Category Archives: Story Structure

Know Your Story Points – Main Character “Growth”

Over the course of your story, the Main Character will either grow out of something or grow into something. Authors show their audiences how to view this development of a Main Character by indicating the direction of Growth by the Main Character.

If the story concerns a Main Character who Changes, he will come to believe he is the cause of his own problems (that’s why he eventually changes). If he grows out of an old attitude or approach (e.g. loses the chip on his shoulder), then he is a Stop character. If he grows into a new way of being (e.g. fills a hole in his heart), then he is a Start character.

If the story concerns a Main Character who Remains Steadfast, something in the world around him will appear to be the cause of his troubles. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to stop bothering him, then he is a Stop character. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to begin, then he is a Start character.

If you want the emphasis in your story to be on the source of the troubles which has to stop, choose “Stop.” If you want to emphasize that the remedy to the problems has to begin, choose “Start.”

THEORY:

Whether a Main Character eventually changes his nature or remains steadfast, he will still grow over the course of the story. This growth has a direction. Either he will grow into something (Start) or grow out of something (Stop).

As an example we can look to Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Does Scrooge need to change because he is excessively miserly (Stop), or because he lacks generosity (Start)? In the Dickens’ story it is clear that Scrooge’s problems stem from his passive lack of compassion, not from his active greed. It is not that he is on the attack, but that he does not actively seek to help others. So, according to the way Charles Dickens told the story, Scrooge needs to Start being generous, rather than Stop being miserly.

A Change Main Character grows by adding a characteristic he lacks (Start) or by dropping a characteristic he already has (Stop). Either way, his make up is changed in nature.

A Steadfast Main Character’s make up, in contrast, does not change in nature. He grows in his resolve to remain unchanged. He can grow by holding out against something that is increasingly bad while waiting for it to Stop. He can also grow by holding out for something in his environment to Start. Either way, the change appears somewhere in his environment instead of in him.

USAGE:

A good way to get a feel for the Stop/Start dynamic in Change Main Characters is to picture the Stop character as having a chip on his shoulder and the Start character as having a hole in his heart.

If the actions or decisions taken by the character are what make the problem worse, then he needs to Stop.

If the problem worsens because the character fails to take certain obvious actions or decisions, then he needs to Start.

A way to get a feel for the Stop/Start dynamic in Steadfast Main Characters is to picture the Stop character as being pressured to give in, and the Start character as being pressured to give up.

If you want to tell a story about a Main Character concerned with ending something bad, choose Stop.

If you want to tell a story about a Main Character concerned with beginning something good, choose Start.

This article was excerpted from Dramatica Story Structure Software

The Most Important Article You’ll Ever Read On Story Structure

We think in narrative, but think about topics. Narrative is the operating system of our own minds, and we seek to impose that upon every topic we encounter. For if we can, then we have the most touch-points with our own awareness, and see the most we can of what we are exploring, as well as the forces that operate in that system and hold things together.

That which does not match the very schematic of our minds appears to be chaos. But even chaos can be topically related.

The problem for the creative mind is that it wants to have topic and narrative come together in a perfect fit. It is not unlike putting a pencil on a table, and balancing a ruler across it. Topic is on one side and narrative is on the other. If you push the topic side down to the table, like a seesaw, the narrative side will go up, and vice versa.

So, the truth of the matter is, that topic and narrative can never both be fully explored in the same work.

And so, some writers seek a perfect structure at the expense of the passion of their topic. And others seek to completely explore their topic, though it makes a shambles of narrative.

But if you can accept that structure should not be perfect and that topic will never be expressed, then you can find the balance between the two that optimizes the effect or personal satisfaction you are shooting for.

When creating, the Muse abhors structure. She wishes to romp free in the fields of experience. You must never try to bridle the Muse or she will run away from you never to return.

So, in any first draft, forget about structure. Let the story flow of its own topical organic nature.

At this time, you create a Story World – the universe of experience in which your story will take place. It is not your story, but is the realm in which your story’s journey will occur. But it should have no structure, because it is not even a narrative yet – just the narrative space in which the narrative will eventually form.

Next, after creating a story world, you create a storyline. This can be one or more journeys across your story world, with a point of departure, a destination, and meandering around and lingering at as manny different concepts as you like within your story world. Again, structure should not be specifically applied at this time, since your own mind is already automatically laying the embryonic foundations of structure in the background while your Muse creates.

