Hello, and welcome, folks, to this bonus episode of the Free Lancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called the Narrative Craft. Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates.
Now today's episode is on story structure in genre fiction, and there'll be a bit of an emphasis on fantasy fiction, but a lot of what I'm saying applies across the board. It's for writers, for fiction editors, and anyone else who's interested.
However, what I say is only relevant to genre fiction. I will not be talking about literary fiction. With literary fiction, you can subvert things and bend rules and make things up in a completely different direction.
The big issue with story structure is that there's lots of competing advice out there, and I believe that a lot of this advice is bad. This is not true for other craft topics, such as characterization, like character goals, motivation, where there's much more of a consensus.
So genre fiction follows templates much more often in practice than, say, literary fiction or experimental fiction. Same goes for film and TV. Perhaps this especially goes for film and TV. Have you ever watched a rom com and said, "oh, this is really predictable?" Or you might go, "it's so American." If you've ever done that, it's because the story will be following a particular formula that you subconsciously recognize, and that can be really satisfying. It can also be irritating, but the specific formula's designed to generate a specific emotion in the viewer, or the reader, if it's a book.
Now the two sets of advice I often hear for genre fiction authors and that create problems for authors I work with are as follows:
The first one is that your novel needs to follow a really rigid story structure. And the second one is "don't think about story structure. Be creative. Let your subconscious talk and write the story that is right for you." So I'll talk about number one first.
So this idea of a rigid story structure, there are various degrees of this. At the top, there are people who will say, if the inciting incident hasn't happened by 10% in or in the first two or three chapters, and the stakes aren't raised roughly halfway through, or for romance, the protagonists haven't kissed by one third of the way in, then you need to fix your manuscript. Now generally speaking, I think this is really bad advice because it can lead authors to make insertions and changes that aren't right for their novel just to fit very rigid expectations. And part of the problem with this is that the fiction developmental editing space is completely unregulated, and that means anyone can hang up their shingle and call themselves a story editor, which means you have, like, various levels of competency, and you have some people who are out there just to make money. I am sorry to see some fiction developmental editors actually be this prescriptive.
I do not think it helps the author. So why does it happen? Well, rigid plotting and story templates comes from the hustle culture end of publishing, the very commercial end, the snake oil end at its extreme. It is easier to sell your magic rigid ten-step formula for story structure than to constantly reply to author requests with "maybe" or "it depends" or "you have to think about the context." And that's because confidence sells.
Now one famous example here is Save the Cat Writes a Novel. So this is a fairly prescriptive model of what a story could look like that has come from the screenwriting, maybe even Hollywood's world, and has been applied to story writing. I really dislike some things about Save the Cat. They do percentages. They say what should happen in each part of the story.
And if authors rigidly stick to that, I think it's gonna be ultimately bad for their novel when they're revising it. Added to that, they make some really overblown strong claims about Save the Cat as being universal. They have different kinds of story that they say can be told, like, what are they called? "Buddy love" or "monster in the house" and so on. I've got a blog post with all the details.
So if you don't know Save the Cat, check out my blog post. It'll be in the show notes. But this whole idea that there's only four kinds of story or six kinds of story or eight kinds of story, again, it's nice because it's marketable, but it's just not true. I think either you have such a small number that you're making these really big generalizations or you have so many different kinds of story that these differences kind of become irrelevant because there are always ways in which you can fudge these categories, and that's that's really why I don't like Save the Cat. They are pushing stuff into these kind of models and categories, and I don't think that's good for storytelling.
That said, I don't hate hate Save the Cat. I think it has a few useful lessons for beginners especially. I found it useful when I started novel writing. It's useful for getting beginners to think about things like character flaws, character arcs, this need to raise the tension as the novel progresses. Like, they talk about raising the stakes.
And if you raise the stakes, you often raise the tension as well. And I know a bunch of traditionally published authors and indie authors who have found success using Save the Cat as a guide. So it can be a semi-useful model. But what I dislike is the idea of it being a prescription or a guide that people feel they should follow, and it just doesn't work for some kinds of stories. A while back, I took some awesome developmental editing courses as part of Club Ed with Jennifer Lawler.
