What Works For Me: building a novel

I’ve been looking at the Hero’s Journey and Three Act and Four Act and Five Act structures and Save the Cat and Save the Dog and Save the Writer and the many potential ways to structure your writing. So many ways. Choice overload. Like walking down the cereal aisle in the grocery store. And because writers approach writing in different ways, what works for one may not work for another. But what if none of them actually works for you? What if you struggle every time you try to plug one in? You blame yourself. Why can’t you get the hang of it?

Maybe you’re trying too hard to make it work and it’s making you overthink things. Writing is an art and a craft. If you can’t let your writing brain get into a flow, it’s hard to really express what your writers feel in certain situations. Maybe you’re trying to stick too closely to the form.

Here’s what I do.

I follow three-act structure in a general way. One of the fathers of philosophy, the ancient bearded Greek, b. 384 BC, Aristotle, came up with it. Works pretty well for most novels. But I ONLY follow it in a general way. I don’t worry about any of the specific rules more modern writing books put on it.

What really directs my writing, what gives form to my story, are my plots and subplots. A book might have one main plot, but my books usually have several subplots that are related to the main plot in some way. I use these to structure my writing.

If I can figure out what these are in my rough draft, that gives me a general outline of what the novel is and how it will be structured. So if I’m writing a mystery, for example, and I know I want to add a romantic subplot and maybe a family subplot then when I’m writing my story I’m looking for ways to develop each plot, focusing of course on the main plot. In revision, I’m making the development, the steps of each plot, clearly foreshadow the next step. In a romantic subplot I’m showing the evolution of the relationship, ideally related to the solving of the mystery if my main plot is mystery. If I add a family plot, like a relationship between siblings or parents etc. then that is developed too. The progress of these stories propels the plot and also gives me the organization of my entire novel.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, foreshadowing is essential. However, I don’t have to come up with it all at once. Once I figure out what’s happening at the end of one plot, let’s say our romantic plot, then I go back and with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight, I construct my foreshadowing.

And that’s my advice for plot and structure. It works for me. It may or may not work for you. What I like about it though is that it gives you clear content to work with when you can identify the type of plots that are in your story.

Happy writing.

Brian