Story Structure Basics: The Skeleton

Be you a pantser or a plotter, the bones of the story are its plot structure—or how you plan your plot.

It is a little sad that after you become a writer, you soon start to analyze stories to see how the writer moved the general tale along. A little sad, in a way, for me, because I was quite the reader! But now I am looking to pick out the “bones,” so to speak, and apply that knowledge to the way that I write.

That is why it is so important to read, and to read every day. The more you can analyze how to move the action, the better a writer you will become. If you would like to practice creating plot with prompt, try my Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy & Romance and my D&D prompt tools.

What is a Story Arc?

At its simplest, a Story Arc is the path your narrative takes from the first line to the last. It is the chronological construction of the plot.

Think of it as the trajectory of your character. If you were to graph the tension and emotion of your story, the line would go up (during the struggle) and down (during the resolution). That shape is the arc. In fact, many of the tools we will explore do look like graphs.

The Golden Rule: An arc requires change. If your character ends the story exactly the same way they began, you do not have a story arc; you have a flatline.

1. Freytag’s Pyramid

There are many ways to approach plot and structure. One of the first ones that writers bump into is Freytag’s Pyramid.

This is a narrative plot structure created by Gustav Freytag in 1863. It is a simple, effective way to dip your toe into planning. Freytag’s pyramid is laid out to show the five stages of a story and give you a framework to put things on.

The stages of his tool are:

1. Exposition
2. Rising Action
3. Climax
4. Falling Action
5. Resolution (Dénouement)

Stage 1: Exposition

All stories begin in what, for its characters, is their “normal.” Everything starts at the beginning. It can vary in length depending on how much world-building the writer is doing, but it sets the stage for what happens next.

For example—and I’ll just pick a mundane writing task to give the bones of how this works—I will set it in everyday American life. My story begins in a regular bank on a Wednesday morning with several people standing in line waiting for the next teller. It’s just a normal day for everybody. A few people are on their phones. Somebody is holding a child’s hand, and the bank manager is working on something at his desk. You could add some details to show the characters, but the main idea is that there is a status quo.

Stage 2: Rising Action

The next stage is the Rising Action. The spark has happened.

For my little example, I’m going to start with somebody rushing into the front doors of the bank with a yell. Chaos. We don’t know what is going to happen yet, but the “normal everyday” has been disrupted. Nobody is comfortably on their phone anymore; characters are disturbed, and so are we.

When we look back later, we can say, “Ha, ha! I saw this coming.” So what’s happening for our poor folks? Well, the man who rushed in is now waving a gun, shouting, “Everybody on the ground!” Some people are scared. The man seems to be sweating. One of the tellers seems to be crying. But somebody at the outskirts looks like they are thinking about what to do.

Stage 3: Climax

That begins stage three: the Climax. You can call this where the theme, the action, and the bones take place.

In our story, the gentleman standing on the edge thinking about what to do is waiting—poised for us, the writer, to do something with him. This is the pivot of the plot. You have to nail this to catch the reader’s attention and make them go further.

In our case, the gentleman is waiting for the man. I’m going to pick that he is a Time Traveler (because I like to write science fiction), but you could make him a superhero, an undercover policeman, or a co-conspirator. I’m going to have him reach into his coat pocket and reach for a “Time Scrambler.” What is that? Well, I made that up. He activates it, and everybody in the bank freezes.

Stage 4: Falling Action

This brings us to the fourth stage: Falling Action.

What happens? Our bad guy is moving in very slow motion because he’s not quite so affected by the scrambler ray. For some reason, the little boy who was holding his mother’s hand is also not affected; he is looking intently back and forth between our hero and the bad guy.

Now, unbeknownst to us, the bad guy’s gun had just started to go off, accidentally aimed towards the child instead of the teller. The bullet lies suspended in mid-air. Our hero walks over and plucks the bullet, which stands motionless, and puts it in his pocket. He walks over to the little boy, says, “Don’t say anything about this, Johnny, see you soon,” and then moves over to the bad guy. He pulls a net out of his pocket, drapes it over the man, and taps it with another strange little machine. The man disappears with a slurp—and so does the hero. Seconds later, chaos erupts in the bank.

