Outlining vs.

Freewriting, Structure in Narrative Writing

By Bryan Lee Peterson

**The following essay can be found at mindofbryan.com, and heard on the

podcast “The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group.” All text is copyright 2008
Bryan Lee Peterson. If you want to use it, please give a citation back to the
original web site.**

Writers in general are a curious bunch of people, especially when it comes to

another writer's process. The curiosity is most often centered on outlining
versus freewriting, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not
all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.
We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum
between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some
are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an
individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when
writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing
process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some
early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline
and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two
words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.
My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing
and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to
start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just
the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own
life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing
television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75
pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and
he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline
and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle,
but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next
episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He
wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t
organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story,
and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he
wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue,
but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.
I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know
at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which
for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer
talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever
had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned
here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had
times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it
written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers
are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff
they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an
accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes
you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a
good writer.
Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get
worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens
without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait
until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I
have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the
process is much more on paper.
With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and
usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In
fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My
outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions
may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be
finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages,
my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that
to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five
comic pages. It blew him away.
I really consider this my first draft. My friends who are writers can’t even
make heads or tails out of it, but it all makes sense to me. When I write my
first attempt at a finished product, I don’t look at this as a rigid outline at all.
Sometimes scenes merge, sometimes they drop out, sometimes they move. I
keep a mind on it being an organic story with real characters who don’t
necessarily act as they were expected in the outline phase. This is a fear of
organic writers, that the outline will force them into a plot that is not natural.
If we remember that the outline is mutable, we lose that worry. We can keep
asking ourselves “what would this character do next?” but it might be
rephrased, “is this really what this character does next?”
I often hear the questions, “I have a middle and no beginning or end,
what do I do?” or “I have a world and a few scenes and characters, but I
don’t know what to do with them.” My suggestion is to arrange what you
have, either in a file or if you prefer to work more concretely, on note cards,
and try to write the scene in either direction. As that question, where does
this go? How do these link up? What does this character do next? What led to
this scene? When we come up with ideas for books, the first plot points we
come up with are the big ones. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example,
since it is one of the most universal cultural events that is worth analyzing.
I’m going to put money on the notion that Lucas didn’t get a great idea about
picking two robots out of a line-up, in particular one that can speak to
moisture vaporators, and the rest of the story came from that point. It is a
mundane scene that serves only to get the droids to Luke. I’m guessing
Lucas started with points like the Death Star blowing up and rescue of Leia,
and then filled in between.
Now, it seems to me that most beginning writers don’t think about
structure, and this is because they don’t teach structure in a lot of classes.
We all remember, probably, the rising structure of the story. We start with an
inciting incident, build it slowly, but with certain acceleration to a climax, and
then have a slight denouement. It looks something like one delta wave cycle,
or maybe a saw wave. I think this is one structure, and the most basic. It
works for short pieces, and in larger pieces, on a whole. If we look at a
famous story, the first Star Wars movie, we start with the inciting incident—
Leia’s ship being boarded. Then we drop to this small unwitting desert
planet, and rise to the inevitable big battle that blows up the Death Star.
There are other climax points, though. We rise in tension until Dantooine is
blown up. Then we hit the first climax, the fight in the prison block. The
escape is another little climax, and then we get to the big battle.
I think there are other structures. My next book is based on a spiral, or
more to the point, a fractal, and The Hidden is also. The first sequences in
these books are a microscale version of the rest of the book. In the Hidden
Malcolm wakes up, finds he is being attacked by a demon. He discovers what
is happening, has a brief confrontation and then dispatches the offender.
Then the story moves on, and the pattern repeats a couple times on an ever
grander scale. In Inside, my next book, Michael has an art showing, his sister
comes in with trouble, his parents come to visit, the protest happens outside,
the showing is infiltrated and attacked, with some innocent people caught in
the crossfire, and we are all left standing wondering why this has to happen.
This expands into a plot where similar events happen as the conflict grows
and the stakes get higher until the final climax of the book.
