The Inherent Nature of Story Structure

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was in a meeting to pitch his screenplay to a movie exec. My friend sold that plot with all the gusto he knew he needed in these rare moments. And he did well. He’d rehearsed that pitch till he could recite it backwards. On a tightrope. While juggling.

The exec was impressed. He picked up the screenplay from his desk and flicked through the pages. He turned to page 10. Not 8, 9, 11 or 12; 10. Then he turned to page 25. Again, not 24 or 26; 25. He put down the screenplay, the disappointment clear on his face.

“I don’t see the inciting incident or the shift to act two.” To this exec, the inciting incident comes 10% of the way into the story, and the main character crosses the threshold into act two at the 25% mark. No earlier, no later.

This is taking story structure to an extremely literal limit. It has to hit those beats, he reasoned, and it has to hit them at these exact times.

I wonder what this exec would have made of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There, she sees the rabbit in paragraph two, by the fourth para, she’s down the rabbit hole. From inciting incident (seeing the rabbit) to crossing the threshold (going down the rabbit hole) in roughly the same amount of words as it’s taken me to get to this point in the article.

That’s how good a storyteller Lewis Carrol was.

But Carrol was writing at a time before there were whole libraries of books on story structure. The most popular among them being Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, my personal favorite, The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

Greatest influence

And, to be fair to that exec, screenwriting is far more inspired by story structure theory than most other forms of fiction. The one book that influenced most of those, however, was not about stories at all – at least not directly. First published in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written by Joseph Campbell, a literature professor who specialized in comparative mythology.

He noticed that all stories, throughout time and throughout all known cultures, had various common aspects. These stories mostly told of a hero going on a journey with 17 distinct stages, including that call to adventure, plus the refusal of the call, meeting with the goddess, master of two worlds and freedom to live.

Campbell called this the monomyth, a word he borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which – like the hero’s journey – makes for a nice complete circle as the person whose work influenced so much literature was inspired initially by literature.

Campbell described the monomyth as:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

He outlines those steps in great detail in his book, and it truly is a fascinating read, as are all of Campbell’s works. His theories might have stayed in academia if, in 1977, shortly after the release of Star Wars, George Lucas hadn’t recognized Campbell’s influence on the movie’s development. Later, Lucas said:

It was very eerie because, in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs. So I modified my next draft according to what I’d been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent.

Hit the beats. Or not

Christopher Vogler simplified those 17 steps to 12 to fit with the stages he saw, mainly, in movies. He mentions those aspects of storytelling, such as the inciting incident, and gives examples of where they fit into the plot, but he reminds us that the exact placement of these elements “depends on the needs of the story and the tastes of the storyteller.”

I think it was then Blake Snyder who gave a suggestion of where these could fit into a story – and specifically a screenplay – with his beat sheet. The inciting incident, for example, comes on page 12 of a 110-page script. For more on that, check out Therese’s excellent WU interview with Snyder.

It’s easy then (for some movie execs, at least) to take such advice as gospel and follow it faithfully.

So is there any point to story structure? And do writers really need to be aware of all these stages?

The answer to the second question is a simple no. Campbell’s whole point was that this structure was organically embedded into stories from all cultures throughout time. It’s intuitive, part of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. (Campbell drew a lot from Jung’s work and regularly corresponded with him, and even met him at least once.)

Patterns

We grow up hearing and reading stories that contain all these elements so that, when you tell a story yourself, it will often follow this pattern. But not always.

I recently met with someone who wanted me to ghostwrite his story. It would be a fictional account of his life, but not a memoir. He wanted a novel.

“What’s it about,” I asked.

“I lived in Vietnam for nearly 15 years,” he told me, “and all kinds of crazy things happened.” He told me about the time he met a top politician, the bureaucracy of starting a business there and the eccentric neighbor he had. “I then lived in Morocco for five years.” And he had a string of similar stories from North Africa. “I’ve had a fascinating life,” he told me.

I had no doubt that was true.

“What binds all these incidents together?” I asked. “Why did you go to these countries, for example? Was there one overarching goal that you set out to achieve in your life?”

“These were the countries my company sent me to work in,” he told me. “It was wonderful.”

I’m sure it was wonderful, but I couldn’t see a story there. Instead, these were a series of anecdotes, and anecdotes are not stories. If I told you about all the things I did yesterday, it could come across as more of a list than a story: I went to the store, then the farmers’ market, had lunch, met a friend for coffee, and so on. Even if I’d had a more interesting day, it still doesn’t make it a story: I went skydiving in the morning, drove 30 laps of the racetrack then went swimming with dolphins.

And we all know someone who loves to recount their experiences, but somehow they just don’t work. There’s no life to them. There’s no soul. There’s no structure to hold them up, so they fall flat.

That’s why being aware of story structure is useful, but it’s important to let it come naturally rather than force it to fit a formula. Instead, you could follow George Lucas’s example and write the story first, then modify the structure in the next draft, if you need to.

How important is story structure in your writing? What are your favorite story structure books?