A Discussion About Story Structure

A skyscraper without a foundation is a giant pole of glass ready to shatter all over the ground. Music without a beat or a scale is cacophonous nonsense. Stories without a throughline are random events. But here's how to make things more easily seen.

While the typical three-act structure is useful for many things, there are more points than just the Breaks into II and III. There are actually nine whole beats throughout the story that change the story, dividing it into eight sequences. They are the Point of Attack, the Call to Adventure, the Lock-In, the First Pinch Point, the Midpoint, the Second Pinch Point, the Crisis, the Climax, and the Denouement.

A Sequence is a mini-story within a book, movie, or other work that can be taken on its own, but works with the others to form a larger, more cohesive story. Every sequence is usually split into five Scenes that are all related in some way. Sequences have their own beginnings, middles, and ends.

You can find more about this at this webpage: http://beatsheetcalculator.com/beatsheet.php

This formula has been used in countless movies, but it doesn't need to be followed beat-for-beat. If the midpoint is more like 60% of the way through the movie, it's fine, as long as the first act is great enough to justify that pushing. However, Eight Sequences is among the best ways to write a film, book, etc.

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Jul 27th 2020 at 9:55:47 AM

I'm gonna warn you right off the bat: Beware the trap of saying you have to structure your story in any specific way. But even more importantly, make sure you pay attention to the other trends and tools that writers use to structure their stories.

• The most basic framework is the Three-Act structure: Beginning, Middle, and End. Lindsay Ellis has a great video on how and why it works, but that's only a starting point.
• A lot of screenwriters subdivide the second act of their movie into two halves, effectively making a four-act structure.
• Shakespearean plays, some epics, and apparently The Avengers (2012) get even more complex and go with a five-act structure that takes the midpoint, turns it into the story's highest moment of tension, and does some other unique narrative stuff.
• Some writers go so far as to subdivide their books into 9 blocks, each with 3 major plot points, for a total of 27 distinct moments.
• But it's important to remember that all of these "structures" are really just guidelines, and there's no one structure you have to use.
• Ultimately your goal is to tell the story in a way that keeps people engaged. If a rigid framework helps, great! But that shouldn't be a crutch.
• No matter what, make sure that your structure is an intentional choice that works for you and your story.
• And finally, once you get enough practice as a writer, you'll end up figuring out what tools and patterns help you best tell your stories.

There you go. A bunch of research material to help you dive even deeper. Story structure is a big, wide world and no one person has the right answer because, frankly, the human race has been telling stories for hundreds of thousands of years. So go explore! Try things out! You'll be surprised what you find.

Edited by AwSamWeston on Jul 27th 2020 at 11:57:42 AM

I like that! Thanks, Sam!

It's just that in typical screenwriting theory most articles split it into three acts, four acts, or eight sequences. I personally try to organize it by sequence, but occasionally some things may end up acting more like a long sequence.

Changed thread title per request.

I wonder why there are so many conflicting theories about story structure? I mean, I get the beats that need to be hit: the Call to Adventure, the Lock-In, the Midpoint, the Crisis, and the Climax. But it's odd how everyone seems to put these in different orders.

I remember one guy had a 9-act structure, one of which was the opening titles. He used Nemo as an example. You know, that movie about a fish called Nemo trying to find his lost dad Marvin?

To be clear, those beats don't need to be hit. Many screenwriters try to hit them, and some writers find them useful as they plan out their story. But no matter what anyone tells you, there are no immutable laws of storytelling. If it's satisfying, that's all you need. (And sometimes you don't even need that!)

Anyway, the conflicting theories exist because different writers find different tools and frameworks that help them, and no two writers have the same process. But people like to categorize things and, like with any industry, certain traditions crop up that may not actually mean anything.

None of this is to say that you're "wrong" for pondering these things, just that it's important to understand that structure is a tool — just like Tropes Are Tools.

Edited by AwSamWeston on Jul 29th 2020 at 9:35:30 AM