could for example be where your protagonist battles his way through the evil minions, and the stakes get higher and higher. This is where the majority of the story takes place.
- Third would be the climax. The final battle, for example. This is where the principal problem/enemy/mystery faced by the protagonist is confronted.
- And finally you have the dénuement. This is basically where you give the reader about how the protagonist has changed and what his life will be.
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Another good concept that ties to the first one is that of the story circle. Of which you again can find numerous good examples on the internet, be it Campbells monomyth or Dan Harmon's circle.
Here the narrative arc we talked about before becomes a circle (in a spatial sense), as the protagonist/hero often returns home after the adventure, which can be a super nice way to show the reader how he and/or the world have changed in the course of the story. In a weird way, having the guy return to the exact spot where he started is a nice way to show the reader how the story actually went from A to B, as things have changed. Maybe your person was an outsider at the beginning or a clown people laughed at, and when he comes back he's wisened up and also gained some authority that comes with it.
Which is why I wanted to have such a thing and made a story circle for OWaP early on.
The redacted version of OWaP story circle, so it doesn't have spoilers |
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The story circle shown above isn't fully accurate anymore. The 10 chapters I split it up into already don't hold (so the ingame events are supposed to start soon™), and probably won't in the future either. But the basic principle is still holding up, which is that the story starts in a confined space (the valley), then the world traversed by the characters becomes larger and larger, before returning to where it began, but with things having changed. So they are basically 10 waypoints now.
Chapter 1 in OWaP starts out with an old man trying to write his story, and we have a priest travel through a desolated valley and destroyed town, before the two meet. So basically we're starting in the future. The story has in part already happened. Later in the same chapter we start getting flash backs to the old man's early days as a little child. Some things have remained the same (the tower, the ravine, the bridge, the general outline of the valley), thereby making it clear to the reader it's the same place. Other things have changed. The town is still populated at the beginning. And a somewhat innocent child went to become a scarred, vicious, but also traumatised old man. So stuff must have happened in between.
But back to the overarching principles. Given that, as I already said, the original chapter split doesn't hold up anymore, it's perhaps time to talk about what a chapter actually is.
The answer: Anything the writer wants it to be. A story can have zero chapters or a million. It's up to the writer how he wants to structure it.
Obviously everyone will have a different answer for this:
- Skotos with his AAR (The last Chariot of the Tarquins) is structurally perhaps the most similar to mine. He has a prologue, where the story is told from a point in the future. Both of us start with an ominous appetiser (reader: "oh no, what went wrong?!"). Skotos then has only a handful of books planned, each dealing with a different main enemy, unlike the 10 I had planned myself, but each of them form a subunit with a different main enemy.
- Kilo's division of chapters in his AAR (Written in Sand) seems less clear to me. I suspect it's more tied to the physical travel from A to B (each province one chapter), whereas it's only loosely tied to the story progression itself.
Both AARs are great and deserve a read. The two might hopefully also be willing to share how they structured their AARs in this thread. But the main point is that, if you want to write a story, you can do it however you want.
For me, chapters, and parts, are simply subunits of the larger story. As such, they should have a beginning, an end, and deal with a purpose/problem.
So basically they should be a miniversion of that same narrative arc as before.
So if your story has, say, 6 chapters, their arcs plotted on the main one could look something like this |
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Chapter 1 already happened in a very different way than I had planned. But I am very happy with the result (apart of some drawbacks I will talk about later):
- The chapter forms a circle on its own, and does so on multiple levels, and the physical surroundings often mirror the development:
- The moment the priest crosses the bridge, he's also crossing the point of no return. This is also where he's spotted by the old man.
- When the child is in the deep ravine, he's also at his lowest point in the chapter.
Those things might seem a tad superstitious, but I believe the reader notices this on a subliminal level, and thereby certain narrative aspects get emphasised, which is good, as long as it doesn't get too crass, at which point the reader might lose his willingness suspend disbelief. - The chapter implements both parallels and stark contrasts, highlighting certain aspects:
- The old cynical, somewhat evil man and the young priest are such total opposites, that any description of one of them automatically highlights the corresponding feature of the other as well. Old man is depicted as cynical? Young priest is also depicted as naive.
- The old man and whichever child of the three he was are also complete opposites, thereby clearly defining start and end point of the emotional journey.
- The tower and the bridge are described as ancient, and they remain unchanged. The impression of the rest, on the other hand, is in clear contrast. The town is described as an empty ruin in the future, whereas it was seemingly doing fine in the past one. Again: A to B. The reader is shown the consequences of the story, before he is told the story itself.
- The chapter has a theme: The valley, and both storylines are tied to it in the same way, yet they contrast each other again:
- In the first "future" one, it's about one person going INTO the valley.
- In the second "past" one, it's about people being forced OUT of the valley.
- In both storylines this is tied to the loss of freedom, but they are contrasted. In one, that character CANNOT LEAVE, in the other, they are FORCED TO LEAVE and CANNOT RETURN.
- The whole chapter fits the narrative arc explained earlier (intro,rising conflict, climax, outro) perfectly. It didn't happen because I planned it, but rather by accident. I'm still happy about it.
Alright, enough of the patting on the back. The point here is to make you understand what I was going for, so that you can understand what didn't work out.
Unfortunately, this is where we'll make a cut for now, as this text has grown far too long and Cookie weary.