I’ve read over a dozen writing books. Some stick, some don’t. The two that stuck the most so far were Robert McKee’s seminal Story and its little brother The Story Grid from Shawn Coyne. What’s helpful about both is that they present you with a framework for writing books.
The framework helps you get started and keeps you within specific boundaries for your story idea, so you don’t lose your way halfway through your unfinished book. Of course, you can still lose your way, and you probably will, and I certainly have, but that’s less the blame of the framework than it is of our inability to stick to something for a book’s length of time.
So what’s the framework then?
Well, a lot of things. You’d really need to read the books. But at its core, it’s a fractal set of five components. I say fractal because these components exist at every level of the book. They exist across every scene, sequence, act, and across the entire book. And they are:
The inciting incident. What upsets the life of your protagonist.
Progressive complications. What makes life more difficult.
The crisis. When your protagonist has to make a decision.
The climax. The decision your protagonist then makes.
The resolution. How things have changed.
You may now say that you already knew about these. So did I. But there’s a large difference between knowing about something and putting them to good use in your book project. Have you ever explicitly defined these fractal components in your scenes? Exactly.
The framework continues. It splits a book into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ground-breaking stuff, I know, but each of these sections needs to have each of the five fractal components we spoke about above. So it’s not just your whole book that needs an inciting incident, progressive complications, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution. Your beginning, middle, and end need those too.
Except that the emphasis will differ. In the beginning, the emphasis lies on the inciting incident, which has to be powerful enough to strongly hook your reader into the book. In the middle, the emphasis lies on progressive complications that sustain your reader until they reach the end, where the emphasis lies on the crisis and the climax, which have to satisfy the reader in a unique and unexpected way.
Three sections with five components each. That’s fifteen scenes already, because you never want your scenes to do more than one thing. Your book will need way more than fifteen scenes. It may need fifty. But those fifteen are the most important ones.
The other scenes matter a lot, too. What both Story and The Story Grid emphasize is that every scene needs to turn. There has to be some kind of story value that changes by the end of the scene. Otherwise, it’s not a scene. For example:
indifference → interest
attraction → love
jealousy → hate
These values can go from positive to negative or the other way around, but they can also go from negative to double negative or positive to double positive. Something has to happen. If there’s no value shift in a scene, it’s too weak to keep in your book.
At least, that’s what Robert McKee and Shawn Coyne say. You can do whatever you want. And that’s the thing with books like these. You shouldn’t treat them as the gospel. They’re not meant to restrict you or impede your creativity. They’re meant to help. Give ideas. Lend structure to your writing. Don’t ever let them stop you from doing things as you please.
You do you, as long as you get there.
That's so insightful to know. Thank you for sharing!