How to Actually Use a Story Structure

In the writing community, there are three story structures (in addition to basic story structure) that tend to get the most attention: 7 Point Story Structure, The Hero's Journey, and Save the Cat! These structures (and similar ones) are also sometimes called "beat sheets." (And worth keeping in mind is that, in the writing world, some terms can be ambiguous, as both "structure" and "beats" are used in other situations as well.) 

These are essentially approaches that help you see, understand, and match the (arguably natural) progression of a good story. Some writers, especially beginning writers, dislike story structures because they can appear formulaic--sucking out the mysticism, magic, and creativity of writing. While no one has to use a story structure, of course, if you share these sentiments, I think eventually you'll find over time, that these structures actually do the opposite. And they lead us to ask bigger questions about the human experience: Why do these structures feel so right to us as human beings? Is it because they ring true to our own journeys, to reality?

But rather than talk about the psychological and archetypal significance of structure 😉, let's first talk about how to actually use a story structure. Because I think some writers struggle with that.

Story time:

Years ago, I was preparing to brainstorm and outline a future book I wanted to write. And I thought, Hey, why not do this properly and go to story structure right away? It will save me such a headache!

But funny enough, I was having a difficult time figuring out how to actually brainstorm and plot out my story with a story structure.

So I took to the web.

And some books.

Searching and scanning and looking. . . .

And you know what I found?

There wasn't a single professional writer that actually came up with a story using story structure!

Even those that claimed to--that said they were going to show how do it--actually did something different: They simply plugged in stuff they'd already brainstormed. 🤦‍♀️

I admit at first, I was a little disappointed.

I'm not going to say you can't come up with a story using story structure right away, but I know almost no one who does it. And some of the (unpublished) attempts I've run into, often do feel a bit stilted, somehow lacking heart. 

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Using Character Arc to Create a Story

Lately I've been writing down and pulling together different approaches to brainstorming and creating stories. Some are more basic and some are more advanced, and some will work better for certain people than others. Today I want to introduce an approach to brainstorming a story that works off character. Well, the character arc (or lack thereof, I guess), specifically. 

So if you are one of those writers who tends to favor character over plot (🙋‍♀️ #GuiltyToAFault #WhatIsPlot), this might be preferable to you. If not, it's still useful to have at your disposal. Every story needs to address character arc. 

Okay, so if you are new to the writing world, you might want to know what I mean by "character arc." "Character arc" is just a fancy term for how a character grows or changes through because of the story. Most of the time, we are talking about the protagonist, since that is the most important character. (But technically any character can have a character arc.)

And that's who we are referring to in this post, the protagonist. 

For the sake of this post, I'm going to break down the protagonist options into two categories: "change" vs. "steadfast." (Because I've used this elsewhere and seen it used elsewhere.) 

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Brainstorm Your Antagonist's Plotline Earlier

Over the last few weeks I have actually started brainstorming and even outlining my next novel. I still have a lot to figure out but recently, I was reminded again how effective it can be to consider your antagonist's plotline early in the process.

Most of us have a rough idea of what our antagonist is or does by the time we really sit down to brainstorm. At minimum, we at least have a notion. After all, we need an antagonistic force to have conflict for a story.

But it's very easy and very tempting to put all our focus on the protagonist. It's absolutely necessary to spend plenty of time discovering and nailing down our protagonist, but it can be extremely effective to really consider your antagonist quite early in the process.

This is because (obviously) the antagonist will be what your protagonist is up against.

Often we might focus only on the protagonist's view of the plot, thinking about what sorts of obstacles, conflicts, and resistance they will meet and need to overcome and what will be interesting.

However, the antagonist has a very different view of what's going on, even if it doesn't all make it on the page. He or she or it will be "fighting" against the protagonist. The protagonist reacts and battles the antagonist, but so does the antagonist react to and battle the protagonist.

If your antagonist is a person or society (as opposed to nature or self) you should consider how their plot would play out. What would they do next? How would they respond to the protagonist's efforts? What is the cleverest way they would handle this situation?

When you take the time to consider the antagonist's story early, you will be able to brainstorm and map out a more powerful story for your protagonist.

Beyond the protagonist and main antagonist, it's also helpful to take some time to consider what the situation looks like through other characters' perspectives (as long as you don't get too carried away). How does the love interest view what is playing out between the antagonist and protagonist? What about a close family member or friend? Like the main antagonist, it can also be very effective to look at the plot, conflict, or issues from any other antagonistic forces.