Finally, in the third stage, you look at your finished storyline journeys and, regardless if there is just one story/journey or many, you go to the list of Story Points in Dramatica and make sure each journey has them all, as completely as is reasonable.

So, you ensure there is a goal, a protagonist, a main character, an influence character unique ability, and so on. BUT do NOT create a storyform yet! We aren’t interested at this stage what kind of goal it is, just to identify what the topical subject matter of the goal is – that each journey HAS a goal.

Finally, once you have revised your storylines to include as many of the story points as you reasonably can, THEN and ONLY then do you create a storyform. This storyform will provide a template to which you can aspire, but like the pencil and the ruler, you can never really achieve without short changing your topic and your passion.

So, in seeing what KIND of goal your story SHOULD have, for example, you can then consider if your goal is actually like that, similar to that, or worlds away from that. And, if it doesn’t match exactly, you can determine if you think that will hurt your story, or if it is close enough, or the story point minor enough, that you can just leave it as it is, in the most passionate and organic form, and ignore structure at that point.

No one ever read a book or saw a movie to experience a magnificent structure. The readers and audience are there to ignite their passions about a topic of interest to them. THAT is the bottom line and it is also King. Never let structure get in the way of that.

–Melanie Anne Phillips

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Story Structure – Guidelines NOT Rules!

Of late, I’ve been working with the concept that perfect story structure is a myth – and should be! As they say in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “it’s more of a guideline than a rule.”

In story creation, one should ignore structure up front because we all think in narrative to begin with, subconsciously – that’s what narrative is: the pattern or framework we use to find meaning.  And since narrative is how we think, every creative work we bring into the world already has an embryonic narrative structure forming in our subject matter.

The problem is that often subject matter may engender multiple potential narratives that are incompatible with one another at some or many levels. And the job of structuring is to find and refine those potential narratives so that one may be selected as the one round which you build your story.

This creative process tends to take place through four stages of story development:

1. Building your story world – who’s in it, what happens in it, what it all means.

2 Finding the path you want to follow through that world – basically your story’s timeline.

3. Adding in structural story points to act as the cornerstones and lynchpins of your story.

4. Determining the complete structural storyform that best matches your intent for the story.

In that final fourth stage, you use the storyform as a blueprint for your story, but have a lot of leeway in how closely you adhere to it. No one reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a great structure. They go because of their interest in the subject matter and a desire to have the expression of that subject matter ignite their passions.

And so, aside from the most crucial story points, an actual story (as opposed to a theoretical ideal story) can vary considerably from structural perfection whenever the process of making it more structurally accurate would undermine the flow of passion or short change the exploration of the subject matter.

Knowing, for any given story, which story points are crucial and how far one can drift, is a result of experience: the more you practice, the better you get.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-Creator, Dramatica

Learn more about Dramatica Story Structure Software

Is Story Structure Your Enemy?

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Structuring before writing or anywhere in the beginning of the process hobbles the Muse and creativity stops and progress bogs down.  This can make it appear as if story structure is your enemy.

But, if you apply structure at the right point in the process, story structure can be your greatest ally.

To turn structure from foe to friend, follow these four steps:

First Step

Create your story world: What are all the elements you would like in your story?  Don’t force creativity – just make a list of all things you want in your story – the people, events, messages, and moods you’d like to explore.

If you have specific ideas for a battle, a line of dialog, a clever plot twist – anything that you want in your story – jot it down.  Then, develop those ideas into the world in which your characters live an in which your plot will take place.

For some tips on how to develop your story world, click here.

Once you feel you have the basic outline of your story in focus, write a synopsis of your story.  A synopsis talks about what’s in your story – not so much the order of events.  It is intended as a conversational description of what your story is about, as if someone asked you, “I hear you are writing a novel (or screenplay).  What’s it about?”

If you answered that question, you wouldn’t answer by telling them the order in which things occur.  You would tell them about all the major concepts, interesting moments, and principal characters.  You would describe your story world so they get an idea of what the finished story will be like.  That, is your synopsis.

Second Step

Create a pathway through those elements – your story’s spine or timeline, including quest, characters and plot.

Your story’s timeline (often though of as your plot-line, though it also includes your character arcs and the development of your story’s message) is like a journey through the story world you created in the first step.

