I have a confession to make: plot structure scares the crap out of me. Of all the problems and pitfalls and mistakes a writer can make, the ones that have to do with how your story is structured are by far the hardest to deal with. They’re insidious in that it’s often very difficult to put a name to what’s going on when these problems happen. “Something just feels off” is a common piece of feedback in this arena. They’re hard to fix, too – plot structure is such a fundamental element of your story that it’s hard to change anything about it without derailing everything, or forcing you to make a tough sacrifice somewhere else in your story. It’s also catastrophic when you get it wrong. If you screw it up, trust me, your readers are never going to forget. Some of the worst disasters in all of fiction that I can think of off the top of my head (and we’re going to talk about a couple in this post) can be boiled down to problems with plot structure. And unlike some other writing mistakes, this is one that sticks with people. Bad plot structure is really, really memorable, and when it happens, it tends to be the one thing people walk away from your story with. So we have not only a difficult problem ahead of us, but a very high-stakes one. No pressure, or anything.

Now, there are a few tried and true roadmaps for arranging a good plot structure. If you do a Google image search for “plot structure,” you’ll turn up hundreds of thousands of squiggly line graphs depicting your various options. Much has been written on why so many stories fit neatly into a three-act structure, or why the hero’s journey is such a well-loved type of character arc, and so on and so forth. Instead of giving you the same instructions you’ve heard a hundred million times, today I want to zoom out a little and talk about the things all these methods have in common, in the hopes that no matter how you’re structuring your story, you’ll be able to use this advice to head off those catastrophic mistakes before they happen.

There are two big things you need to nail to get story structure right: rising & falling, and setup & payoff. Let’s go through them one at a time and break this down, with the aid of my favorite kind of examples: terrible ones.

Rising & Falling

Story structure is really just a pattern of ups and downs – of rising and falling tension, action, or emotion (ideally all three). The basic idea here is that something has to change over the course of your story for it to be a story. In fact, not only does it need to change, but it needs to change repeatedly. That rhythm is what keeps an audience engaged.

For a deeply traumatizing example of where this can go wrong, let us reluctantly examine M. Night Shyamalan’s live action movie adaptation of the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: the Last Airbender. Now, I don’t mean to imply that story structure was the only problem with this train wreck of a movie, because it absolutely wasn’t. But one of the issues was that the story didn’t really rise and fall. It just sort of… happened. It’s as if he wrote down everything that happened in the story he was adapting in a list, and just checked them off one at a time. Those ups and downs that make a story feel engaging and dynamic just weren’t there. If you’re wondering why it felt so boring despite the morbid fascination of watching such a catastrophe unfold before your eyes, this is why.

I actually can’t take credit for this observation; I only noticed this problem after having it pointed out to me in this insightful and very cathartic three-hour dissection of the movie by author and video essayist Timothy Hickson (I’ve linked the relevant section, which starts at 2:06:48). He points out that the movie doesn’t have nearly enough of these “falling,” or reactive story beats – periodic breathers where the characters take a minute to stop and feel their feelings and take stock of their situation before soldiering on. You just get dragged from one plot point to the next with very little in between. The result is the feeling of there being virtually no change in… well, anything throughout the movie. It’s just a flat, barren prairie, devoid of any variation in pace, tone, tension, emotion, or just about anything else.

Think of story structure like a hike up a mountain: if the trail never flattens out and gives you a little break from just going up, up, up, then when you get to the top, you’re not going to feel like it was worth it, no matter how cool the view is. You’re just going to collapse, exhausted, and promise yourself that you never have to do that again. It should go without saying, but this is not how you want people to feel when they read your story. Make sure your whole trail isn’t just heading in one direction, and you’ll solve a lot of problems.

Setup & Payoff

This is (part of) what went wrong with Season 8 of Game of Thrones. A lot of you can just stop reading right there – you get it. But on the off chance that your friends and coworkers were less obsessed than mine were and, unlike me, you managed to avoid subjecting yourself to this travesty just to be able to hold a conversation during those fateful few months of 2019, I’ll elaborate.

In addition to rising and falling, your story needs a series of setups and payoffs. You set something up, then you pay it off. Done. Easy. Except! That would be boring. So let’s have lots of setups and payoffs, and let’s also put them in a blender. When they come out, the story might look something like: setup, setup, payoff, setup, payoff, setup, setup, payoff, payoff, setup, payoff, payoff.

Notice two things I did here.

There’s overlap.

“In the first half, you set things up, and in the second half, you pay them off,” said the Giver of Terrible Writing Advice. No, doofus. Who wants to read a story like that? There’s only so long readers are willing to hang on, waiting to hit the payoff, and there’s only so much resolution they’ll put up with before they start wondering when something new is going to happen.

It’s true that you can weight the beginning of your story more heavily with setups and the end more heavily with payoffs, but in the middle, you should be aiming for a mix. Chaining them together so that the payoff of one thread sets up the beginning of the next is another way to do this, although when overused, it can contribute to that dull, demoralizing, “just one plot point after another” feeling. A better bet is to mix it up and make sure you’re giving your readers periodic rewards for progressing through your story, as well as giving all your different subplots plenty of attention and weaving them together effectively.

There’s an equal number of setups and payoffs.

Everything you set up, you need to pay off, and everything that gets paid off needs to have been set up at some point. I don’t mean to scare you or anything, but it is absolutely critical that you get this right (looking at you, Game of Thrones). People tend to think of this in terms of making sure you tie everything off, which is important! But as the world has now seen, making sure you set up those endpoints properly is equally important, and about ten times more destructive when neglected.

Now, if you’re writing a series, it’s totally fine to leave some of the payoff for the next book. That’s how cliffhangers work, and it’s also a very normal and expected part of how you put together a cohesive series that doesn’t just feel like a bunch of loosely connected stand-alones (nothing wrong with a series of loosely connected stand-alones, by the way! But you may not be aiming for that). But when considering your story as a whole, you don’t want to leave loose plot threads hanging, or do something big (like, I don’t know, have your main character go crazy and burn down a city) that you didn’t adequately set up.

The key is to have some system for tracking your setups and payoffs to make sure all this actually happens, which can be a daunting task, especially if you are as disorganized as I am. Usually the way I do this is by leaving comments throughout my document as I’m writing, noting where I’ve foreshadowed something or kicked off a new subplot, as well as places where I tied something off or answered a question that was (or rather, should have been) posed earlier in the story. I revisit these notes frequently during the revision process, when I’m adding or cutting things and need to make sure I’m not getting rid of anything important or adding in something that doesn’t make sense. But that’s just one method! Play around, try different things, and find a system that works well for you.

A word from our sponsor: pacing

The glue that holds all this together is pacing: the timing of rising and falling, and of setup and payoff. It’s a critical element of getting all this right, and it is inherent in any good execution of the things we’ve talked about. Additionally, there is no hard and fast rule about how to pace your story. It’s important that you consider it, but what you decide to do is heavily dependent on things like tone and genre. Basically, it really deserves its own post, so I’m not going to go too much into it here. For now, if you’re paying attention to the other stuff we’ve talked about today, you’re probably on the right track in this department.

And that’s it! Those are the ingredients in a good plot structure, and the main areas where bad structures tend to fail. And sorry for reminding you about the existence of the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie – I hope you’ll agree that I did it for a good cause.

Happy writing!