Story structure and plot are not the same thing. They’re like climate and weather, where climate is what you expect and weather is what you get. Plot is what happens in your particular story. Fido the dog steals kibble from Gaius the cat, then Gaius gets his revenge by turning the clothes dryer into a trap using beef jerky as bait. Structure, meanwhile, is the shape of the story: the inciting incident, ensuing conflict, final battle, and resolution.
But plot is more than just a sequence of events. “The clouds rolled in, it rained for two hours, and then the sun came back out” isn’t a plot even though it has a three-act structure. You need characters for a plot. And characters have to do things to drive the plot forward. It’s not good enough to stick Cletus out in the field and have him just stand there and get drenched.
Characters have problems. They try to solve those problems. They make decisions. They actively drive the plot forward by acting on those decisions. And by the end, they are transformed.
Here’s a problem I see in lots of manuscripts: A character goes through a harrowing experience and emerges transformed on the other side, but the transformation is little more than an afterthought.
- I really ought to be nicer to my family.
- I’d better start being honest since all those lies got me into so much trouble.
- Next time I find an unattended bag of money out in the woods, I’ll keep on walking.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. In a compelling story, a character’s transformation isn’t an epiphany stapled onto the end as if the writer is checking a box because they read in a how-to-write book that the main character has to change at the end. Transformation is a process, not an event, just like in real life. It happens in stages. A caterpillar doesn’t suddenly zap itself into the shape of a butterfly. Teenagers don’t wake up one day and, poof, they’re adults with deeper voices, jobs, and the ability to manage a household budget.
There’s no correct number of stages for a character transformation in a novel, but three is a good number because it’s convincing. Something that happens three times isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern of events or behavior. You can connect three dots and show a plausible trajectory. Any number less than three isn’t a pattern. It’s just random noise.
Since you’re writing about a character’s transformational experience, you need to write about a “before and after” moment in that character’s life. We all have some of those, where life was forever different after the event than it was before. Choose the biggest one in your character’s life. If you’re going to write about Cletus, you need to write about the most important, life-shaking, transformative thing that will ever happen to him. Don’t write about him struggling to get up at four in the morning to milk his cows because he drank too much hooch in the shed.
Say you invent a character who’s a high school teacher named Walter White (the main character in Vince Gilligan’s great American television crime drama Breaking Bad) who becomes Albuquerque’s most notorious drug kingpin in middle age—lots of potential there—but then you write a novel about how he overcomes his academic struggles in graduate school. No. What about the whole drug kingpin thing? That’s what ultimately defines Walter White’s life, not the small-ball struggles he goes through thirty years earlier. Who cares? Choosing that part of his life to dramatize in your novel is like writing a book about a hit man’s nonviolent struggle with his condo board.
White begins Breaking Bad as a high school chemistry teacher and slowly transforms himself into a murderous crime boss. He doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to become a murderous crime boss. Nobody would believe that. It’s not even faintly realistic. Rather, he’s diagnosed with lung cancer and frets about leaving his family destitute after he’s gone. So he teams up with a punk-ass former student of his named Jesse Pinkman, and together they leverage Walter’s knowledge of chemistry to make the best batch of meth that Albuquerque has ever seen. Walter doesn’t plan to make a new career out of this. It’s supposed to be a one-time thing. But one thing leads to another, and one decision leads to the next, and before he knows it, Walter finds himself facing moral dilemmas in a criminal underworld that he could scarcely even imagine before. Rather than solving his initial problem, he adds a whole host of new problems that take him entirely by surprise. Every decision he makes drives the story forward, and every decision he makes transforms him, inexorably and one step at a time, into a completely different kind of person, someone unrecognizable to even his family.
He starts the story as Mr. Rogers and ends as Scarface.
That’s one hell of a character arc. A spectacular transformation. And that transformation takes place slowly over the course of five television seasons. Lots of things have to happen in order to make that kind of transformation believable. And whatever those things are, they need to happen as a result of decisions the character makes.
Your main character doesn’t need an arc as dramatic as Walter White’s. But do think about how your character can start your story as one type of person and end as a different type of person. And ask yourself what kind of things need to happen, what kind of things your character must decide to do, for that transformation to be believable. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have the basic contours of a plot that’s character driven rather than a contrivance that moves a two-dimensional character around like a plastic piece in a board game. And you can take that plot and map it to your story structure outline. Thus, your character arc and your plot become one.
Don’t plug a bunch of events into a story structure template and call it good. Do that and you’ll end up with, at best, the literary equivalent of an insipid action movie starring Dolph Lundgren. Your characters aren’t sock puppets. They’re people. They’re in pain. They need and want things. Events don’t go as planned, and their lives go into a ditch. A ditch that’s on fire. And when your characters climb out of the burning ditch, the bad guys start shooting at them. By the time they get through all the torture and trauma you put them through (or they put themselves through), they’re profoundly shaken and unrecognizable even to themselves, hopefully for the better.
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If you enjoyed this and learned something useful, you can read so much more in my book Write, Edit, Publish: What Every Writer Needs to Know but Only an Editor Will Tell You. I’m also a professional developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, and publishing consultant, and you can hire me to help you with your book. Reach out and tell me what you’re working on, send me your questions, ask for a free sample edit, or just say hi.
