The Novel Formula

Sometimes you have to break the rules before you can learn them

Welcome to September at the Writing Retreat! This month, I’m writing about novel templates. Love them or hate them? It’s a controversial subject among writers.

This month I’m writing about one of the aspects of writing fiction that I’m most conflicted over: plot structure. There’s a big part of me that wants to hate the idea of a three-act form that pre-determines how every story has to be told — even more so, the beat sheets that aim to micro-manage our imagination to the extent of prescribing the contents of every single chapter in a novel. But I’m not so avant-garde in my tastes that I can sit patiently through a story so experimental that it doesn’t follow some kind of structure. Despite five years of studying modernist fiction in grad school, when I read for pleasure I quickly lose interest in meandering or directionless plots, no matter how stunning the prose. So I’ve thought a good deal about how much I should let any novel templates influence the project I’m working on right now.

There are many writers who take umbrage with the “rules” of plot structure. It’s natural to rebel against any boundaries placed on our creativity. People who are considering investing money in our work (such as publishers), on the other hand, want to see the hallmarks of a successful product in terms as unambiguous as possible. This isn’t as simple as creativity vs profit, though. Of course, we don’t want to believe that the great stories that have captured our imagination can be boiled down to something so cold and artificial as a beat sheet. But just because we don’t want to believe it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Like any writer who has been to a workshop or two, I’ve seen instructors demonstrate how my favourite stories do seem to adhere (more or less) to a time-tested shape. As proponents of the three-act structure will point out, the fact that this shape has been around for so long suggests that it’s somehow encoded in the human DNA.

As it happens, that line of reasoning doesn’t work for me. It’s the same one that apparently justifies gender roles—just because it’s all we’ve ever known, we assume that it’s inevitable. And like gender roles, I’ve a strong suspicion that the three-act structure will turn out to have its origins in the history of human culture. Of course, the cultural origins of the three-act structure doesn’t mean that we can’t find meaning and satisfaction in it—quite the opposite. But it does suggest that there’s always room for innovation, albeit perhaps on a microscopic scale.

The easy answer, of course, is that we need to find a balance. Use templates to the extent that they’re helpful, but not to the point where they’re stifling. They should be working in service of the story, not the other way around.

When the story serves the template, you end up with novels that are cringe-worthy in their predictability — you can literally spot the beats as they came. I’ve read plenty like it, and even spotted a badly-disguised “beat” in some better books too. You can see the writer inserting conflict just because conflict is required, not because it makes the story better. These stories tend to coincide with cliched characters who are there to perform a role in the story, not to exist as whole individuals.

In my experience, conventions work best for us when we twist them around, play with them or interrogate them. Throwing them out of the window might feel good, but aside from the risk that you’ll leave your reader completely at sea in the anarchic environment you’ve created, it doesn’t help us understand what it was about those conventions that made them so tyrannical in the first place. Genre bending can be a productive way to play with the rules while retaining some credibility. Experimenting with different chronologies can add some spice to the mix as well, as long as there’s a good reason for doing so.

So, finding balance. The advice is easy to give but harder to implement. How do we find that balance? How do we know if a story (no matter how much we like it ourselves) is compelling to a reader? And if that all-important structure is so ingrained in our psychology that we crave it in every story we read, why do we need a beat sheet to help us write it into our own? Can’t we re-create those shapely arcs for our characters by instinct?

It comes down to knowing yourself as a writer: more specifically, figuring out what your tendencies are in order to correct for them. Are you prone to extended flights of fancy which leave your readers wondering if a plot will ever materialise? Or do your stories come out more on the predictable side?

For me, it’s the latter. I don’t start my stories with a beat sheet because for me, breaking out of the box is harder than breaking in. In other words, my brain seems to have a much harder time coming up with ideas than applying structure to them. I’m a natural planner and my imagination seems to be wired to impose restrictions rather than to run free. And then once the rules are in place, it’s hard for me to break them. So I have to start by coming up with as many ideas as I can and forcing myself to push past the obvious ones to find characters and situations that are more interesting. For that reason, once I find a character that generates conflict and chaos on the page, I often let them dictate some aspects of the plot to keep things from getting too dry.

I do, however, often compare my story to an appropriate template when (and only when) I feel like it has enough personality to hold its own. This can help me work out how to fix any moments in the story that don’t quite sit right — it’s a way of getting another pair of eyes on the project when it’s too early to consult an actual reader. A beat sheet, when it works best, can even prompt me to complicate things at times when my chapters are moving from A to B in too straightforward a manner.

But this is just what works for me. Other writers will find they need to reign in their characters sometimes, or go back and pick up on story-threads they’ve neglected. If your stories have been known to run away with you, starting with something more structured might save you a lot of time that you would otherwise have had to spend re-writing. Understanding how your imagination works takes a lot of writing experience, but it’s worth asking yourself if either tendency resonates with you. In NaNoWriMo terms, are you a plotter or a pantser? (And if those terms are unfamiliar, check out this post, which explains the difference between them.)

In the end, only you can decide how much “external” structure your writing project needs. If you’re trying to sell it in a commercial market, it will need more than if your goals are more personal. And it’s always worth researching the models that other writers use, if only to reject them for yourself. I just wouldn’t make this the first step in your writing journey. Sometimes you have to break the rules before you can learn them.