How to craft your book’s plot structure
Setting up and understanding your plot structure can be frustrating and confusing, even for experienced writers. This article will help you better understand what a plot structure is and how you can practically craft one to make it work for your story.
What does plot structure mean?
A plot structure is a chain of plot points that define what happens throughout a story. When writing a story, you will use this to set the backbone of your story. It is recommended to define this before drafting out your story in order to create clarity for yourself up front.
One of the confusing aspects of this is the fact that the term ‘plot’ is used in many ways for many different things. For example, the term Plot Structure can be used synonymously with the term Narrative Structure, but in essence, we mean the same thing. This gets confused further by the popularity of Christopher Booker’s book, 7 basic plots, in which he analysed thousands of books and boiled them down into 7 basic plot types. This speaks more to the thematic nature of different plots and less to the actual structuring of the plots. Here we refer to ‘plot’ as how one structures the story building components, not the content of those components.
Despite these plot norms and conventions, the majority of your plot structuring decisions will be derived from your own creative preferences and process. This is where you design what the story journey will be and what kind of experience you want your readers to have. Even if you don’t want to conform to writing norms, it is a good idea to familiarise yourself with each of these as you need to know the rules before you can break them.
The idea here is to form a backbone for your story in which you can then flesh out the content. How you choose to form the backbone and what content you want to fill it with is completely up to your own creative preference. Below you will learn more about some common plot structures as well as a basic creative process for crafting yours.
Common plot structures
The Hero’s Journey
This is a common plot structure first analysed by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He describes it 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.
The structure originates from classical epics but is extremely common in modern literature. People love reading these types of stories, which makes it a hard-to-go-wrong choice.
Freytag’s Pyramid
Developed by the German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag, this common plot structure is made up of 5 plot points which are commonly referred to as a drama arc. As you can imagine, as we follow the pyramid shape, the story is built up to a dramatic peak, then everything comes crashing down.
7-Point Story Structure
This structure is derived as an analysis of many common stories. It has been popularised by the author Dan Wells and is commonly used by many writers. It is made up of 7 plot points that oscillate between turns and pinches, taking the reader from a hook to a resolution.
Three Act Structure
This is a classic plot structure popularised by Syd Field’s 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. Although it references screenwriting, it can be used just as well for any other form of storytelling including fictional novels or even academic writing (I mean, why not?)
- Act one is commonly referred to as the setup. This is where the reader is introduced to the characters, the setting and the premise of what is going on.
- Act two is known as the confrontation. This is where the character goes about their challenging journey. This ultimately reveals the character's main goal.
- Act three is the resolution. In this act, it is revealed whether the character is successful in their goal or not.
Defining plot structure with Bebop Writer
With Bebop Writer you can easily map out your plot structure with our Plot Map tool. Under each plot point, you can specify which chapters you want to belong to it and edit them as needed. The Plot Map will then automatically update your draft with the specified chapters and chapter order.
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Get creative with your plot structures
Here is a simple process for exploring a wide range of custom plot structures for your book and defining the best one to build your book around.
- Brainstorm what kind of experience you want the reader to have. Research other books which in your opinion do this well and analyse their plot structures to get a better understanding of what mechanisms they used to create that feeling. We recommend visualising these journeys on an emotion map (like a drama curve).
- Brainstorm as many different ways as possible to create that desired feeling and reader experience with your story idea. Go for quantity and don’t worry about quality at this stage. For variations of this, have a look at Eduard De Bono’s book Lateral Thinking.
- Evaluate all your ideas against any success criteria you may have (i.e. the ability to create the desired experience). You may find here that one in particular tickles your fancies beyond the others, or you may find that there are elements of several that you would like to combine. Refine and iterate on these plot structure ideas until you have something you feel happy with. Remember that writing books is an emergent process and you can allow for the plot structure to evolve as you learn more about the story as you flesh it out more.
- Place your plot structure into the plot canvas tool in Bebop Writer. You can easily add the chapters you want to belong to each plot point and add notes to them. This way you can create an entire end-to-end story outline, ready for you to draft your story without having to worry about how things will tie up.
Why Bebop Writer?
It breaks our hearts every time we see someone paralysed with writer’s block, losing track of their story or unable to find time to write. It is our mission to eliminate these creative stresses by providing writers with a tool where they can plan, draft and edit their books. We make it easy and useful so you can spend your energy crafting your story, not pulling your hair out.
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