Stage 5: Resolution (Dénouement)

This leads us to the last stage: Resolution, or Dénouement.

It is how we end a story, and it is a very hard thing sometimes to do because everything often could just end up in a tangled mess. All the little details have to pull together to leave the reader and the writer satisfied. Without a note, it’s just something that ended randomly.

In our story, I would have the little boy being put to bed at night by his nervous and frazzled mother. She had spent all day listening to her friends tell the story over and over again. She’s a little distracted, and she just tells him to go take a bath and get to bed. And so he does. But when he is getting ready for bed, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the spent bullet. He had tried to say a couple of words earlier about what had happened to him, but no one, of course, believed him. Now he is holding in his hand evidence that something strange happened. We end the story on this note: that there was proof that the hero existed.

2. The Three-Act Structure

Another way to think of the structure of your story is to use the Three-Act Structure organization.

What is the three-act structure? Well, it is one of the most common ways to organize plot, and it defines events that should occur in each stage of the story. It divides your model into three parts: the Setup, the Confrontation, and the Resolution.

Interesting note: This traces all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics, where he defines it as one of the five components of tragedy. Aristotle said that each component of the story should follow a “beat”—a rhythm where the crescendo and valley send the story in a different direction. It is a cause-and-effect, where the direction is determined by looking and thinking about what could happen next.

So we can look at this somewhat like a play.

Act I: The Setup

First of all, you take the setting, and this is usually defined as lasting the first quarter of the story. Another word for this is the exposition, or setting the stage for the story. We can take our boy in the bank example from above to show this.

So let’s look at Johnny. We know he’s a schoolboy. Maybe we can put in some characteristics from that; we can tell them what their day-to-day life is. Does he have a bully? We already can anticipate the story is going to go in the direction that he is different, so we have that in our head. Maybe that difference is foreshadowed by what makes him him. It’s common for the hero to be outside the beaten path, so I’m going to make Johnny a little bit strange. Maybe his mother is quite poor. Maybe he’s bullied a bit and has some strange inkling of some difference that will help drive the plot. Is he happy? Is he sad? The best main characters are ones that are driven by circumstances that make them an outsider.

We already know what the inciting event is: the bad guy breaking into the bank. That’s the first pivot point. Here we get to the first challenge. Johnny was watching the man at the bank. He was thinking of what he could do to save his mother, to save the people, but he was scared and felt cowardly (though we, of course, have put him at the age of 10 for purposes of the story). Still, he is different enough not to be affected by the time-stopping gun, and that will be the little spark that drives the plot.

The choice he has to make in this section is that he finds a bullet and he doesn’t show it to his mom; instead, he hides it and thinks about it. He’s already a different boy than when he started.

Act II: The Confrontation

We have our changed hero, our 10-year-old Johnny, who now has a bullet to prove that things are different—that maybe he is different. We can expect the bad guys to not stay hidden, and we can expect the good guys to return and start driving the plot. That’s what we seize on to set our story into motion.

Stage three of the three-point plot is the longest part and usually composes the second and third part of the story.

There’s something dangerous in Johnny’s life, but we don’t know what it is yet. The reader is continuing on breathlessly (we hope), trying to see what is happening next. Strange things start happening around him. He has a feeling that people are watching—strange people watching around the corner, an “itchiness” that danger is there. He worries about his mother, and worries that she will be threatened next. Our hero feels weak and unsure.

The Midpoint This leads us to the middle of the story. Something should happen here, and sadly for poor Johnny, it’s going to be bad. The bad guy returns, and this time he’s threatening in an odd and strange way. Somebody comes to visit Johnny’s house—a new teacher from the school. He sits down across from his mother and starts talking about some things that Johnny can do to help him. Johnny looks at him and knows that something is dangerous about him, but his mother agrees that it is a wonderful idea. The bad guy takes Johnny under his wing—especially because Johnny has been acting up ever since the incident at the bank. The man watches Johnny digest this information and winks at him.

