Story Structure is simpler than you think.

I begin every writing session with a sort ten to fifteen minute timed automatic writing exercise. The point is to get some air through my mind. I use a program (flowstate) which deletes what I’ve written if I stop. It helps with not editing.

This little post was the outcome of one of those sessions. It was mostly a reminder for me. It might be more useful for you, I hope it is.

Anyway. Enough with the throat clearing.

What I want to say is that writers overcomplicate story structure. They think there is a single story structure — the One Story Structure — and that their story is Good or Bad by virtue of how well their plots hew to the grand structure. This is further exacerbated by the whole cottage industry of experts and whatevers which promise that as long as their stories follow the mold, then success (of whichever form the writer desires) is soon to follow.

Of course, this is bullshit. Plotting is both simpler and more difficult than simply following some mold. There aren’t 21 steps a protagonist must go through for the story to be valid. That’s a fairy tale for writers — the purpose of which is take away some of the terror of coming up with ‘what happens next and why.’

I say that it’s simpler since we all ‘plot’ all the time—that is we want things, and come up with plans to get them. As we execute those plans we naturally come up against interference, constraints, hazards, or our plans go awry, they backfire on us, and fall through. So, despite the fashion for well crafted sentences and interiority in fiction, we all have a grounding in what makes a dramatic character: intention and obstacle. At base that’s all there is too it, a character wants something and has to navigate around, or through, a series of escalating obstacles, until they definitely have achieved their aim, or definitively have failed. The remainder of the story deals with what that success or failure means for your character. Whether they could do something (e.g. ask their crush out) that they couldn’t at the beginning of the story, or how now they can’t do something they could earlier in the story.

That all sounds simple, because it is, so the difficulty is all in the execution. A story can sound good in summary, but fail to move us because the prose is dull, the scenes confusing, the sequences meandering. In the end all there really is are marks on a page to read, actors on stage reciting lines, or images on screen. The success or failure of the artwork is all about the arrangement of those base elements—there is no platonic form of the story separate from the execution. There is no world beyond the words, the images are not a window into some other place.

Lets take a couple of examples from my recent life.

Just now I was interrupted in writing this essay because my mother wanted me to help set up the sofa bed I’m sleeping on for the next few days. I wanted to keep on writing, but if I want to have a peaceful life over Christmas I had to help my mother. The task was complicated by my mother not knowing how to turn the bed from a sofa into a bed, my brother calling my mother as she was (badly) explaining how to open the bed to me, my mother getting the wrong size sheet twice, my mother getting in my way whilst I try to do what she’s asking of me, and my father interrupting the whole thing because he needed my help pushing a motorbike with a flat battery into the garage. This whole thing was a test of my patience, and a real life example of farce (interruptions, miscommunication). The stakes were suitably low (just keep the peace in a relationship), and the obstacles easy to overcome (don’t lose my temper). At the end I was really the same person I was at the beginning, which in a comedy is no sin.

The other example came a month or so back when my team had to move offices. Our company had agreed to sublet the floor we worked on to a third party, so we needed to pack everything up and move to our new premises. At stake for the company was a big fat pile of rent money—the subtenant had a firm date when they needed to be in the office (their lease was up), and any delay would mean they cancelled the whole thing. At stake for me was that at work I deal with PII data, specifically a cabinet full of the stuff. Only my team is authorised to see the contents, and I can be personally sued if somebody who shouldn’t has access to the documents (even for a little while).

Normally I am a pretty chill guy at work. I am want to just let things play out as they play out, taking the view that most squabbles are small fry in the grand scheme of things. Being told I needed to move office was just another thing I needed to manage. There was a deadline however: we had to be out by Friday 14th, because on Monday 17th one of our rooms was going to be used for a delicate negotiation involving an external mediator. We didn’t want the process to be interrupted by the chaos of moving.