For example, in the project I'm working on, the protagonist has to team up with a gray character who is an antagonist-sympathizer. Though he's not the main villain, I have found that I can brainstorm a better story when I take time to think about his view, actions, and reactions, early in the creative process. What this does is give my protagonist more powerful or significant conflicts. I have better quality ideas, and my protagonist needs to deal with them in clever ways. In other words, it produces a better story quicker. I have better ideas in brainstorming.

This sort of approach is also a great way to help you create strong side characters, because it ensures you are creating a plot where the side characters don't only exist for the sake of the protagonist.

When we are learning to plot for the very first time, we are often asked to consider what try/fail cycles and obstacles are keeping the protagonist from reaching his goals, and then trying to brainstorm what those are and how he overcomes them. Then we might go back and see how the antagonist can make those obstacles happen, or what kind of antagonist we need. Then, we might start fleshing out and filling in the side characters to populate the story.

When it comes down to it, I don't really believe there is a "wrong" approach to coming up with your story--you have to find what works for you. But when you are next brainstorming, try taking time to consider your antagonist and supporting cast earlier and see if that helps you actually develop a better plotline for your protagonist.

We talk about the antagonist as a character a lot, but perhaps not enough about his or her or its own actions and reactions when brainstorming.

Here are some benefits to doing this:

- Your story will feel more authentic
- It will be "bigger" than what's on the page
- You'll see elements you can play with that you may not have noticed otherwise
- It helps the plot itself from feeling flat; it adds dimension
- You'll come up with ideas you haven't thought of and would not have come up with otherwise
- Your protagonist will have to work harder to deal with his or her conflicts
- The antagonist and side characters will become more rounded

And that's the tip for the week.

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Dealing with Dumb Ideas--Placeholders, Building Blocks, and Portrayals

If you are a creative, you are going to come up with some dumb ideas. I mean REALLY dumb. This doesn't mean you are stupid or not talented, it's simply part of the creative process. Some are placeholders until you get something better. Some are building blocks that will lead you to something great.

But it's a completely normal part of the process.

Unless you have tried to write a professional quality book, you may not appreciate just how many freaking choices a writer has to make. I mean TONS.

A novel is in some ways simply an accumulation of all those little choices.

I once voiced to someone how difficult it was to keep everything about my book in my head.

This person didn't believe me. "Of course you can. It's your book! You wrote it!"

Writing a book and reading a book is vastly different. The reader only sees the published product. The writer has all these scraps of past, present, and future ideas, dots that aren't yet connected, motives that aren't yet known, conflicts they haven't figured out how to solve--with multiple options and "alternative universes" for how the story can go. For every decision on paper, there could have been a dozen other options brainstormed.

You see, there are so many components to a good story that it's almost always impossible to have every single aspect figured out and brainstormed all at once. There are too many things! And one component affects how another functions, so if you change this, you have to consider how it affects that. And on and on.

A completed, polished, published work may fit entirely in your head, but a work-in-progress that is constantly in some kind of motion can often feel like an intellectual, unconnected mess.

Dumb ideas will come--simply because there is so much to brainstorm and make decisions about and components that affect one another, that you can't magically fit everything together the first time (or sometimes in your head for that matter).

I used to think there was no such thing as dumb ideas. I didn't believe in using the term.

Until I was editing my own story.

Guys, I had some really dumb ideas. REALLY dumb.

But here's where I think we get confused.

That doesn't mean I am dumb.

Remember, dumb ideas are a completely natural part of the process.

Weeks ago in a blog post about being gifted, I referred to this article on Mozart, which touched on something that had been living in the back of my head: dumb ideas.

In it, it has this quote from Seth Godin:

"The problem is that you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones … Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, 'none.' And there, you see, is the problem." – Seth Godin

As writers, when we sit down to brainstorm, the first things that come to mind will almost always be the most cliche. Why? Because we've seen them so many times! Of course they will be the first things that comes to mind! "Hmmm . . . what kind of tree should this be? Oh, an oak."--like all the other hundreds of trees in fiction are.

Some other lesser ideas happen because they connect dots and problems easily. They fix or add conflict in simplistic ways.  "Hmmm . . . I have this character that died before the story started. What did she die from? I know! A car crash!"--like all the other hundreds of other characters that are dead by the time the story starts.

The simplistic and cliche aren't always wrong. There are definitely times where you should use them. And sometimes they are even the best idea to use.

Some dumb ideas aren't either of these kinds, but simply concepts you didn't think through. BECAUSE REMEMBER HOW MANY THINGS YOU HAVE TO BRAINSTORM?