Let’s look at some common structures from various media, and see what
we can extract from them.
Screenwriters and filmmakers employ a couple different structures: acts
and reels. These are simultaneous structures, and I’m much more used to
thinking in acts.
In terms of reels, let’s imagine that every movie is 90-120 minutes. This
number works for most films. There is a physical limit to how much film we
can load onto a projector, and that’s something like 20 minutes. That is a
reel. I hear reels being used more in pitching a movie, and producers like to
hear very significant things about the first reel, explosions, car chases, a
body, whatever really gets the action going. Most acts wind up being two
reels in length. If we think about it, most movies have a very significant plot
point 15-20 minutes in. Maybe this is a good number for the average movie
viewer, the point where we make a decision whether this movie is worth
another hour or so, and so we put something major here, just to keep the
viewer interested. After this point, we’ve got them.I don’t think we can as
writers of novels think in reels, but there are lessons to be learned in the
reel. First, the inciting incident needs to come early. There is no better way to
lose readers than to bog them down with exposition early. Second, as a
smaller division of time, we can think about whether we have the right
balance of action, story, character development and plot for a given
breakdown of time or pages.
Let’s move on to acts.
There are almost invariably three acts to every screenplay. I suppose you
could make a case that Brazil or Fight Club have a fourth act tacked on, and
there might be others, but this is the exception to the rule. Acts can be
thought of in terms of action, or they can be thought of thematically, or you
can think about them as they apply to a character’s development. Thinking
about one will often lead you to the others, or you can think of them in
conjunction. If you want some support for the theory of a fractal story
structure, a film script has three acts, and larger stories that are written at
one time are most often trilogies.
There are basic standards for what each act does, however, and knowing
them gives us our story’s main structure. Act One is introduction. It
introduces the world, the characters, the relationships of those characters,
and the problem. Act two is complication. We put more obstacles in front of
our hero. Act three is resolution.
Once I have thought about those, I’ll come up with actions and themes to
lay over them.
So let’s look at our standard model, Star Wars, for some structural
analysis. In terms of on screen actions, the first act of Star Wars establishes
the entire series. Since we have a three-fold plot (Empire, Rebellion and
Force) we have three main story lines in each act. In act one, Leia gets
captured, which in this case represents both the Empire and Rebellion
storyline. The Force reaches out in the form of two droids who bring the
secret plans to Luke and Obiwan. We meet Han and Chewie, and we escape
from Tatooine. We end the act with Luke beginning his training in the Force,
and the destruction of Alderaan. I choose this point because it brings us to
see the larger conflict, back to the Rebellion and the Empire, and we see just
what is at stake. Up to this point, the conflict is hinted at, but not fully
elucidated. This keeps the viewer interested in something that was at the
time a very foreign idea, and through what is kind of dull in many respects,
even though it is necessary storytelling.
The first act is about foundation and problem. We establish all of the
characters, lay out the problem of the story, and set the characters on their
way. There are mechanical elements of the story, the plot, and there’s a
higher goal, theme. A free writer who has a basic story in their heads might
be able to write a three word outline, with a single word for each act, and
that might provide sufficient guidance and structure to move on. For
example, in terms of theme in the first act of Star Wars, I’d call it initiation.
The story is getting going, Luke is initiated into the Force, Han is brought into
the Rebellion, the viewer is being initiated into the universe. The viewer is a
very important consideration. Remember that in 1977, this kind of movie was
unheard of. If Lucas had moved too quickly over this part of the movie, the
viewer might have been turned off. Walls had to be broken down in order for
us to understand and care for these characters.
In terms of Character, I’ll argue that the whole series is about Luke. In this
act, Luke is isolated both geographically (or well, spatially) from the rest of
the universe, and mentally. He has no connection with the conflict, nor with
the Force.
Let’s not forget to mention that this act has a small climax in the escape
from Mos Eisely. It is a little climax, because we don’t want to blow our load
just yet, there is a lot more story to tell.
The second act is about complication. A simple mission, fly a couple of
people and a couple of droids somewhere, becomes a save our butt and
rescue the princess operation.
In the second act, the conflicts meet head to head as Luke and Han are
captured by the Death Star, infiltrate, rescue Leia, escape, and Obi-wan is
killed. There is a three part story here as well, Obi-wan disarms the Tractor
beams, Luke and Han save the princess, and the droids man the computers.
This is the action. Our second climax of the movie is the escape.
Thematically, we go much more dark in this act, as we find out how
ruthless the Empire is. Escape is the action, the theme is defiance of tyranny.
If the only hope is to get off the Death Star with the plans, success is the
only option.
In terms of Luke, the story is entanglement. He suddenly finds himself an
integral part of the struggle for the galaxy, a position he wanted to be in. He
also finds out how difficult it can be to be in this position. He has just grown a
little bit more into a man, and he gets a lot less whiney and becomes more
forceful (no pun intended). These are examples of how the character
develops.
The third act becomes conflict resolution and climax. The third act is
where the story turn from being captured and chased to the Rebellion going
on the offensive. The attack on the Death Star is planned.
Thematically, this act is about turning the tables around. We see that the
Rebellion is capable and formidable, and the antithesis of the Empire in every
way.
For Luke, he grows from erstwhile farm hand turned adventurer into a
warrior.
When we write, our first hints of story are often world, character, or
conflict. Thinking about this seedling in three parts can definitely give an
early bit of structure that won’t get in the way of the organic writer, and is a
first step towards the outline for the structure writer. I believe that this three
act structure can be applied to nearly any book, film, game, or story. For the
beginning writer, thinking about this is not second nature. I was never taught
structure like this in college. We spent more time on character, dialogue,
setting, all important things, but in the ten week terms we had, we never got
into anything larger than short stories, and so we talked about larger scale
structures. I had to learn this from screenwriting books and apply it to long
form writing. Thinking in terms of these kinds of acts will help a story jump
