Mastering Story Structure

Structure is an organizing principle that once set will help you develop your storyline and keep you on track as you write. Structures can be simple and linear, or complex, drifting or charging in and out of time and place. Different stories lend themselves to different structures and there is no right or wrong decision. The only mistake you can make is having no structure at all. Susan Orlean, a longtime staffwriter for The New Yorker and the author of several bestsellers, put it this way in her July/August 2019 WD Interview: “The biggest challenge is structure, which informs everything. You can write beautiful sentences, but if you don’t have a flow and forward momentum, it doesn’t matter.” The idea of selecting an organizing principle is not new. More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most stories are told using a linear (also called chronological) structure. The rest use a nonlinear structure. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each option.

USE LINEAR FOR CLARITY

Chronology follows a regular, linear timeline. Sometimes the chronological structure is inherent in the book or chapter title. In James Grady’s thriller, , for instance, the action. The novel’s nine chapters run from September to May. Think of the possibilities: How about a doctor’s memoir called ? Or a romance titled ? Or a middle-grade adventure novel called ?