Small Level Story Structure

Last week, I rambled about a metaphor in story structure and how I want the story’s big picture to progress. Today I’ll hopefully provide a more legitimate theory and less abstract thought process about the parts of the beginning, middle, and end. I can’t promise to stay away from metaphors, though. 

What do I mean about small-level story structure? The big picture is the three acts, the theme, the big questions of the story, and the character’s overarching goal. Small level story structure will be the parts of the first act. The initial eye-grabber or beginning hook or inciting incident. The first scene should grab the reader’s attention. From there, the story should progress to the climax of the first act. Slowly each act should build tension to reach the climax. 

So how many scenes are at the beginning, and how do I break them down? Most articles I’ve read break it down into numbers; so many scenes total based on word count. I’m going for 100,000 words at 2,000 words a scene, so 50 scenes total. The middle reasonable seems to be the longest section, so that will be twenty-five scenes, and the beginning or end will be 12/13. (I haven’t worked out which one will have 12 or 13). But for here, we’ll use twelve in the beginning. 

Cool. So if I know how the first act starts and ends, I have at least two scenes. So how do I go from the beginning to the end of the first act? 

The way I’ve started to think about progressing from one level to the next is like going through an RPG Video game or following a video game’s storyline. Each level is a chapter that becomes progressively harder for the player. For the reader, the tension in the story grows with each scene, like each task becomes more difficult in a video game. (I don’t play many video games, but I know people who do, and this seems to be the general theme). Each scene provides a new complication that moves the story towards the climax. For me, that is slowly walking Peregrina through a fall from grace. By the end of it, Peregrina will firmly believe there is no saving her, and she is the villain in the story. Of course, I want the reader to believe it, too. But considering there’s a blog post or more discussing the journey of outlining and writing a seven-ish book series following Peregrina’s life. It’s hard to believe that she will be the villain in all of them. But hopefully, despite that knowledge, the story still keeps the reader glued to their chair and their nose glued to the book. 

Or at least willing to finish. 

My current dilemma is struggling with turning each scene into a complication pushing toward the ending goal. First, I didn’t really know the story arc I wanted when I went to outline Book 1 in Peregrina’s series. Then, I couldn’t determine how to progress through each act of the story and build the tension. Many of the sites I shared last week on story structure have helped identify issues and approaches to handling this problem with outlining. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I outlined a memo, paper, or even blog post without it being required by a teacher or professor. Trying to outline and figure out the parts and uses of outlining will hopefully make the story better. 

So what about you? When working on a project, writing, art, musical, etc., what part of preparing or editing do you struggle with most?