I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And on the plot and story structure course, Jennifer Lawler says that story structure is like a chair. Now you know when a chair works as a chair, and you know what wouldn't work as a chair. Like, a spike would make a really, really bad chair, for example. But there are hundreds, there are thousands of possible great chairs, and a chair that is comfy for me might be uncomfortable for you and vice versa.
So we should be really wary of pushing rigid formulas on people. And the story coach Karen Parker has linked this kind of formula pushing to capitalism explicitly on their coaching course. And we've come in a full circle right back to hustle culture again. It's easier to sell, like, a rigid ten-step model, and it can make people feel secure and good about what they're doing, especially if they're just starting out. And that's not all necessarily a bad thing.
Furthermore, using a beat sheet can be incredibly useful. And if you're like me, a pantser, I'm now a reformed pantser, but I would just write. I would just start writing. If you're that kind of person writing genre fiction, I especially recommend finding some kind of recipe for your plot and definitely making a book map and so on. Okay?
If you're writing romance, there is an awesome book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes, who is a romance writer and editor. And in Romancing the Beat, Gwen has a model, a potential story structure of what could happen in a romance novel. And very famous romance novels have been based on this formula, have used this formula intuitively, like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example. But Gwen says at the start, you should treat this as a recipe rather than a prescription. And that is what I think is important here, and that's passed over in Save the Cat.
Because a story template is not what makes a story work.
All right. Now onto the other bad advice. The second bad advice is to basically say, story structure doesn't matter. Just let the story write itself from your unconscious.
And this advice comes not from hustle culture, but the more academic, the literary academy, I call it, end of publishing, which has been heavily influenced by German Romanticism. And on this view, writing a story is also a magical journey of self discovery. And I don't doubt that. I I really think it is. And I think there is value in pantsing, and they call it discovery writing when you are starting out.
But a novel is a very long thing. And whilst pantsing and discovery writing might work for a short story or a scene in a novel, you are likely to run into problems further down the line if you take this approach and apply it to your whole genre-fiction novel. You can end up with weak plotting. You can end up with a mishmash of things happening, yet with no tension, no progression, no raising of stakes. If you're writing literary fiction, this could be potentially fine.
But if you're writing genre fiction, it's almost certainly not fine. There could be no character development, no story resolution. So for genre fiction, especially, but I think for all fiction, you should carefully plot your novel. You should make notes on what happens in each part. If you're a pantser, you could do this after the first draft.
But I believe it's really important, and it is helpful anyway, to have some kind of rough outline before you even start writing. And I know this firsthand because many pantsers writing a first novel ever run out of steam halfway through because they haven't considered and developed aspects of their story like the tension, the narrative drive, and so on. So they just kind of meander and then lose their way and then put the story down. And that's a really common thing, I think. And it's what happened to me.
When I first drafted a novel about ten years ago, I spent about six months getting really into it, but doing it all in this kind of unconscious way because I didn't know any better. I hadn't learned anything about story craft, and I just ran out of steam after a while and put the novel down. I think it's a really common way of approaching story, and it's kinda inculcated in people through this vision of storytelling and crafting a novel as being something intuitive, as something that comes from the unconscious rather than as being something that is learned, that involves craft techniques, involves you getting better at specific craft techniques, and so on. And if you follow this kind of advice, you'll probably end up with a weakly plotted novel that needs much more editing and revising than the average novel that has been plotted in advance.
The truth is, whether a particular story works or not, it's not about a template or anything. There are a bunch of different factors that affect this, such as attachment to the protagonist or the the viewpoint characters, how immersive and complete the world that's been created is, how compelling the opening pages are, and then checking for things like a sagging middle, a compelling resolution, and so on.
Readers can get really annoyed by problems with many of these issues, such as constant cliffhangers at the end of chapters or a really big cliffhanger at the end of the novel. That said, there are some basic guiding principles that you can follow. With story structure, my advice is do something in advance. Don't completely pants your novel, especially if it's your first novel.
Well, any novel, really. If you lean in that direction, then just make some basic notes, like a really basic outline, something like that. If you lean towards carefully plotting your novel, then by all means, explore different templates, explore different beat sheets, but don't follow them rigidly, and don't make edits for them. So to give one example, I think in Save the Cat, there's this thing about a minor character saying early stating the theme of the story on the first few pages or something something like that anyway. And I've I've had authors ask me, do I need to state the theme explicitly on the first page or two, that kind of thing?
