by Ros Woolner
Karen started our July workshop by running through ten benefits of structuring a story before you start writing. They included preventing you writing yourself into a corner, helping you know what you’re aiming for, giving you confidence as a writer and helping to avoid writer’s block.
As Karen pointed out, there are lots of different ways of talking about story structure, but for the purposes of our 2-hour workshop, she had picked this framework for us to work with:
Hook – Sets the tone, introduces the main character and the situation that’s about to be threatened.
Inciting incident – The key event that sets the story off.
First pinch point – Something goes wrong, we meet the villain, ‘promise of the premise’ (tells you what the story is going to be about).
Midpoint/turning point – Change in dynamics, shift from reaction to action.
Second pinch point – More pressure, plan fails/mentor dies/dissent in the main character’s team.
Dark night of the soul – Lowest point, the villain is about to triumph, the object of desire is lost.
Plot turn – The main character is forced to come up with a solution, dig deep and find courage. The story starts to deliver on the promise of the premise.
Pay-off – The climax, the bit the reader has been waiting for that draws all the threads together.
Resolution – Shows (briefly!) how the world or main character described at the start of the story has changed.
Karen illustrated all these points with clear examples from Jaws and Back to the Future and then invited us to pick a favourite novel or film and have a go ourselves at identifying the different story structure elements. This is a lot harder than it sounds. I picked The Hobbit, thinking it would be easy to work with, but I still couldn’t work out whether there is a midpoint, and I even struggled to identify the dark night of the soul. Maybe it’s when Bilbo and the dwarves are besieged on the mountain after Smaug has been killed, and Thorin banishes Bilbo for stealing the Arkenstone? This exercise definitely got me thinking harder about how stories work!
Our next task was to think about what made the ending of our chosen story satisfying and come up with unsatisfying alternatives. Which led to a discussion about whether satisfying endings are always happy, and about coincidences in stories and how unsatisfying they can be.
Having explored all these story structure aspects, it was now our turn, and Karen gave us a good amount of time to plot a story in our favourite genre.
The feedback was enthusiastic and there’s even talk of setting up a critique group for prose writers. Watch this space…