from a directionless and shapeless story to a dynamic tale. Also, for
somebody about to take on their first project of length, knowing this simple
shape might help the book feel shorter just by way of being a map to the
end.
Now that you know this structure, as you watch movies, you’ll be able to
pick up on the moments that make up the three acts.
Now, I’m not saying that we need to be a slave to three acts in our books
like a writer is in a screenplay. Turn in a book with five acts, and a publisher
will judge it on its own merit. Turn in a screenplay with five acts and a
producer will throw you out of the office as an amateur. What is most
important to this line of thinking is that each act starts in one place, goes
someplace else, and ends on a significant turning point event. Sometimes an
understanding of this can be just what a writer needs to go ahead and write
a book.
To put this in terms of something I’m writing now, Inside, I’m not sure how
many acts I have in any of the three books. I’m guessing it is more like four
rather than three. They are each designed with a rise in action to a specific
point at which the conflict is returned to a baseline point, and it all begins
anew, and as I outlined, I always had the next major plot event in mind. That
was the direction I wrote in. I’m not somebody who can start in the middle
and work out. I always start at the beginning and work to the end. It’s just
my way.
We can look at other structures from other Mediums as well when we
think about giving structure to our pieces. If you have an idea and you have
no idea of how to structure it, we can think about things in acts. Giving just
this much structure might give the organic writer some better concept of
how to outline without interfering with their organic process. One of my
degrees is in theatre, and I’m quite glad I did it, because the intense work of
analyzing character and creating movements from words on a page is what
gave me a good understanding of character, voice and motivation.
Theatre has a number of structures, from Beats to acts. A beat is the
smallest structural unit of theatre. The story goes that when modern acting
method was brought over to England and the United States by Stanislavski,
he wanted to say “bit” but in his thick Russian, it came out as “Beat” and the
term stuck. I believe this is a significant structural element that can be used
in constructing a book as well. If we write a conversation, any kind of
dialogue, we can think of turning points. Any turning point represents a beat.
These points can be moments where advantage is gained or lost, information
is imparted, a character loses it, or calms down. The entry of a new character
almost always signifies a beat change, as does the exit.
When we look at a conversation, we should look at beats, and if things
feel aimless, often that is a sign that we wrote a conversation without
thinking about the structure of it, likely we spouted a lot of information
without thinking about what it meant to either of the characters that said it.
Exposition is tough, especially when you have a lot of it, and you feel like you
have two people just spouting it off without any real reason for it. We can
change that by giving them a reason to say it, give each of them a stake in
it. Every beat has a beginning, and a turn. These are my terms, so you might
not find them in any other places. Beats can be long or short. The
centerpiece of a beat is a motivation, which literally comes down to what is
this character trying to accomplish right now? When the answer to that
question changes, you have a new beat. These beats are what give a story
momentum and direction.
If you look at a conversation, and it feels flat, it is probably worth looking
at it, and breaking it down to points where the conversation turns. If it
doesn’t turn, or more importantly, turn enough times, it may not be an
important conversation, and maybe you could do without it. If there is crucial
plot information, you’re probably going to have to work it, to find points
where significant development can happen. We as writers can very easily get
lost in information, and thinking about what has to make it to the page to get
the plot moving, while forgetting about developing our characters for a
scene. Thinking about breaking these scenes into beats is maybe the best
way to inject that development back in.
Sometimes, a beat breaks with a pause. You know that five minute lull?
That is a break in a beat where the author hasn’t written the next beat yet,
and that can be a great way to develop a character. If there are pauses while
nothing happens, it can indicate contemplation, boredom, any number of
isms that make a character tick. Somebody who is socially awkward might let
this pauses drop without thinking about it, others may use it as a tool to
force the other character into saying something in the uncomfortable silence.
When you string together enough beats, you get a scene. Some plays
have scenes, and some don’t. Some just have action for an act and then
more for another act, and one of the main elements that will dictate this is
setting. One setting, one scene is often the rule. Shakespeare moves things
around quite a bit, and so he writes scenes. In Waiting for Godot, Becket has
a tree as a setting, and there are no breaks in action, though there are a lot
of beats. Scenes are very much like what we have in our books, screenplays
or other writing projects. They represent fairly major actions and movements
of the story, and may be spelled out, or may be interpreted by the director.
Scenes are more widely used at this point in film and books, but scenes are
used extensively in theatre with origins before the mid 20th century.
Common act divisions in theatre are two act, three act, and five act. In a
two act play, we look for dichotomy, an equality to the acts in terms of action
and emotion. There should be a rise and a fall if the play is a tragedy, or a
set-up and denouement if it is a comedy. One of the most perplexing
examples of the two act structure is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. In
it, two men stand by a tree waiting for Godot to arrive, and just when you
think they must be the two lowest men on the world’s totem pole, two more
men arrive, one a slave, and you find just how low we can go. In the second
act, the same thing happens. Two acts, if they are sufficient, can make a
large work, but I’m not sure I could make a novel out of two acts. I think this
might be a structural experiment for a novella.
 I’ve covered three act structure in the section on film structure. Let’s
move straight to a five act structure. The most prominent examples of a five
act structure are the plays of William Shakespeare. Five acts, each with
multiple scenes, make for a very long play, but in Shakespeare’s time,
theatre was an afternoon event that took advantage of daylight. The theatre,
like now, would make money based on sales of seats, but also the
groundlings selling refreshments, and so long shows meant more money.
There is a very strong structure in this that makes a lot of sense for all forms
of writing. Since I have just written a story based on Hamlet, I’ll use that
work as an example. The basic breakdowns and title of the acts are coined
by Gustav Freytag, a 19th century critic. He has created this graphic to help
you think about this structure.

