Storytelling and narrative structure – Master the three-act format

The next thing that I wish to talk to you about is structure. Please don't get anxious. A structure simply means the shape and composition of the story. It can be as elaborate or as simple as you want. But it will have to have a structure. Otherwise, it will be an unstructured mess. Now, when it comes to structure the first thing that will determine the structure is probably size. Which brings us to a consideration of the short story. In a short story you will have to do all of the things that you will eventually have to do when you're attempting your first novel but you're doing them in miniature. You will have to introduce your characters. You will have to introduce the dramatic situation. You will have to resolve that dramatic situation one way or another. But you will be doing it in a much more restrained number of pages. So, basically, the short story is an excellent way to begin your writing career. I would say that, in my own experience, it's the only way to begin your writing career. All of the problems that you will face with a longer work you will face in miniature in the short story. And, also, because they are relatively swiftly accomplished you will be able to experiment more. You don't want to do all your experiments in a big important novel but you can do really useful experiments in a short story that will be over in a week and where, if it doesn't quite work, that's no big disaster. A lot of these experiments will be concerning structure itself. Structure is... There are lots of different ways to approach it but probably the best and most applicable way, the simplest way, would be the classical three-act structure. Now, what this is, is you divide your narrative into roughly three parts. You've got the beginning, you've got the middle, and you've got the end. The best way to do this, or at least as suggested by the screenwriter Syd Field, is to jot down notes about scenes that you've thought of or, you know, character introductions. Write them down upon library cards. Have these scattered all over the carpet at your feet. And when you've got enough of them start to sort them into roughly three piles. OK, these incidents, they've got to happen sometime at the beginning. These ones have got to happen sometime at the end. And I guess these that are left are what's happening in the middle. You can put your plots together like that. But you should always remember that plot is not the story. The plot is not the structure. It's just the plot. It's what gets you from one end of the story to the other. But it is not the most important thing in the story. For example, most stories can be reduced to a simple plot that makes them a nonsense. George Orwell's *Animal Farm,* the plot of it, which is some talking animals take over a farm, is not what the story is about. And I apologise for anyone who hasn't read it yet for whom that might be a massive spoiler. But your structure, once you've come up with the idea of it, you can do anything within that structure. You don't have to have your beginning, middle and end in that order. There are interesting effects that can be had by starting with the end and then filling in how we got to that point in flashback. That is probably something that is a little overused in modern narrative and cinema. But you can chop your story into any order as long as it will still maintain the reader's interest and will still tell the story. Another way, other than rearranging the time sequence, is to repeat certain elements of the story so that we learn something more about them with each repetition. A good example would be the famous story *Rashomon* or even the Gene Hackman film *The Conversation* where we have somebody trying to unscramble a piece of recorded conversation that he's only getting in increments. And as he cleans up the noise the piece of conversation becomes more audible and we start to realise that our earlier assumptions about what these people were saying are completely wrong. And, along with the Gene Hackman character, we are taken to an unexpected ending. So, these are ways that you can play with your structure. You can start at the end and work backwards if you think that would work. You can do anything. It's important to realise, however, that you are going to need a structure, a skeleton, for your story to stop it from just collapsing into a mass of gelatinous flesh. You need that structure there. You need that skeleton. Now, with the three-act structure, yes, you've got your beginning, your middle and your end, I'd like to talk a little bit about what that actually means. By the end of your first third, by the end of your beginning, you should have established all your characters, you should have established your essential situation so that the reader thinks that she knows what you're going to be doing for the rest of the book. That is a good point at which to wrap up your opening, your first section of the structure. The middle section of the structure, by the end of that, you should potentially have come up with something that completely reverses or betrays or turns around the reader's expectations that you had set up. You have some big revelation at the end of the second third that will propel the story towards a new and unexpected climax at the end of the third part. So, that is usually the way that the three-part structure works. Now, of course, in terms of the way that you are actually structuring these things, there are a multiplicity of varieties of structure that you can employ. There are people who have used what is called an epistolary narrative. This would include Bram Stoker's book *Dracula* which is largely conducted through letters between people and diary extracts. That's an interesting device. It gives, perhaps, an air of authenticity to a story as if, yes, this could have been someone's diary entry, this could have been part of a letter. There are stories that can be told from the point of view of numerous unlikely objects. There are stories that can be told as an intrusive questionnaire. I remember a story by the writer John Sladek which was something... the "universal anxiety register" or something like that where it was simply a questionnaire. The first question was: "What is your name?" The second question was: "What is your address?" The third question was: "List all of the addresses at which you have stayed during your life including the time of occupancy and any other factors." Fourth question: "Now, what is your name?" All of a sudden, you start to get an anxious feeling. And as this form becomes more and more intrusive and keeps continually asking you: "Now, what is your real name?" it sounds like you're already under suspicion. So, that's a useful structure. You can borrow structures from almost anywhere. And if you find something that you think is useful then try it out as a structure. But all structure is... is simply you are crafting the shape of the story and you are doing that because you want to leave a particular impression in the mind of the reader. Work out what that impression is. Work out the shape of that indentation that you want to leave in the reader's consciousness and then shape your story to leave exactly that kind of mark.