Imagine that your story world is a map of the terrain you wish to cover in your story.  Then the timeline is a journey across that terrain – the sequential order in which you visit each of the interesting concepts you’ve developed.

It can be difficult to turn a list of ideas into a pathway, however, but if you run into trouble, click here for a method of generating your timeline from your story world.

One you have your timeline, imagine that the person who asked what your story was about in the first step responded with, “Cool!  I like it!  How does it unfold?

Your answer would be a conversational recounting of the key events or happenings in your story in sequential order – not too much detail, just the essentials.  If you write that down, it becomes what is called a story treatment.

Essentially, a treatment is a description of how your story will unwind, minus any dialog unless it is absolutely essential to understanding a particular event.

Third Step

Once you have your treatment, add in structural story points. I’m not talking about building your story’s complete narrative structure – not yet.  For this step, you just want to make sure all the critical structure story points are all in there, such as Goal, Requirements, thematic conflict, a main character, and whether that main character ends up changing their nature (like Scrooge) or holding on to their point of view (like James Bond).

You see, structure is composed of two parts – the essential story points and the dramatics that hold them together.  Every story has the same points, but it is the way they are connected to one another that creates your story’s unique narrative structure.

We’ll worry bout those connections in the next step.  Here, just make sure all the most important story points are in your story, and if not, put them in so they fit with what you’ve already developed.

For a list of the twelve most important story points you really need, click here.

Fourth Step

Create a narrative structure for your story.  To do this, you will want to look at all your story points and then determine how they hang together.  This can be done by intuition and experience, but it is always a little “iffy” if you rely on that alone.

That’s why we created a software program that can do it much more precisely.  You can use it for free to work out the narrative structure in  your story.  But, the software is not the point.  The point is to create a template for your story that would show you what a perfect structure would look like.

Now, nobody reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a great structure.  Rather, we are drawn to stories to have our passions ignited.  Still, there are some essential structural components that can scuttle the best-told and most exciting story every conceived.

So how can you reconcile structure with your Muse?  Simple.  Don’t try to make your story’s structure perfect, just better.  Use your structural template as a guide – like a blueprint.

Writing is a strange endeavor, as it is best done when you build the house first, and then determine the perfect blue print for it later.  Then, you lay that template over your story and see where you can bring your story into better alignment with it, without destroying all the design concepts and decorations you already have in place.

In the real world of story development, perfect structure is a myth.  Trying to make a story structure perfect will drain the life out of it. And trying to create a structure first and then write from it will create a “paint by numbers” picture.

But if you use structure only at the end (after completing your first draft is ideal), then you can hone your story as closely as possible to the most solid structure, without undermining your passionate expression.

Now I said you could use our story structuring software free, and here’s how.  We created a product called Dramatica, based on our concepts of narrative structure.  It contains a Story Engine that uses those concepts to help you build a structure that best represents your story.  The demo version is fully functional, including the Story Engine!  So, you can use it to structure your story and you don’t have to spend a dollar.

You can download the demo version for Windows or for Mac here.

You’ll find the demo has complete instructions and even a path for beginners called the StoryGuide that will walk you through the story structuring process step by step.

What it won’t tell you is how to apply that structure to your story without crushing the creativity.

For that, just keep in mind – the structure that Dramatic generates should be treated as a collection of guidelines, not a list of rules.  Use each story point in the structure to gain insight into your story, and then apply it if you can and as best you can to strengthen your structure.

And, of course, your friendly neighborhood story coach is always available, as described below.  Plus, you may also with to try my other software, StoryWeaver, to help you with the creative part of the process as well.

Contact me about narrative analysis for fiction and the real world

~AND~

Try my StoryWeaver Software for Step By Step Story Development

Only One Main Character in a Story

By Melanie Anne Phillips

There’s only one main character in a story.  Why?  Because a story is about the group experience of trying to achieve a goal.  When people come together around a common issue in the real world, they quickly self-organize so that one becomes the Voice of Reason and another the Resident Skeptic, for example.

In essence, each “character” in a group endeavor takes as his job one of the major attributes we all have within our own minds.  In this way, the group benefits from having specialists to look into each point of view exclusively, which provides greater insight to the group than if we were all acting as individuals, each trying to see the problem from all angles at once, as we do with personal problems.