(Image is from wikipedia.)

The first act is exposition. Normally we associate exposition with heavy-

handed telling, and not showing. In the case of Hamlet, there is a long bit of
history to learn, a lot of characters and plots at work, a lot of relationships to
establish, and actions are already setting themselves in motion. As you can
see this isn’t all about exposition in the modern sense of the word, plots are
moving forward even as we look backward. In act I of Hamlet, we are first
confronted with wary guards who see the ghost of Hamlet’s father. We then
see Claudius and Gertrude in a procession, moving forward in their lives,
while Hamlet is held back with grief. Hamlet is then told by the guards and
friend about seeing his father’s ghost. We get a brief scene of Polonius
doddering about his son going to college, and beginning the plot to play
matchmaker between his daughter Ophelia and Hamlet. Hamlet spends a
night on the guard and meets with his father’s ghost, who reveals his murder
to the prince, but Hamlet is unsure of the truth of the ghost.
Act two is defined as Rising Action. The stakes go up, the conflict
becomes more complicated, obstacles fall in the path of the hero. This is the
act where the going gets tough. In Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius try to
avert war with Norway. Hamlet decides to feign madness to keep his
intentions secret. In response, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are called to
help Claudius and Gertrude see through the ruse.
Act three is the climax or the turning point. I believe that Freytag had a
different perspective on climax than we do in a modern sense of the word.
Turning Point is the better term in a modern context. While in act two, Hamlet
seeks confirmation of what the ghost says, in act three, the tip of the
pyramid, the action gains momentum, and the inevitable downward fall
begins. In this act, Ophelia is sent to court Hamlet, a troupe of players
arrives, and Hamlet lays out his trap. The turning point of the whole play is
when Claudius sees the play, and his reaction confirms the ghost’s story. If
we want to think of a similar act in a comedy, we can think of Much Ado
about Nothing, where Claudio falsely accuses Hero of having slept around. At
this turning point, this play could very easily have become a tragedy. The
whole event is kind of like the part of the date movie where the two people
who are falling in love have the fight and break up and feel miserable. If
Shakespeare had felt like it, he could have made a very dark little story out
of it, but instead we have a wedding at the end.
In act 4, the action falls. When we say falls, we don’t mean slows down,
draws to a close, anything like that. In classical terms, rise means an
elevation in the tone of a story. It bears some relation to why Dante’s Divine
Comedy is called a comedy. It isn’t because it is funny. It’s because the
general motion of the story is upward both spiritually (going from the
condemned to the blessed) and metaphysically (Hell is down, Heaven is up).
In the case of Hamlet, the action is down. Polonius is killed behind the
curtain, Ophelia goes mad and drowns, and Hamlet is judged to be insane
and sent off to England to be killed, with his friends there to make sure it
happens.
Act five is resolution. Hamlet returns, having been attacked by pirates,
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dispatched. We find out about Ophelia’s
funeral, and Hamlet is welcomed back to court. Claudius sets up the duel,
and fixes it with poison when is then shared around to all the most important
people in court. Then everybody fated to die does so.
This is a very rough overview. I hope you can see how the action of the
play fits into the structure. For a beginning writer, what often happens is that
you have a character, or a plot, but halfway though you get lost, and the
story never gets completed. If you look at the story that you have, and think
about it in terms of these five acts, or four or three, as in the other sections,
you have an advantage to getting it done. So going into writing your project,
or maybe into Nanowrimo, you may have an idea of your character and your
conflict. You introduce your conflict in the first act. If you just start writing
here hoping you will be able to work it out as you go, you may lose your way.
Instead, before you set down any words, give it some thought. It is likely
that you can come up with several plot points that fit one of these acts, and
give you a quick throughline to your story. I’m working on a story right now
that is set in a post-apocalypse Boston. It’s a short story, so the acts may
simply become scenes, but who knows at this point. The story is kind of
nascent, and I’d like it to be larger. My character is a reporter who is told to
go maybe to New York to report on something. In act one, she gets her
assignment, and suits up. In act two, she meets mushroom farmers in the big
dig tunnels. They are a perfect environment for mushrooms, and it is after
the apocalypse, so they need some survival niche. As it turns out, they are
actually cannibals, and Pickman, a survival artist who lives alone above
ground, rescues her. In act three, Pickman brings her to his studio. He paints
very unusual demons. Suddenly, she sees movement. He gets his guns, and
kills a creature that is his next painting. I know, very Lovecraftian, but I’m
intending to use it as a fun reference, not quite a main story point, and New
England’s apocalypse is essentially an old sin and witchcraft gone amok kind
of apocalypse. In act four, it turns out he needs a mate as any good
survivalist does, and she’s tops on his list. She must escape from him, but he
has all the guns. In act five she escapes and finds her assignment.
This is my first line of thinking on this story, and it isn’t great, but it is a
structure I could write, and is further along than I was five minutes ago. In
fact, I could see this as a very episodic story, and so there will likely be many
of these bits as she pursues her main story, and so maybe this is just the
first part of a much larger story. Or I could take it in any number of direction.
Point is, I got here by thinking of some events in relation to overall points in
the structure. Next we’ll look at a teleplay four act structure, and I might
finish off with Aristotle’s Poetics just for the fun of it.
On television, the one-hour drama is based on a four act structure. These
acts are defined by the commercial breaks in between them, and usually end
on a cliffhanger. The series I am working on now started off life as a hour
long television drama pitch, and I did quite a bit of analysis of current shows
at the time. Your average television scene is two minutes. If you time it,
you’ll almost always get a scene break at every two minute mark. The first
and second act have about eight scenes each, the third will have six, and the
fourth will have ten. I’m sure there’s some marketing reason for this, more so
than a writing choice reason. In television, you have to have your four to five
commercial breaks.
I think this structure is useful in writing narratives of all sorts. In act one,
the protagonist becomes aware of the problem. In act two, the protagonist
becomes entangled, and this complicates the problem. In act three, the
protagonist tries to solve the problem, and fails, which usually raises the
stakes in some way. In act four, the protagonist must overcome all of this to
solve the problem.
This formula is useful, but also exactly what I don’t like with some
television shows. I’ll pick on House since it is very popular right now. At first, I
really enjoyed this show. The characters were interesting, House was as
sardonic as I am, the stakes in the story were very real to the characters in
the story. On the other hand, the stories became so formulaic that I could
almost set my watch to the patient’s seizures and the mention of lupus. I
don’t watch it anymore, but my wife does, so I’m going to flip on my DVR,
and as I veg out, I’ll make some plot notes. Then we can go back and do
some analysis.