You may be focused on brainstorming a main component and come up with a dumb idea for a side effect issue that popped up unexpectedly.

I once met a Shakespeare scholar who stood and told us how amazing Shakespeare was because he wrote so fast that he didn't have time to think up character names in his early drafts. He told us this like it was something stunning.

Having worked in this industry for several years, let me tell you, Shakespeare was completely normal.

I mean, he was a genius.

But that part of his creative process was completely normal.

Because you don't brainstorm everything perfectly at once. Lots of writers stick in "placeholders" so they can get on with the story and figure out that stuff later. Just a few weeks ago, someone in the industry posted some dialogue where they had marked the speaker as like "dwarf guy #1" because they hadn't yet come up with a name.

In early drafts, I use some kind of placeholders all the time. Sometimes things that are even less than placeholders, like, "[insert a line a of setting description]"--because I haven't yet brainstormed the details of that setting or the contents of that line, and right now I'm focused on the plot.

Sometimes I use dumb ideas because I can't think of something better at the time that satisfies my needs. But because a WIP book is like a constant moving target, I have been shocked more than once how an idea that appears later in the story crops up and I can go back and replace my other crap with something brilliant.

Some of the dumb ideas that I worry so much about end up solving themselves through the process of writing a book, and I realize they were really placeholders until I found something better.

Other times, it's not so easy.

For one, you have to come up with some good ideas before putting pen to paper. If you write a whole book with largely dumb ideas, then it's going to be a beast to rewrite and edit. It's almost like you are starting over from scratch anyway and have all the same problems. You have to come up with some good stuff to get a solid draft started.

Sometimes in situations where dumb ideas aren't placeholders until something better comes along, they may be more like building blocks.

You might brainstorm them all out first, so you have to work your brain into coming up with something better and they don't keep swimming around in your head. But sometimes the dumb idea can be the seed that grows into something better. Maybe for some reason your protagonist is not turning to the police no matter how ridiculous, dangerous, or serious her conflicts have become. You might look at it and realize that this is stupid. Any coherent person would go to the police at this point. You either need to rewrite the story so that she does go to the police. Or brainstorm a believable reason she does not. Perhaps in the process of brainstorming the latter, you uncover a treasure chest of powerful motive, characterization, and worldbuilding that will take care of this problem and actually make the story better.

Thus, having that dumb idea actually ended up being a building block to something better.

One of the things that I think most of us writers pray for is that all our dumb ideas are taken care of by the time the book is published.

In some technical or complicated scenes, you may have a dumb idea that has emerged out of the darkness from the sidelines that you had not foreseen. Like anyone, I want to believe that we can always get rid of them, but in some situations, especially in later drafts, that might be rather difficult to do, as it might change a bunch of other things that connect in, in the process. It might not always be realistic to get rid of all of them.

Thankfully, motives and portrayal can go a long way to fix some problems. Some writers say you can get a character to do almost anything if you show the right motive. Other times the right portrayal--how that concept is rendered on the page--can go a long way. If you look at some of the concepts in Lord of the Rings, they might sound rather silly. Little people with hairy feet and huge appetites? Magical rings? But the portrayals take care of a lot of that. Another fantastic example is Guardians of the Galaxy. When the first movie was going to come out, a lot of people thought the concepts were ridiculous, or even dumb. A talking raccoon? A green lady? A giant tree that can only say the same three words? Man, that sounds dumb. But it was amazing! Why? Because of how the creators rendered those ideas. And I'll throw in Hamilton too, because most people who heard Miranda's concept thought it sounded dumb and ridiculous. But he had the vision for what many others called a dumb idea. He saw how to marry hip-hop and rap with the founding fathers.

Here's what's crazy about some of these things. Lord of the Rings, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Hamilton ended up all being pioneering. They changed their industries. The world was not the same after them. So sometimes what the vast majority may think sounds stupid (because they don't understand it or have never seen it before) turns out to be revolutionary. In each of those cases, the creator had the vision for what the story could become--and he knew how to portray it to make it work for audiences. Perhaps in that way, there aren't dumb ideas (concepts), only dumb portrayals and motives. Those are the dumb ideas.

Probably almost no one is saying Lord of the Rings, Guardians, and Hamilton are dumb now. (And yet the world just wants to keep remaking the same things instead of something new--which is what made these things great to begin with.)

So sometimes you can even run with something ridiculous and see how you can make it work for the masses, like Guardians.

And sometimes with stupid ideas, if you actually poke fun of them on the page, instead of taking yourself so seriously, you can make them entertaining. And/or you can validate the situation to the reader, which I've talked about before on here.