And so, the group takes on the nature of a group mind in which our primary attributes are represented by people.  In fiction, this group mind is called a Story Mind, and each of the people are the archetypes.  This forms the basis of narrative structure.

But who is the main character among all of these?  In real life, one of the archetypes will emerge as the leader who represents the identity of the group, such as a the CEO of a company, the team leader in sports, or the President of the United States.

Those who are part of the group assume the mantle of that identity, and the leader is the personification of the group mind’s sense of itself.  In fiction, that character is the main character, for it is through his or her perspective that the readers or audience experience the story in the first person.

This main character may or may not be the protagonist.  The protagonist is the archetype who represents our initiative – the drive to affect change.  Every group mind has one.  But that person is not always the leader.  The leader is the spirit of the group, the protagonist may be his principal operative.

And so it is in fiction.  Any of the archetypes might be the leader.  So that leader might be the antagonist, for example, trying to maintain the status quo and prevent change.  Or it might be the reason archetype who insists that all decisions are based on logic.

Still, though the leader may be any archetype, there will only be one avatar for the group’s sense of self, one main character in the story mind.  For, just as in our own individual minds, we think therefore we are.  There is only one voice inside that is our identity, our sense of self, who we are.  (Unless, of course, we are mentally ill, just as a group mind might be dysfunctional in the real world if it has more than one identity – more than one voice that speaks for the group or tries to define the feel and essence of the group.

So, in your own stories, be sure you only have one main character.  But if you want to write about other characters in your story and see how it looks through their eyes, create a sub-story around that character that doesn’t involve the others.  Then, you can populate it with people such as his family or his religious group, and his personal story will allow you to stand in his shoes in that regard.

Be certain, however, that you do do not confuse your readers or audience by writing your sub story in such a way that this sub main character is mistaken for the overall main character, as this would create a dysfunctional story.

Still, it is important to develop the individual natures of every character so the readers or audience can identify with them more easily as being like real people.  And this prevents your story from being about just one person surrounded by an army of automatons.

After all, each of us is the main character in our own personal narrative.

Learn more about story structure at

The Tectonic Plates of Story Structure

tectonic-platesThink of the large structural elements in a story as tectonic plates in geology that push against each other driven by an underlying force. In geology that force is generated by currents in the mantle. In stories, that force is create by the wound-up justifications of the main character that puts him or her in conflict with their world at the point the story begins.

Sometimes, in geology, this force gradually raises or lowers land in two adjacent plates. Other times it builds up pressure until things snap all at once in an earthquake. So too in story psychology, people are sometimes slowly changed by the gradual application of pressure as the main character’s justifications gradually unwind through experience. Other times the pressure applied structure just builds up until the character snaps in Leap Of Faith – that single “moment of truth” at the climax in which a character must decide either to change his ways (or outlook) or stick by his guns believing his current approach is stronger than the pressure bought to bear against him, believing he just has to outlast the forces against him to ultimately triumph.

All of these variations result in four basic kinds of growth arcs for your main character: A gradual change over time, a gradual strengthening of his resolve, an abrupt change in a leap of faith at the climax, an abrupt decision not to change.

Learn more at Storymind.com

What Creates Dramatic Tension?

In narrative structure, there are two forces that converge to create a sense of rising tension that culminates at the climax: the quest to achieve a goal and the increasing pressure to change a deeply held conviction. Each of these forces informs the other so that, ultimately, the choice to change one’s nature or remain steadfast in one’s views and potential success in achieving the goal depend upon one another. In some stories, success depends upon the personal choice. In other stories, one’s nature is determined by success or failure. But in all cases, the interrelationship between the outcome of the plot and the culmination of the main character’s growth, builds the potential that drives the story forward to its conclusion.

Learn more at Storymind.com

Dramatica – Part 1

Introduction

To understand story structure we must understand writers, for it is they who created it.

Story structure represents our quest for truth and meaning. In this regard, it reflects the structure of music and art as well. What’s more, as story structure transcends language and culture, it illuminates the mental processes involved in that quest that are common to us all. And as a result, as we shall see, story structure provides a schematic of the operating system of our own minds.

But that concept is a long way from here. And to fully embrace it, we must start at its beginnings.

To be continued in Part 2:

The Origin of Story Structure