So this is the kind of rigid advice that just doesn't serve authors in my opinion, and that will lead to stilted storytelling instead of a much more natural and organic kind of flow to the story. I've talked about genre fiction in a general sense now. So what about fantasy fiction? Well, there's a few things I can say here. You might have heard of the hero's journey.
Like, this is a really common kind of template used. It's grounded in the much older idea of a quest. And I think this appeals to a lot of writers because in a way, writing a novel is also a kind of quest. And it, yeah, is actually about the getting there rather than the publishing of the book at the end of the day.
Now, typically, the hero's journey follows, like, a chosen one, not necessarily, but often.
A character who might be responsible for the fate of a group of people or, like, the world or a situation or something like that. And this link, they they usually have some kind of unique skill or ability. One example would be Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, who has, like, archery skills and particular strong personality features, such as her independence and compassion and so on. Now the hero's journey is a circular model, and the chosen one or whoever this person is, their journey typically ends in the same place it begins, but the world and them have usually been changed forever by the process. So the hero's journey typically involves this protagonist moving from their known world that might be home or a familiar setting to another world that is full of danger.
And yet this could be The Hunger Games. It could also be Lord of the Rings. Right? And often this journey into the unknown introduces the protagonist or reveals to them their unique power. I'm not gonna go into the details.
I'll stick a link in the show notes again. But the hero's journey is incredibly popular in storytelling, in Western storytelling specifically, and you'll see it all over the show in anything from Hollywood films to fantasy novels. I prefer the heroine's journey, which is another fairly common template. Now this is like the hero's journey. There's still this move from the familiar home like setting to the unknown or the unfamiliar setting.
But the arc isn't about the protagonist's individual kind of change and realization that changes maybe the world or their situation. It's about the heroine as they move through this space, this unfamiliar space full of danger. It's about them forming a support network of allies and beating this foe or this darkness and being changed through collective action rather than individual action. I'll be honest. I like that because it suits my politics better.
I'm on the Left. That's a heroine's journey for you. In the fantasy space, it also depends a lot on subgenre. So if you are writing fantasy romance, then the emphasis will be on the romance, and it will typically have the romance beats, something very similar to Gwen Hayes's Romancing the Beat. There will be obstacles to the couple being together, and there will be a happily ever after (HEA) or happy for now (HFN) ending.
On the other hand, you have romantic fantasy. Romantic fantasy is really a fantasy novel with a significant romance subplot. So it's not all about the romance. The romance isn't the number one feature necessarily. And that might not have a happily ever after, so there's more flexibility there.
And I believe romantasy can kind of straddle, for want of a better word, these two subgenres, romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. But for me, the beauty of spec fic and fantasy is that you can get all kinds of stories in there as long as there's some fresh worldbuilding element. And while certain templates like the hero's journey and the heroine's journey may be favored, I think there's also a lot of room for plot innovation in spec fic compared with some other genres that stick more closely to expected beats, such as romance and thrillers. And that's partly why I love editing spec fic because I find it constantly surprises me. Okay.
So that's all I'm going to say for today about story structure. There's a lot more that I could say. I think that what makes a story work and that links to structure is getting things like story tension right and also things like story mysteries, things that tap into the the reader's curiosity. Because these are all things that keep the reader turning the page. This has really been a, what I would call, story structure one zero one.
I've covered a bunch of very basic, like, texts and resources on story structure. And I've shared my view as well, which is pretty much in the middle ground, in the middle zone. And as with all storytelling, I think it's important to say that if you don't like what I said and you're doing things in a very different way, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing things in a wrong way. Everything that I've said, everything that I have learned over the past several years is my take on all of this. And I am just a person running a series of experiments in this space, and what works for me might not necessarily work for you.
And that's okay because it's a really open and creative space. What I don't want you to do is to leave this podcast thinking, woah. I can't I can't touch Save the Cat. I shouldn't use hero's journey and so on. If it works for you, it works for you, and I'm very happy for you.
Just do it. Just do whatever works for you. This space is so creative, and that's what I love about it. So don't feel you have to align with me on any of these issues. I'm just trying to get a conversation going.
And if you want to continue that conversation, drop me an email. Let me know what you think of this, or sign up for my newsletter, subscribe, rate, and review. And I will see you next time.
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