So been reworking through John Yorke’s Into the Woods, a book on story structure I read on retreat. This is a topic I have a lot of difficulty with but I’m at the stage that I want to understand story mechanics more formally. I’ve got rather stuck with another project and I have been hoping this helps.
Woods argues that some of what makes stories work is instinctive and a writer can often get it fairly right without following a formal structure (and it turns up anyway.) He also says that all the competing structure theories largely map onto each other. His ‘Five Act Structure’ is quite openly a development of the three act structure first described by Aristole. Finally, he says people who work within the structure sometimes play with it – so Shakespeare occasionally skips an Act and Raiders of the Lost Ark can be seen as having seven Acts.
So colour me surprised when I studied Draft Two of my Work in Progress which turns out to follow… the five act structure.
It fits best if I discard my rough idea of what the great turning point in the book is – the midpoint – to something a little later which happens to better unite the different strands of plot. The story kind of works as written and the shift in conceptualising it works.
My existing method leans rather a lot, after the first sloppy draft, on not boring the reader and keeping the story going. So I look at how far into the book must A, B, and C, happen. This has a similar effect to formal planning.
Fun fact about stroy structure – if you post on it, people immediately recommend two other books about it….
