What is structure in novels?

I did a B.A. in English and French Literature and an M.A. in American Literature, which is not a boast, it’s to stress that I have read literary theory, taken apart complicated novels and thought I knew my stuff.

Then, last year I started the Author Accelerator book coaching course in fiction, which I cannot recommend enough-more on that in a later post, and I realised I knew very little about building a novel (or story for that matter). I enjoyed every second of sitting in English seminars throwing around theories on Samuel Beckett BUT we never discussed inciting incidents, the three act structure or how cause and effect from one scene to the next keeps a reader turning pages. Maybe it’s because we were reading literary novels, whichdon’t necessarily follow genre expectations(thank you Lidija Hilje for your great explanation of this), but still why wasn’t there more discussing of the formulas behind stories?

Yes, I think it was probably snobbery. Formula sounds basic doesn’t it? Unintelligent. Unimaginative. However, the argument that story structure only applies to genre fiction or is more appropriate for creative writing students, doesn’t allow for the idea that understanding structure helps us to appreciate stories and writing.

Anyway, the Author Accelerator course led me to read Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, which is an incredibly popular writing guide inspired by Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide Save the Cat!. I was so dismissive of this book. I looked down my nose at it, sure that it was writing snake oil. Then, as I read it I couldn’t believe how the 15 story ‘beats’ that Brody argues are in every novel worked for every example. This was a story recipe.

Except, there would be no Book Coaches if that were true. I understood this so fundamentally reading Jessica Brody. On one hand, I felt excited to see that the 15 beats in Save the Cat! worked as a sketch (or Blueprint!) for my favourite novels. Yet, it took nothing away from those novels to understand how the writer had constructed them. The magic of fiction writing is in the specific, not the formulaic. As humans we clearly enjoy certain elements in stories- it helps us to connect with them and see ourselves in them- but what is hard in writing is the specific. And the specific is the writer.

Now I can see how the formulaic allows us in to the story, and, crucially for book coaching, can help a writer to build their novel. The constraints of a structure help to provide the shelter for the specific. The writer and the reader are safe within the formula, so that they can then squish down into that green corduroy sofa of the specific. Yep, I took it too far…