At first we resisted moving: the new space wasn’t secure. There’s some rather dull legal chicanery we did to force our company to give us a properly specced space. Very quickly, since a lot of money was on the line, the company relented and found a suitable space for us. This included a new lockable room, with brand new keys, that only my team could access (this part is important). So we agreed to move.

In fact, we didn’t do anything as passive as just agreeing to move. Instead we made a plan. My team would pack everything in our office, and the Workplace management would move the boxes on Friday 14th. For the cabinet full of PII data, we would pack them into specially marked boxes, which would be placed in the lockable room, and one of us (me) would accompany them from the old office to the new room and physically lock them over the weekend. We’d move the cabinet at 5pm on the Friday, as it was the very last thing which needed to be moved and we didn’t need to fill it up straight away. Then once everything had been moved, my team and Workplace would do a key handover. They take the keys to the old office and we’d get the keys to the new place. Plus we’d do a load of paperwork to record which keys were where and why. Simple.

The first obstacle was that my team hadn’t sorted what was in the cabinet as the years had gone by. Instead we were too busy and just put everything in the inbox tray on the middle shelf, and promptly forgot about it. So, as well as organising the move, I also had to file a year’s worth of paperwork. This tasks wasn’t so bad, but it turned out our company didn’t have moving boxes so everything had to go back into the cabinet once I’d filed it. I had to overcome our collective distractions, and general hatred of paperwork.

Then what went wrong was that the facilities guy got sick, and didn’t install the new locks in time. Obviously there was nothing I could do about that, but there were other facilities guys onsite who could have installed the new locks, but the office heating system had broken so we understandably weren’t the number priority for them. I was left reeling, trying to persuade or cajole the head facilities guy into doing what I needed him to do. Instead I was fobbed off and ignored.

So we made a new plan: hire a moving company, they provide boxes, we pack everything into these shiny boxes, and the moving company moves everything into the secure location. Except that this plan also goes wrong: my company expanded the scope of the removal company. Workplace needs the movers to do more stuff than can fit in an afternoon, so the move has to be postponed until Monday 17th. The day of the negotiations.

So we make a Final Plan: everyone would arrive early with the movers on the 17th and the facilities guy and do the move before the negotiations. The facilities guy would install the new cylinders last thing on the 14th and hand over keys to the new office. We would keep the keys to the old office. Now there are two sets of keys I was responsible for which can go missing.

Of course, the Final Plan Goes Wrong too. It’s a story, so nothing can go smoothly or there’d be nothing to tell.

I arrive early on the Monday morning to find that the moving company isn’t there. Neither was the facilities guy.

I have to find a trolley and moves the important cabinet stuff myself, but I couldn’t lock it securely since the new locks hadn’t been installed. Also the IT dept hadn’t got around to cancelling meetings in the new secured room, and this it has meetings scheduled in it all day. So I have to organise/persuade other teams to move their meetings and sort out some alternatives, so I can lock the door.

Then I need to move the cabinet. But the moving guys have been given other priorities by the company. Finally I have to intervene and ‘be a leader’ to get the cabinet moved, so the cabinet is finally in its new home.

There were several obstacles I had to overcome: the company forcing a move on me, the internal facilities people and their priorities, the moving company and their instructions, seasonal illness. None of these were, in principle, difficult to get through. They just required that I try different tactics out: persuasion, bargaining, cajoling, threatening the whole move, finally directly intervening and asking the moving company to just move the fucking cabinet already. In other words, the project challenged my chill guy self conception. In some small way, I’m better able to stop being a chill guy when I need to get things done.

What the second story has that the first didn’t are: clearer stakes, deadlines, plans, failures, and a protagonist who changes ever so slightly. Both are taken directly from my actual life, both suggest ‘scenes’ and in the second these are grouped into ‘sequences,’ both suggest ‘genre.’

What I want to say is simply: there’s no need to follow a predetermined formula, or have ‘required scenes.’ Nothing will help us against the terror of the blank page. Nothing but intention and obstacle can help us figure out what next.