Extremely Local Authors

Encouraging Literary Amateurs.


On Structure

Comedy, Tragedy, and A Third Thing

Categories: [Know]
Tags: [Structure]

There are about as many ways to structure your story as there are stories, and they cover a whole range of different forms. This can be a fascinating topic to geek out over, but in terms of what you need to be thinking about, there's some fundamentals.

Comedy and Tragedy

This is one of the oldest theories on story structure, and can be summarized as "has a happy ending (often a wedding!)" and "has a sad ending (and it's because of a flaw in the hero)". Basically, do the events of the story focus on the main character overcoming challenges because of who they are, or does it focus on the main character failing to overcome the consequences of their own mistakes, also because of who they are?

Three Act Structure

This is the most common story structure now (in English, at least!), and maps very neatly onto the basic structure of "beginning, middle, and end". The first act introduces the characters and setting and themes of the story as the normal world, an inciting incident that kicks of the story, a second act where things get slowly worse, then a third act where things get suddenly better, then a bit where everything is tied up neatly at the end.

More Complex Structures

The are a bunch of more strict and complex structures out there, too, but my advice is to only dig into those if you are legitimately interested in the topic. They won't automatically help you write a better story.

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