Just remember, there is no shortage of dumb ideas. And if you aren't coming up with some stupid ones, you are probably blind to your own creative process or too timid to face the rubbish head on to get to the good stuff.

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The REAL Key to Brainstorming: Restrictions

If you're like me, you probably learned how to brainstorm in a classroom. Some teacher gave you some methods, like this mind map or just told you to write down everything that came to mind. Maybe you connected them with lines. But for a lot of people, like me, it just wasn't really that effective. Sure, I might get a great idea eventually, but the truth is, there are more efficient ways to get better results, faster.

Here is why I wish my teachers didn't tell me I could brainstorm anything.

You brainstorm better with restrictions.

I know it sounds like the exact opposite of what should work . . . because it is. But it works, and it works better.

The problem with the "anything can go" approach is that nothing really ends up going. In this post, I'll explain why restrictions are so important and effective in brainstorming quality work, and give you some restrictions to get you brainstorming a fantastic character in minutes, as an example.

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Leaving Your Stamp on a Scene

Today's post is kind of a follow-up to last week's post, where I talked about ramping up your scenes by taking advantage of everything brought to the scene. But there is also something else to consider when brainstorming a scene: Leaving your stamp on it.

Now I don't mean like secretly putting your name in the text somewhere or doing a cameo or making sure every scene has a mention of water. What I mean is making your scene different from all the other scenes out there in the world.

Let's say your about to write a scene where your protagonist meets his love interest. There are a million scenes in the world of storytelling where that happens, right? So consider how you can make yours different or better than what's already been done.

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Starting a Scene: Two Important Questions

One of the most important questions I've learned to ask myself when brainstorming/writing a new scene is,

What am I bringing to this scene?

And then the next important question is,

How can I take advantage of that?

You see, I think all of us consider this on some level, maybe even a subconscious level, because unless you're writing the first scene of your story, your scene is building off the scenes that came before it. You're guiding the reader through a narrative.

But it wasn't until the last year or so that I consciously and actively started asking and considering these questions.

And holy cow, the scenes I've been writing are so much better for it!

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Tips for Sequels and Focusing Ideas

elementrolls asked you: I'm one of those people who tends to have a lot of ideas from the get go, but I have a hard time deciding what's just a fun idea (that I might explore in a sequel or another book) and what really needs to go in the story. Any tips on focusing?

One of the pseudo-problems I run into when brainstorming happens when I get a bunch of ideas and suddenly I think I have to either pick this idea or that idea, when most of the time, I can use both ideas. So if you have a lot of ideas, try to see if you can use most of them.

With that said, there is a point where you have to stop yourself or your story will get longer than Lord of the Rings, which isn't a bad thing, but most writers aren't looking to write stories that long.

There are also times when you don't want to use all of your ideas; for example, if you are writing a medieval fantasy, you might not want to throw in time-traveling aliens after you already have a quest story for the main plot. Time-traveling aliens just doesn't fit.

For sequels, a good technique is to look at how you can broaden or deepen your storyline so that the conflict goes farther or deeper than the book before.

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Interstellar: Flipping Story Stuff

If you follow my Facebook, Tumblr, or G+, you may have encountered my ramblings about the movie Interstellar. And let's be honest. That movie is storytelling at its finest. It works so perfectly, in so many aspects, that of course I'm going to pull it apart and talk about the thing on my blog. Don't pretend to be surprised.

I realize I'm months late jumping on the Interstellar bandwagon, but I made it. And whether you saw the movie the first day it hit the big screen or you see the film this month, it's still a killer story. The movie had a huge impact on me. And frankly, I don't think I've watched a movie that made me that emotional since Les Miserables, and I'm not sure if even then. If you read my rants on social media, some of this particular post will be a repeat, but not all of it. I promise. And there will be more posts after this one.

I've talked several times on my blog about flipping story-parts on their heads for an interesting effect. The example I usually refer to is Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, which takes the classic hero-journey fantasy story and flips it. One way he does this is by starting the tale after the prophesied "hero" has attempted to kill the god-like antagonist--and died. That's like Harry finally reaching the climax of his battle with Voldemort, dying, and then J.K. Rowling starting the story there.

The point of flipping and twisting familiar concepts is that it creates a sense of originality, breathes fresh life into old ideas, and surprises viewers. Whenever you need to get your story to feel more original, whenever you need to brainstorm new ideas, you can look at flipping, twisting, and morphing a common concept. You can look at flipping, twisting, and morphing what is already at work in your story.

Interstellar did just that in several ways.

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