By the way, I am still reading War and Peace and Stephen King's works, despite the long gaps. I fully intend to get back to both of them.
I've been reading a lot about how stories work recently because I'm trying to write. I've been trying to write for years, but it was hard to figure out how to write a novel-length story. Now with ADHD medication and two Masters degrees under my belt, I have the focus and the confidence to see a path through from where I am now to where I want to be. And right now, that means gathering the tools to analyse and breakdown stories, and understand why they work, so I have a framework I can play with in new and interesting ways.
Recently, I've read/been reading Randy Ingermanson's How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, Shawn Coyne's The Story Grid, and Paul Tomlinson's Plot Basics. I'm also rereading Stephen King's On Writing. They're all fundamentally describing the same thing, but in slightly different ways. They're all trying to codify how stories work in our brains, so this is something we all instinctively recognise when we see it, but we don't know exactly why it works or what we're seeing. Most writers didn't intentionally try to structure their stories in specific ways, but stories that work tend to have things in common, and those things are what 'story structure' tries to describe. It's like building a map of a city. The map isn't the city, but it helps you figure out your way through it.
The consensus is, broadly speaking, that a story contains these elements in this order:
- An Inciting Incident to set off the plot, i.e., why is this happening now and not earlier or later? What was the trigger?
- Escalations, factors which make things harder for your character. These are often called 'complications', but I prefer escalations because my mind links 'complication' with 'problem' and thinking of these factors as problems made it harder for me to identify them. Randy Ingermanson talks about a character in a crucible. The crucible gets hotter and hotter until the character breaks out of it. This metaphor is quite useful because it also includes the idea that once a crucible is broken, you can't use it again. You can use parts of it, since the character probably hasn't solved the whole problem (if they have, you're probably at the end of the story) but whatever your character faces in future should be different in some way.
- A Crisis point, where your character makes a decision. Basically, I picture this and the escalations as a game of Buckaroo. You pile things onto your character until they can't take it any more and they do something. This something 'turns' the story, points it in a different direction. Something has fundamentally changed. As I type, I realise I don't like 'turns'. That makes me picture a game of Snake, and that image isn't useful to me. That snake has no direction, it doesn't have a plan, it's doing random things. For me, a better image is a labyrinth, and the 'turn' is a choice about which path to go down. There is somewhere your character is trying to get to, metaphorically speaking (or literally, like in the movie Labyrinth), and the story you're telling is about each turn they come to and how they decide which path to take.
- A Climax, once the decision is made. To be honest, I still haven't gotten my head around this, but I think I see the crisis point as both the moment in which the character makes up their mind and the immediate action they take, while the latter is more properly part of the climax. Plus, this same structure applies to the story as a whole and is also the structure of each component of the story, that is, beats, scenes, chapters, acts, etc, and while the climax of the entire story might be big and obvious, the climax of a scene might be very simple.
- A Resolution, that is, an ending.
However you picture it, your characters choice should matter, and talking about values is one way to describe how it matters. We can all understand why going from safe to in danger matters, or why it matters if you've gone from loved to ostracised. If your characters choice doesn't change something that matters, it's not a scene-turning choice. Characters do make small choices, like choosing tea over coffee, which don't really impact the story but do characterise them or change something slightly so something else can happen. Include those, but build your scene around a bigger choice.
The idea that makes sense to me is the choice being the turning point of the scene, but Coyne, if I recall correctly, defines the turning point as being the final escalation that your character has to react to. That can be an action or it can be a revelation, a new piece of information. That is useful to think about, because you don't want your story to be all revelation or all action, but the map that works for me is one where I think of the choice as the turning point.
You could have a very short segment, like a sentence or a paragraph, that just has beginning, turn, and end. In longer scenes, it's generally the escalation part that expands the most, though some scenes will have important emotional climactic moments which require more space. You can create a cliffhanger by ending the scene immediately before or after your hero makes their decision known, leaving the climax and resolution unfulfilled, so we're waiting for them.
