The Most Dangerous Game got me interested in story structure. It has long been a popular short story in American high schools. Most USian folks I’ve spoken with are familiar with it and I’ve seen some good rewrites and alternate takes over the years.
The thing is, in US English class they teach that there is only one story structure – the 5 act (sometimes the 3/5 act) with the Hero’s Journey as an incredibly detailed take on one type of 5 act story. And then they present you with The Most Dangerous Game, which fits the 5 act structure by courtesy only.
My English teacher used it as an example of the flexibility of the 5 act. “The resolution is only a single sentence! Everything else is implied.”
You know what else is implied?
The climax. It does not exist in that story. Not in the usual sense. Like, you can cram it into the definition. But say “We are going to have a to-the-death fight, winner takes all,” jump straight to “Victory was sweet” and tell me there was a story climax there? Bullshit.
The climax is in the blank spaces between the words. It’s a beautiful piece of writing. But it’s not 5 act.
(And don’t get me started on Shakespeare and 5 act. How any English teacher can claim with a straight face that the Bard wrote in ‘classic’ 5 act baffles me.)
The point is if you still think ‘5 act structure’ and ‘conflict-based narratives’ are universal and important, I have a reading assignment for you: Worldwide Story Structures by Kim Yoonmi
For me, even though a bunch of stuff made me question the 5 act structure, it was years before I ditched it for my stories. I kept having stories that didn’t work and trying to ‘fix’ them by adding more conflict/better climax/what have you.
Yeah, that was going nowhere, no way, no how.
So I stopped thinking about it and just wrote what worked. For nearly ten years, I hardly thought about the structure of my stories. I read a shit ton about story structures and tried to read a variety of stories with a variety of story structures. But my stuff? I let it be what it was.
Mostly worked, but caused some problems.
One problem was Mighty Hero Force Epsilon.
Overall, the serial came out well, but I spent over a year fighting it because Season 2 did NOT want to come together for me. Which is why I wrapped it up and pinned “the End” on the piece.
It was also what made me sit down and think about my story structure, if I have a consistent one, what am I doing with my stories?
It turns out, I do have a story structure I follow fairly consistently. It’s just not one I’ve ever seen described.
My Growth-Based Structure
To start with, my story structure is built around growth – character growth and relationship growth mostly. This is why I kept failing when I tried to fix the conflict in my stories. Conflict is a side issue in my stories. By increasing story conflict I actually distracted from the central plotline, which only made the stories worse.
I don’t have a name for my particular growth-based story structure. But (borrowing Kim Yoonmi’s analysis format) I can break down how it works –
Number of Acts: As many as needed
What is it?:
- pushed out of normalcy/comfort
- lack of stability causes discomfort and upset
- growth leads to temporary stability which cannot be maintained
- repeat 2-3 as necessary until
- characters grow enough they can establish actual stability in a new ‘normal’
Story Driver(s)?: discomfort/unhealthy personal situation
Notes:
Most stories have a ‘central conflict’ in the sense that an outside force disrupts the ‘old normal’ and continues to interfere in establishing a new normal. However a central conflict is not necessary, and if it exists may be resolved before, during, or after the establishment of a new normal. Or not resolved at all.
Other Growth Based Story Structures
This is not the only way to write a growth-based story. It’s just my way. When I look at my reading over the years I recognize other authors using what could be called growth based story structures, all using different structures. There are also some structures, like the four act ki-sho-ten-ketsu and it’s many varients, which don’t necessarily center growth OR conflict, but can center either or neither as the author wishes.
Below is a short list of other authors who have written growth-centered stories
This list is not meant to be comprehensive or academic. It covers the growth-centered stories I am familiar with, which is probably a small portion of the growth-centered stories out there. My goal here is to get a few ideas for different kinds of growth-centered story structures on paper. If you are writing or know other types of growth-centered structures, please reach out!
Maeve Binchy:
Maeve Binchy wrote what I call braided stories. Her novels have one or two ‘main’ characters, but in and around the main character, many other characters twine their own stories. Binchy truly grasped the ‘we’re all the protagonist of our own story’ idea, and wrote books where every character was a protagonist. The story they were protagonist of may have appeared only briefly, but it was there.
In braided stories there is not a climax, any crisis will be a ‘normal’ life-gone-to-hell moment and these happen throughout the story. Lovers may come together without any great declarations, quietly sliding into and through each others lives until it’s obvious that they belong together without anyone needing to say anything.
Instead, each character has a story thread. Most of them start distinct, others are already twined together – often in unhealthy ways. Over the course of the story, these threads come together and pull apart in different ways. Usually, ways that support and buttress each other. By the end, with the direct and indirect support of the stories around them, most characters have grown into a new normal and a healthier life. Those that don’t stand out as examples of what happens when we reject the growth and support offered by people around us.
Andre Norton
Andre Norton is best known for Witch World, but for me her stories that stand out most have always been the Senses and Dipple series (serieses? How do you plural that?)
In these books, the main character gets caught up in a conflict that was none of theirs – until the wider world forced it on them. Surviving this wider conflict requires growth, often a great deal of it. These stories often include a traditional 5-act conflict structure. But I would argue this conflict structure essentially acts as a macguffin to drive the growth.
The climatic scene in the Senses books particularly often have an almost staged quality. All the characters know their parts, and there is very little tension. They have all grown in knowledge of themselves and their compatriots. Everyone will act in the right way at the right moment, everyone trusts the others to do their part.
This growth may come in the form of new abilities and powers, learning to trust others, giving up harmful goals like revenge, or moving beyond the role one has been trained in all their life. But this growth and how it happens is the center of the story, with much of the conflict never being fully explained, happening off screen, or taking part on a much wider scale than the character’s story.
Miyazaki Hayao
Miyazaki mostly writes ki-sho-ten-ketsu structured stories. Ki-sho-ten-ketsu can be used for either growth centered or conflict centered stories or center something else entirely. Much of anime is ki-sho-ten-ketsu, but Miyazaki Hayao’s stories stand out as unique among anime. I don’t know what Miyazaki calls his fiction structure, if he calls it anything in particular. But to me, his movies always flowed like water, moving from one place to another, sometimes meandering, sometimes rushing and white with rapids. But his stories often focus on his characters growing and becoming.
I’m thinking especially of Spirited Away because it’s the movie I’ve seen most recently (and I can’t watch video these days, brain stuff). But I remember watching Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa and how different they were from everything I had seen before, how much they focused on characters. There were battles, but they seemed to take place almost in the background, even while they were happening. Secondary to the characters and how they interacted with and affected each other.
And Spirited Away, well, that movie is ALL about growth with almost no on-screen conflict.
Ursula Le Guin
Long before I started writing, LeGuin was calling out the conflict-focused view of fiction as a false and imposed restriction based on an unhealthy view of the world. Her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of fiction is still available online and I highly recommend it.
“I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
“…its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”
It’s stretching things to say that the carrier bag is growth-centered. Le Guin never claimed it as such or talked about growth much that I recall. Certainly not all of her stories were growth centered (Olemas comes to mind, as one that wasn’t). But many of them were. The carrier bag theory certainly has room in it for growth centered stories.
A carrier bag, by definition, has room for many things.