Plotting Your Own Story Structures

I recently came across an article you wrote about the Gothic story structure. ... Your article was incredibly straight forward and informative. Do you have any resources you would recommend for aspiring ... authors to ensure they are hitting all the wickets?  -- J 

 

Sadly, there's not a whole lot out there on the different types of Plotting Structures. Most of what is available is somewhat...simplistic derivatives of Aristotle's 3 Act Structure for a Tragedy, Freytag's Pyramid, and The Hero's Journey based on Campbell's 'Hero with a Thousand Faces.' 

Unfortunately, those structures only cover a small amount of very common, very basic stories. 

Certainly not what I wanted to write. 

So, what I did was outline the plots of some of my favorite stories from books and movies to figure out their plotting patterns. This is how I came up with the Gothic plot, the Fairy Tale plot, and the Romance plot patterns. 

(INTJ here. We're all about creating patterns.) 

This is something you may want to try yourself. Treat it as an exercise!

Plotting Your Own Story Structures

This exercise will allow you to build your own plot structures that you can use to make your own unique stories.

Pick out 3 of your favorite movies and/or stories.

Outline the plots into Four main Acts. (Only Tragedies end in the Third Act.) 

Make it as simple as possible; leave out names and details.   

Base Example:

1) Trouble Begins
     Set up and character intro, plus hints of darkness.

2) Falling Apart
      Struggling to figure out what's going on.

3) Crash and Burn
      They know what's happening and they can't stop it. 

4) Rise from the Ashes
     They fight to survive.   

Keep in mind that most movie scripts are far more compact than the average book; only a Novella; 60,000 (60k) words, in length where books tend to start at 100,000 (100k) words, so expect book outlines to be longer and far more detailed. 

After you make your outlines:

Look for what is Similar and what is Different in your outlines.

Look for missed steps, and doubled, or even tripled steps in each Act. 

 -- More often than not, whole scenes are repeated a minimum of three times, but with different results. Often played out with three different characters. (Stephen King does this a lot.)

Once you get the hang of this, plot out different genres. 

 -- Notice how the stages of each Act change --often drastically-- between the genres. For example; an Adventure story won't have near as many Emotional Impact scenes as a Romance.

 

After you've condensed each genre outline to their most common traits, you'll have the perfect plot structures to Plug and Play with your own characters, places, and situations.
Don't forget to Experiment along the way! 
 -- Sometimes a bit more repetition here, and a longer emotional breakdown there can make all the difference between something common and boring, and something completely new and fresh.

Hopefully this proves helpful!  

Morgan Hawke