Writing a story is like building a house. Without a solid foundation, it’s bound to fall apart. And by foundation, I mean the underlying structure, which is one of the most important parts of any story.
Remember that.
Burn it into your brain.
WHAT STRUCTURE IS
When people ask writers what structure is, the most common response you hear is this: a beginning, middle and end.
Well, duh. We’ve all seen enough movies and read enough books to know that you’ve gotta start somewhere, end somewhere else, and that a bunch of stuff has to happen in between. Otherwise what’s the point?
The trick is knowing where to start, where to end, and what to put in between.
Several years ago I read an article in Writer’s Digest by a writer named Gary Provost. Mr. Provost wisely compared a story to a basketball game, in which the players have an overall goal—to win the game.
To reach that goal, they must face the challenge of several smaller goals, traveling from one end of the court to another in order to score points and, of course, to prevent the opposing team from scoring.
All during the game, the two teams have conflicting goals and will do anything they can to stop the other from succeeding.
Mr. Provost was, I believe, trying to describe the nature of conflict in storytelling, and he did it in a way that not only tells us about conflict, but about structure as well.
Structure is a series of goals—or navigating points—that lead to an overall goal. You can’t have your players wandering around for no reason. They have to have a purpose in life. They have to know what their objectives are and must be willing to fight to reach those objectives.
A MAN WITH A PURPOSE
Let’s look for a moment at the movie The Fugitive.
It’s been around for over twenty years, is based on a once popular television show, so there’s a good chance you either saw it when it was released in theaters, watched the DVD, or you’ve seen it when it popped up on cable TV. While not a perfect action-thriller, it comes pretty close, especially in terms of structure.
It opens with a woman being killed. Her husband, a prominent doctor, is arrested and convicted for her murder, but he’s an innocent man. The real killer is a one-armed man he fought with at the crime scene.
On the way to prison, there’s a terrible bus crash and the doctor escapes just as a train slams into the bus. Seizing this opportunity, he begins his quest to clear his name. And the only way to do this is to find the one-armed man.
This setup is the “beginning” of the story. Act One. It defines the main character, his situation, and his overall goal, which is to find the one-armed man who killed his wife. Not only is this the character’s overall goal, it was the writer’s as well. And it was the writer’s job to figure a way to get his hero to this goal in a dramatically compelling way.
Not an easy task.
To accomplish that, the writer structured a series of sub-goals that would eventually lead his hero to the end of the game. Conflict helped him do that.
Let’s break it down:
In Act One of The Fugitive, what is the first sub-goal? What dramatically compelling event did the writer have to reach to keep this story moving?
I’ll give you a hint:
To get Dr. Kimble arrested.
Kimble’s wife is killed, he fights with the one-armed man, the one-armed man escapes and Kimble is left behind with no alibi and blood on his clothes. The next thing he knows he’s arrested for murder.
In the process of setting up the character’s main objective, the writer used this smaller goal as a kind of navigating point. And by breaking the act down to a series of subgoals/navigating points, the writer was able to execute his story in more manageable chunks.
The second sub-goal in Act One of The Fugitive is what?
To get Kimble convicted of the murder.
And this is followed by a third, and slightly bigger goal:
To free Kimble from custody.
This final sub-goal—precipitated by the bus and train crash—ends Act One and allows Kimble to begin his quest toward his overall objective.
GOALS, GOALS AND MORE GOALS
The part of the story that usually makes or breaks the writer is the “middle” part, or Act Two.
This act is commonly known as the confrontation act, and carries the bulk of the story. Again, like Mr. Provost’s basketball game, Act Two is filled with many sub-goals and, hopefully, a formidable force to keep the hero from reaching those goals.
In The Fugitive, Kimble has escaped at the end of Act One, but Act Two brings him a whole new series of problems.
His immediate objective is to get to safety and to take care of a gash in his side caused by the bus wreck. He runs through the woods in his prison garb, exchanges it for a truck driver’s overalls, then sneaks into the nearest hospital and tends to the wound.
These scenes are filled with conflict because Kimble is being pursued at the time by a new character the writer has introduced: Kimble’s nemesis, U.S. Marshall Sam Gerard, a hard-assed fugitive hunter.
Gerard’s overall goal is to bring his man in. He’s the opposing team, trying to score points and win the game.
So in Act Two, the first sub-goal is this:
Getting Kimble to the hospital.
This sub-goal arises from the conflict preceding it—the bus crash, the wound in his side, and police pursuit—as Kimble reacts to and battles against them.
This, in turn, leads to yet another sub-goal or navigating point:
The first confrontation between Kimble and Gerard.
After patching himself up at the hospital, Kimble steals an ambulance, gets cornered by Gerard in a viaduct and jumps to certain death in order to escape. Again, by using this first confrontation as a navigating point and writing toward it, the writer was better able to manage his story.
Since we’re limited by space here, rather than continue through the story scene by scene, let’s look at some of the sub-goal/navigating points that helped the writer make it through Act Two:
Kimble survives the jump and heads back to Chicago.
He contacts a colleague, who helps him with money.
He goes to the prosthetic ward of a Chicago hospital and gets a list of one-armed men.
He calls several of the men, narrows down the list, and discovers one is in prison.
He goes to the prison, discovers it’s the wrong guy, but is confronted by Gerard and must escape.
He breaks into the apartment of the last man on his list and finds photos and evidence that raise questions about a drug Kimble’s own hospital had been testing, a drug Kimble knew was defective.
He goes to his hospital to investigate and discovers his colleague was behind his wife’s murder—with Kimble the intended target.
Each of these is a sub-goal/navigating point that helps the writer build his story. Moving parallel to this are a series of goals involving the Gerard character. By moving from one to the next, the writer is able to build a series of sequences, each affected by one preceding it.
By going beyond the simple “beginning, middle and end” and structuring your own story this way, your foundation becomes as solid as a rock, and the process is much easier to handle.
Like those before it, Act Three, the resolution, will have its own navigating points, the biggest of all being the hero’s success or failure to achieve his overall goal.
Have your eyes glazed over yet?
Hey, nobody said writing is easy.
AND IT DOESN’T STOP THERE
Structure doesn’t end with these navigating points. When we break our story down further, each scene should have a goal and a structure of its own.
That’s right.
In a well-written story, each scene has its own setup, confrontation and resolution. These elements won’t be as fully formed as they are in the overall story, but they’re there. I urge you to take a very close look at any well-written novel (or movie) and see for yourself.
THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
Anybody confused?
I hope not.
For those of you who are, simply think of what it’s like to drive across country. It would be impossible to take the trip in one long haul, never stopping to rest and refuel.
Before we get started, most of us fire up our GPS, punch in our destination and look for navigation points along the way to break up the monotony of a long journey.
So, go on, get out of here. Mark your route and start driving.
And whatever you do, don’t get lost.