structure

So I’ve gotten back into working on my fantasy story, and it’s got me thinking about how to structure things.

The first book I ever wrote used the structure I learned from screenplays and from film school. There’s a bit of variation on this, but generally it’s a three act structure. I was specifically taught an eight sequence method that broke down roughly this way:

1. First sequence introduces the main character and gets us to the problem
2. Second sequence takes the main character “into another world.” This would be where Dorothy lands in Oz and realizes she’s not in Kansas, etc…
3. Third sequence is the first quarter of act two. To tell the truth, I don’t really recall what the milestones are of act two so much, just that there are four sequences therein.
4. The midpoint is the end of sequence four, and somewhere in the latter half there’s something I remember being called the “turn or burn” moment. I think this was basically the moment where the protagonist is totally committed to seeing things through (or, I guess, walking away, but that’s not really how most film stories work).
5. The last bit of act two, sequence six, is, as I recall, the “dark night of the soul” when the bad guy has the upper hand and all is lost and whatnot. This is after Obi Wan gets killed in A New Hope (I think).

I’m probably doing this all a disservice. The book was by Paul Gulino, and while I am doing a bad job of describing it, I’ve internalized a lot of the structure in it. It’s pretty good.

For a movie.

But this is a book (or a series of books), and I’m having a tough time figuring out how to structure it.

My initial thought was to do a rough sort of 3 act sequence outline for each POV character and then just kind of toss them together. When I attempt that, though, I end up having to kill time with some characters who have full arcs over the course of the full story but not so much in the first book.

Then there’s the approach of creating one overarching structure, but that kind of falls apart as I fall into the habit of writing it like a script. I’ve become so good at taking that structure and making it what I learned to make it that it’s difficult to get past about 30,000 words. This book wants to be more like three times that, so that’s a problem.

Right now I’m doing a lot of free writing and scene writing that I know I want to be in there, but don’t know how it’ll all fit together.

I need a Maxwell Perkins.

And speaking of Thomas Wolfe, I’ve also considered taking up one of his books and using it as a device for telling my own story. I’ve never read any of his work aside from a short story, but I know that he was from Asheville and wrote a book that made him a bit of an Asheville pariah.

So maybe I get that book, read and analyze, and also use it to frame my own experiences in Asheville becoming a pariah and learning you can’t go home again. Not sure if that’s a book or a blog idea.

Kind of a mopey, literary, Appalachian Julie and Julia.