House notes

Teaser
The patient wakes up on the floor of his front hall with paramedics breaking
in, when he comes to, he finds he is outside his house. He panics, punches
one and runs back in.

Act 1
Scene 1: Getting the case at the hospital. Patient has headaches, seizures,
agoraphobia. Discussion with Cutty in the hall. Some results from preliminary
scans.
Scene 2: Going to patient’s house. Patient is locked in. won’t let people in.
Scene 3: Patient on bed, the doctors discuss taking him to the hospital, but
he won’t go.
Scene 4: At hospital, House talking about kissing Cutty.
Scene 5: Discussion at the patient’s house.
Scene 6: House brings people to invade the shut-in’s house, in order to
provoke a seizure, right on time for the commercial break.

Act 2:
Scene 1: At patient’s house. There is some sort of colon blockage. He won’t
leave the house. House tells him that he will find a surgeon that will perform
surgery in his home.
Scene 2: Discussion in the hall. House wants to put him under, slip him to the
hospital and have him back before he wakes up. Ethical dilemma.
Scene 3: They have set up a surgery, and put him under.
Scene 4: Lunch with Cutty and the doc that she’s actually dating. They talk
about her relationship with House.
Scene 5: Cutty finds out about the fake surgery. She won’t let the patient
leave the hospital to take him back home before he wakes up, there is too
much risk of post-op complications.
Scene 6: Patient wakes up, realizes he isn’t at home. Cue seizures.

Act 3:
Scene 1: Patient, now back home, is suing. Cutty removes the team from the
case.
Scene 2: Discussion of whether House and Cutty’s relationship is in the way
of the case.
Scene 3: One of the doctors apologizes to the patient.
Scene 4: House and Cutty’s boyfriend talk about the relationship with Cutty.
Scene 5: House on phone talking about surgery in house.
Scene 6: Surgery at home. Gas from his intestine ignites. They are under
supervision of the patient’s lawyer.
Scene 7: Docs at home eating take-out. Cue trouble: Patient’s legs are numb.