What could happen? Where will Johnny find help? This is the time where Johnny must make a decision. We can also think that he will find assistance from the good guy from the beginning of the story. The way won’t be easy, but it will bring him to the potential that he holds within—an explanation of the calculation of time.

Act III: The Resolution

This brings us to the last quarter of the story. Johnny is only an 11-year-old boy; what can he do yet? The story must go on, and he must grow.

He meets up with the good guy again, and that man begins to explain the strength that Johnny has within him. Johnny learns to wield the power that he has, even though it is difficult, and he feels that he may fail. He has a mentor, and he shows the beginnings of the hero he will grow to be. By then, the bad guys have captured his mother, and he fears he will never see her again. They are powerful, and he doesn’t know how he, a small boy, can fight against such powerful enemies.

Indeed, all seems lost. But he pulls within himself, learns to wield the power of time control, and in one last battle, defeats the bad guys, saves his mentor, and rescues his mother.

In the end, the good guys win, and your reader is on the edge of their seat and relieved at the same time. They didn’t know if Johnny would be able to, but he did in the end. We see Johnny and his mother go back to their regular life. Johnny finds his strength to face everyday life; he makes a friend or two, and he is not bullied. He is much happier than when he started.

Why do people write using this plot? Because it’s neat and clean. Each section has a job to do. If you do it, the story progresses naturally.

Another way to look at the journey is to apply Joseph Campbell’s model.

This is commonly known as the 12 Steps. Interestingly, in his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell actually outlined 17 stages of the journey. However, for most writers, the simplified 12-step model (popularized later by Christopher Vogler) is the standard tool.

I am not going to repeat our “Johnny in the Bank” story in full detail. Instead, I am going to give a quick recap of the 12 steps and show where our story would fall in them.

1. The Ordinary World: The bank. Johnny and his mother are living their normal life.
2. Call to Adventure: What is this strange time manipulation that Johnny witnesses? What does he have to do with it all?
3. Refusal of the Call: He is only 11, and he is scared. Yet, the tides of fate seem to be pulling him in that direction.
4. Meeting the Mentor: Johnny meets the man who controls time (from the beginning) and who seems to know him.
5. Crossing the First Threshold: Johnny leaves the safe space of youth and learns from his mentor what he must do to save himself, his mother, and the world.
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies: Johnny meets the new characters in the story. All of them drive the plot forward.
7. Approach to the Innermost Cave: The bad guys are truly bad guys, and they have his mother. What should Johnny do?
8. The Ordeal: Johnny battles the bad guys for the first time.
9. The Reward: He is victorious—but the victory is incomplete. He has gained something (knowledge or power), but the war isn’t over.
10. The Road Back: There are still some plot problems to fix; all is not quite clear yet. The enemy rallies.
11. The Resurrection: The final battle. Johnny faces the ultimate test.
12. Return with the Elixir: Johnny reaches his potential. His mother is safe, and he ends up being stronger and happier than when he started.

Why Use This Model?

This is a beautiful model of plot. Its main beauty is how the story is driven by conflict; there is no part that stays still. Surprisingly, it can be applied across many genres, not just fantasy.

For complex plots and longer word counts (like novels), the Hero’s Journey allows for more complexity and character growth. I myself like it because I am a fan of Carl Jung’s archetype models, and I like to think of how my characters fall within Campbell’s plot lines.

A Final Note on Models

Of course, in the end, the models above are just that—models.

A story is nothing except the unfolding of events triggered by conflict. There are many models that we do not have time to cover in this short webpage. Indeed, the ones we covered are primarily English-language based models; other cultures have vastly different structures for storytelling.

As time permits, I will add more of them to this page. If you are interested in exploring other similar frameworks, look up:

• The Dan Harmon Story Circle
• The Seven-Point Story Structure
• Save the Cat! (by Blake Snyder)

These will be added to this page at a later date.

---