This is a blogpost about writing, and also not. It's about how structure's been a bad thing for me and a good thing for me, over the years. It's about plot and character arcs and so on, and it's also about the character arc of my life.
As a little kid, I always hated rules about what I could write. I wanted to be free to imagine whatever I wanted! I wanted to be free and fly like a bird in the sky of story. I was ADD, and constantly told to use scheduling tools and forms of organization that I was terrible at. I was living in a world that was orderly, predictable, and full of hierarchies. I rebelled.
Now, some two decades later, I'm reckoning with introducing more structure back into my life - but this time on my terms, about and for people I love, rather than imposed from above like some kind of divine command.
So let's ignore that for a moment, and instead talk about plotting.
There's a divide within the writing community between people who outline extensively and build the structure from the outside-in - planners or architects - and people who just set their pen to paper and wing the whole thing - pantsers or gardeners.
Everything I was taught about writing and life (at least in my early years) was built for planners. I ignored most of it and struggled my way forward anyway.
I wanted very, very badly to be able to write - but in my early years, I was never able to call it up on cue. I had a feeling like I needed inspiration to be able to set a single word to page - a thrilling idea, something I'd already developed a little as worldbuilding, some spark to catch. Even today I tend to follow my whims, but I had an even harder time as a kid. In fact, I had such a hard time at writing that when I was asked to write a short story for a sixth grade exam based on a small prompt, I locked up completely and wasn't able to write a single word. Trying to call up the flow in hostile circumstances had strangled it.
Over the next few years, I would become first a roleplayer, and then a glowficcer, and then a stand-alone author. But that process was a long and grinding one, and I'm still missing parts of my author's education - and nowhere does it show the most but in my pacing.
Well, because it meanders. It takes hundreds of pages to get to the core of a plot and make real progress. This is an artifact of the fact that almost every single one of my stories is a first draft that I'm writing as I go along - and also an artifact of a discomfort with plot as an artifact of craft, something that I'm scared will strangle my characters and reduce them to devices. The whole point of craft is to present people that you could imagine standing beside you and thinking with their whole head, with full-fledged personalities that feel even more real than the people you actually know. Humans are fascinated with people, and that's what drives story.
Or so I believe - but the truth is, there are many successful and effective authors who are able to plot their stories without turning their characters into devices. So what am I missing?
Well, the issue is that plot is structured. In, you know, some kind of plot structure. If you have no plot structure, you don't have a story, you have a ramble - and looking at my work, it's unfortunately often a ramble that fails to get to its real point for many thousands of words. I can fake a lot with good character action and good character arcs - my focus on character gets me somewhere - but the pacing tends to drag at best.
So, slowly and haltingly, over the past few years I've slowly started to come face to face with my old nemesis. To make progress now, I need to learn what I've put off for so long.
Chuubo's Marvellous Wish Granting Engine is a diceless and esoteric roleplaying game by Jenna Moran. It's explicitly narrativist and built around putting your characters through plot arcs that emerge naturally from gameplay.
"Emerge naturally from gameplay," huh? When I realized that the system was trying to do this, my metaphorical fox ears perked up and my tail swished from left to right. Maybe this book could give me something useful when so many previous books with "formulas" had failed.
It was with Chuubo's Marvellous Wish Granting Engine's Arcs that I built and structured my first two novel-length projects.
CMWGE, or simply Chuubo's, divides all fantasy plots up into eight aesthetic categories, each of which it assigns a color, symbol, and name.
These eight types are:
For each of these eight types, Jenna gives a formula - three standard, major parts to the plot, with a fourth and fifth part that are optional.
This was a formula, but importantly it was a formula that actually adapted to my story. I could pick whichever of these eight ideas I wanted and immediately have a broad set of goals to follow through on. And that gave me the flexibility I needed to chill out and accept a little structure.
Zigzagging through Hoenn was explicitly written with the intent of being a Knight arc. I still failed to structure it well enough - more on that later - but it worked well enough to have an idea of where to go all the way through the story.
The stations of the formula for the Knight arc were as follows:
As you can see, book one finished at quest four - so I discarded number five in the series and started over for book two. At this point I was in deep enough that I knew how I wanted to end the story, so I was able to write the rest of it in more or less one burst.
I used more details than this - actually picking individual quests for each plot section from the Chuubo's book - but this ultimately proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Ultimately I just needed an idea of where to go.
Yeah, but it's more tailored than some examples in the industry. Save the Cat Writes a Novel tries to lay out one formula that literally every story should follow, and as a result it crushes detail. This formula is less well-known, more specific, and had to do in a real way with the actual goals that Autumn was searching to accomplish. That made it work for me in a way Save the Cat never has.
I started experimenting with structure a little more. Plotting plots in advance. Often I would end up having to change them as my characters got to the relevant sections. It still was too loosey-goosey though, and still is to this day. But there's some hope, because of a little book called Understanding Conflict.
I could and will do a full post on this slim little tome, but this is a critical piece of fundamental writing advice that I was missing. Understanding Conflict did a couple important things, but the most important one was separating the character arc from the main conflict.
This would later go on to mesh with a later writing course's notes to produce the following understanding, which is pretty much verbatim from my personal notes:
There are two conflicts in any book. The character's internal conflict (the struggles they go through as they attempt to weather the emotional storm) and the external or plot conflict (the series of physical, real-world tasks that the character must complete in order to complete their goal.)
These two conflicts intertwine. The external conflict determines the situations that the character gets into - the scenes, the action, where they are tested and fail, or succeed with negative or messy consequences - while the internal conflict drives the characters' choices in their internal struggle to change or grow.
The characters' choices create scenes, where the character is tested and fails (or succeeds painfully) and the disastrous or complicated outcomes of those scenes produce sequels where the character is presented with a dilemma and must come to a new decision about it. This new choice then goes on to create a new scene. In this way, the internal conflict drives the choices that determine the arena of the external conflict, and the success or failure in the external conflict determines the new dilemmas the character is faced with to resolve internally.
These two things build on each other in A B A B structure, first a scene that goes messily, then a sequel dealing with its fallout, then another scene caused by the decision in the sequel, then another sequel determined by the outcome of the scene. The two conflicts, internal and external, are effectively interbraided to feed each other.
A choice is only real if it is genuinely difficult and changes what the next arena of conflict is, and a conflict is only real if it costs or risks something that results in a new emotional dilemma for the character after its resolution.
This matters because it means every conflict and every choice has direct consequences for the character - if any single conflict or choice went differently, a whole different series of events might well have occurred.
My fundamental problem was that I did not understand this braided structure. Scenes happen because the characters pick their challenges. Sequels happen because the characters have to reckon with the damage of their attempts to progress.
Understanding this and incorporating it in practice are two different things, naturally, but at least now I have a sense of what good plot structure looks like!
I still get squirrely sometimes about commitments, schedules, planners, anything that involves a time and place to be. But over the last few years, I've slowly started to keep a schedule of my own recording when my girlfriends have dates with each other, when I have dates with my girlfriends, and things I hope to see happen in the future like trips to see each other. I have a regular bedtime, now, and daily alarms to take my pills. It still aches, a little. But it's better than it was before - and it's not unrelated from the fact I'm able to see the uses of structure in my writing a little more clearly these days as well.
Structure is only evil when it's not in service to your own goals and desires. In a system where I was helpless before bureaucracy and the will of my family, it was no ally to me. But leashed and under my own control, it grows, blossoms, and creates joy and connection. And that's beautiful.
It just goes to show that your first impression of something isn't always correct.