Act 4:
Scene 1: Stable patient. Diagnosing. Organic toxins? He’s OCD. Cleans his
tub with ammonia and bleach. Chlorine poisoning.
Scene 2: At hospital talking about a pacemaker. And the relationship.
Scene 3: House on the phone. The patient is getting worse. They are too
late. House says to give him morphine, and hope for whatever may happen.

(Here we have an extra commercial break, but it isn’t the break of a new act,
merely a way to make more money. )

Scene 4: Looking at xray, House cuts open the patient’s hip, finds metal in
hip from a bullet that had hit him years ago. Talk about rose petals and
happiness. He’s pretending he’s happy by shutting himself in.
Scene 5: 2 docs talk about relationship.
Scene 6: House plays guitar at home. Mosquito bite.
Scene 7: Patient leaves home because of House’s accusations of him
shutting himself in to avoid conflict due to fear brought on by his mother.
House visits Cutty, but can’t bring himself to knock on the door.

Maybe you can piece together the story from that. Sometimes my notes
for scenes are only intelligible by me.
So let’s look at this in terms of structure. In act 1 we introduce the
problems, both the patient, and that House is macking on Cutty, which is not
good news for her relationship with her actual boyfriend. As this is a serial
program, this introduces the episode’s problem, but gives us the series
storyline of House getting it on with Cutty despite objections from both to the
contrary. We have a minor climax, or crisis in the last scene to hold us
through the commercial break.
In Act 2, we spend a lot of time diagnosing the problem, performing a
surgery, and complicating the relationship issues. Isn’t it funny how I can
describe any episode of House in one generalized description? Here we ramp
up the level a bit, but things are kind of moving along.
In act 3 we learn that the problem is persistent, and often something they
did in act 2 has compromised treatment. We also raise the stakes on the
relationship game, finding out the kiss wasn’t so innocent. Another climax at
the end of this act, and our graph of structure kind of looks like a hill with
speedbumps.
Act 4 resolves everything for the patient, but leaves the story arc open-
ended.
Now let’s look at any story that you might have. When you’re a beginning
writer, you probably have a mess of a story in front of you. I’m a fan of
putting in the actual work in physical writing before setting out, and a
beginning writer might feel self-conscious about doing this. Real writers don’t
outline like this, do they? It all just comes out of their heads and onto the
page and its done, right? I should be able to do it that way too, and all of that
pre-writing seems like a lot of work when I should just be getting onto the
book.
Let me assure you that plenty of writers do this pre-writing, and for some
of us, we have done it in the past, and now we do it all in our heads, which is
the art of making it look easy.
So, humor me and do it. Take out a piece of paper and write your
beginning on it at the top, or on the left if you want to make it a timeline, or
best yet, write it on a notecard, and keep a stack ready.
You have a character, a conflict, a beginning, an end, and a few points in
the middle. The first thing to look at is putting these things into a structure.
Is your beginning really the inciting incident of the story? Yes? Good, set that
down. Do your other points look like climax points, or are they bits of story
that lead to climax points? Are there points where the relative power or
success of your protagonist and antagonist changes? There probably should
be, people like an underdog and a come from behind win. Okay, put those
climax points on new cards, or on your paper.
Do these look like a logical sequence? Does a lot happen in the front half
of the book, and not as much in the back? What has to come before other
events? Does each event seem like an elevation of the conflict? Spending
this time right now, before a word is set down is worth the effort. Imagine
writing 90,000 words and then realizing that if you had done this now, you
would have turned left instead of right at 25,000 and saved yourself all of
that writing that will likely never get used. Foresight is having a plan, not
seeing just around the corner. I believe that just about every writer who
writes without an outline has at least this much planned out before setting
down, even if the story ultimately doesn’t head in that direction.
A four act structure has four climaxes, each a complication of the plot and
each larger than the last one. This is a simplification of a well-worn structure,
but it leads to a structure that can be expanded. I have done some
conversion of four act teleplays that I wrote years back into prose, and they
wind up being novella length, even with expansion. But if I inserted two or
three extra acts, they would easily be a novel. The difficulty is in taking a
story as concise as a television episode, and adding things that are critical to
the plot, without changing the overall story, because anything you add must
be absolutely relevant. A reader can see padding from a mile away. As a
writer part of your job is to trim the fat, not add to it.
If you want to write a novel in four acts, as I said before, a TV script has
enough scenes to be a novella, but a story can be infinitely long, all that
matters is making choices of what stays in and what doesn’t. We can add
scenes to our House example that would round out the story quite a bit, and
not be irrelevant at all. We can see Cutty thinking about the incident with
House. We can have her and her boyfriend arguing about it. Then we have
the boyfriend’s reaction. We don’t really see House talking about that
incident, or his subconscious desires for a relationship. In the TV series, the
story of the relationship plays out slowly, as we move from patient to patient,
and we think for an hour that the story is all bout that patient, but over time
we realize the story is about House, and that’s what keeps us coming back.
If we wanted to make a book of this one episode, the balance would
change. You notice we only get three or four scenes where we deal with
House’s relationships, and I’ve already doubled that number without much
thought. As we continue to put flesh on that story, the patient becomes more
and more of a prop, a symbol, or a foil. It is up to the writer to make the
patient’s plot influence the plot of House’s relationships. Often that means
that the patient sees what is going on, cuts through the subtext and says it
plainly. That’s not original, so as an author, you’d have to write incredibly
detailed and quirky characters to carry a less than original plot.
There is the Scott McCloud principle of points in a story to think about. He
is a comic writer that has done a lot of theorizing of plot and technique in
comic books. He has or had a story on his site, (scottmccloud.com) where
you can put in a number between 1 and 60 and get the same story in a
different number of panels. The same thing happens with writing a book. We
pick what gets seen and what doesn’t, what is significant and what isn’t.
Aristotle’s poetics is the earliest document I’m aware of that covers literary
structure. Yes, this is Aristotle the philosopher and not an Aristotle imposter.
There are a few forms of Greek drama to be aware of. We are most conscious
of the tragedies, what evolved into theatre. There were also comical plays
that were shorter that would show along with the tragedies to lighten the
mood. It was only later that comedies became plays of their own, largely
under the playwright Aristophanes. Aristotle also used philosophic dialogs
which were much more like closet dramas, an exercise in academics that
isn’t meant to be performed so much as be an instructional tool.
The tragedies were a high form of drama that were both a matter of
competition between playwrights and their wealthy patrons as they were a
near religious experience. I can go into plenty of detail on the evolution of
drama under the Greeks, but as a brief foray, the term scene comes from the
background setting called the skene, the term deus ex machina comes from
a machine that would be used to lift an actor over the skene dressed as a
god to fix everything (I know, if somebody asks if you are a god, you say
“yes”). Thespis was the first actor to step out of the chorus and deliver a solo
line, giving us the term thespian, thereby enabling us to fool conservative
politicians whose daughters are actors.
Aristotle gave us a seminal work called Aesthetics, in which he attempts
to categorize writing into genres, first in Poetics and Rhetoric, then dividing
Poetics into epos (epic poetry), lyrical poetry, and tragedy. In some ways this
is kind of similar to novels, short stories, and drama, but this is an
oversimplification. It is interesting to see how he identifies so many elements
of story in this work, any one of which could be an issue of this blog/podcast,
including plot, character, reversals, spectacle, diction, and action. I think his
thought on character are a very good basic understanding for a writer,
absolutely still applicable today to any fictional writing.
 In a first nod to structure, he describes every plot as having a beginning,
middle and end. This may be a primitive version of the three act structure, or
it may be the well, duh part of the work.
What I really want to cover here is his rules for tragedy. His thinking and
analysis is really quite remarkable for a man looking at literature in such a
primitive state of development.
According to Aristotle, “the structure of the best tragedy should be not
simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity–
for that is peculiar to this form of art.” The hero suffers a reversal of fortune
that is the result of a tragic flaw. His definition of flaw isn’t quite what we
think of as a tragic flaw, his word, “Hamartia”, translates more to “missing
the mark”. There are some qualifications on this flaw that aren’t really
relevant in modern times, so I won’t delve too far into them, but as an
example, if the character isn’t noble, or the reversal of fortune happens
because of social forces, this disqualifies the work as a tragedy. These rules
certainly applied in the dramatic competitions of Aristotle’s times, but would
disqualify such works as Death of a Salesman.
Aristotle defined the unities, rules for tragedies. These are the rules that
delineate whether a tragedy qualifies as Aristotelian or not. They are:
1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows,
with no or few subplots.
2. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and
should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent
more than one place.
3. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more
than 24 hours.
You’ll notice right away that these cover some of our basic questions,
what, where and when.
Let’s look at action more closely. First, he was keen enough to tell us to
stick to the plot, that subplots were a distraction. He also was keen enough
to recognize a sub-plot. In drama, where time, measured in human terms of
how long an actor or audience member can go between relieving the
bladder, is a consideration. Remember, the actors had large costumes and
masks. So, stay focused. In a novel where you have unlimited pages, this is
still important, but the story can be much larger.
When we think about place, what he describes is having one setting, and
one setting only. News can come from off the stage by messengers, but the
story must take place in one location. This forces us to go deeply into the
character’s head for development and analysis, and not get distracted by
action. Action supports character, never supplants it.
And finally time. You have a character with everything in the world going
for him, and then it all crashes down within 24 hours, or thereabouts. This
concentrates the character development and catharsis (which is yet another
term he coined in this work).
Of course, once these rules were defined, others immediately broke them,
and literature continued to evolve and develop. The Aristotelian rules were
never more in effect than in the 17th century, when a fresh copy of them
was translated, and it given a certain neo-classicism element of the
enlightenment, people started adhering to the unities like nobody had
before, even in Aristotle’s time.
Still, an interesting set of structures to think about, and an interesting
challenge to your abilities. Take from it what you will.
So what can I give you about all of this? Everything I write has a different
structure and a different process, a way of thinking that is unique unto itself.
No one structure can be used for everything, but everything has some kind
of structure.
I like to think of novels in terms of an indefinite number of acts. As I am in
my freest writing mode, I tend to look at major events, and write myself
towards the next act goal. Some day I’d like to tackle a five-act Elizabethan
style play, but that’s a way’s off into the future, I think. For right now, I’ll
stick to books.
For a beginning writer, I hope that this small amount of thought can give
you a little more fortitude to get through your project. I’ll cover outlining
styles at some point, but I have never really seen anybody’s outlines but my
own. Writers aren’t very prone to revealing their very early work on a story
since it pales in comparison to the final product. Maybe they seem to think
this will undermine them in the mind of the reader.
My point in all this description of acts is to think about the major
movements of the work, and make sure there are several, there is a logical
flow through them, with reversals and rises and falls. If you have to divide a
book up, you’ll want to plan these points to coincide with act movements,
but there is a strategy to it.
As I plan out a narrative, acts are my major units, and I’ll look at the
overall shape to plan out how the story will progress. I look at whether the
action generally rises or falls, or if it is a bumpy progression. Any of those is
sufficient as a structure to tell a story, I don’t limit myself to following any
classical model unless it is by design, but straying from the models should be
done consciously.
I have a lot of time at work to listen to podcast books, and one I am
currently listening to is J.C. Huthins 7th Son trilogy. I listened to the first book
and put it down because it is a long story, and too much of anything can be a
bad thing. I think the story is good, well conceived, and most factors I
consider when judging a book were very good, though there was something
that lingered in my mind as unsatisfying about the first book. It took me a
while to put my finger on it. Story was good, characters were rich and
colorful, the villain was a solid villain, the story has hooks, but there was
something lacking. Then I realized that the first book isn’t the first book at
all. It’s the first act. There is a single distinct rise, a single distinct climax, no
reversal, and no resolution.
7th Son in its three parts is a long book in its totality, and it makes up for
it when you get into book two, but if I were J.C.’s editor (and he probably
didn’t have an editor when he recorded it), I would have put the end of the
first book at chapter nine or so in book two, leave the audience with a
cliffhanger, and probably developed a bit more of a turning point early in
book one to give it a full three acts. As it stands, book one feels like an
overdeveloped short story.
This is not to denigrate the work as it stands. The stopping point of the
first book is a choice, and being a podcaster myself, I know that it is a lot of
work to get these things out, and so when J.C. got to his first climax, it was a
probably good point to take a break and coordinate the marketing strategy
for book two. It is more logical than the place I chose to take a break in that
context, and it really is a killer book.
But I’ll pull in an example of why structure is important from another
branch of entertainment. The new Rachael Yamagata album is a double-disk
album that chose a different structure than the usual album. Now I knew
Rachael when she was in Chicago, and spent many hours at her old band’s
shows, so as a solo artist, I got on her bandwagon pretty early. I even have a
demo that is so early it was burned on her home computer and has a black
permanent marker cover. Her first Ep and album have a great structure to
them, they go from her slower darker moodier stuff to rockers, and it gives
every song a very individual feel, and makes listening a series of emotional
movements. When you put together an album, you arrange songs in an order
to accomplish this. On her double disk, she put all of the slow moody stuff on
one disk, and the rockers on the second disk. This means that one is
consistently upbeat and the other a consistent downer. The net result is that
the first disk feels like one really long song, and I couldn’t hum a melody
from any one of them, even though individually, they are as strong as any
work she has put out.
Same thing happened with Stabbing Westward’s Darkest Days album.
This is another band I knew back in the day. The songs were arranged in four
movements, and the slow dark part of the album is a long and dull blur.
What these lack is the highs and lows. As an experience, they are
consistent, and it doesn’t matter how high and intense they are on average,
we’ll still become familiar with the level, and familiarity really does breed
contempt. This is also the reason that Bergman films are fairly unpalatable to
American audiences. They are just long and dull no matter how artistic they
may be.
So as I look at my act structure, change is my friend, consistency in
narrative is the enemy. Remember this is a shape, it is a story arc, not a flat.
Think about sailing around the world with Magellan, a story in and of itself.
The wind is never consistent, but sailors in the doldrums do nothing and get
bored, but the inconsistency of wind and weather always keeps them busy.