Story structure

Based on Wikipedia: Story structure

Every story you've ever loved—every film that made you cry, every novel you couldn't put down, every bedtime tale that shaped your childhood—was built on invisible scaffolding. This scaffolding is called story structure, and once you learn to see it, you'll never experience stories the same way again.

Here's what's fascinating: for over two thousand years, writers, philosophers, and scholars have argued about what this scaffolding should look like. The ancient Greeks had one idea. The Japanese developed something completely different. Hollywood created its own formula. And in the twenty-first century, as films like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" blend Eastern and Western traditions, we're watching these different approaches collide and merge in real time.

The Three-Act Structure: Hollywood's Beloved Formula

If you've watched American movies, you've absorbed the three-act structure without even realizing it. It's so embedded in Western storytelling that it feels like the natural way stories work—even though it's actually a fairly recent invention.

The structure works like this.

In the first act, we meet everyone. The hero. The villain. The love interest. The quirky best friend. We learn where they live, what they want, and what their lives look like on an ordinary day. This is called the exposition—a term coined by Reverend J.K. Brennan in 1912 for an essay he wrote for the Delphian Society, an educational organization that believed in self-improvement through classical learning.

Then something happens. Screenwriters call this the inciting incident or catalyst. A letter arrives. A stranger walks into town. A bomb is discovered. The hero's ordinary world is disrupted, and they must respond. Their initial attempts to restore order lead to what's called the first plot point—the moment that ends the first act and poses a dramatic question. Will the detective catch the killer? Will the lovers reunite? Will the rebel destroy the Death Star?

The second act is the longest. This is where conflict develops, where the hero struggles, where they change and grow. Think of it as the mountain they must climb. At the end of this middle section comes the second plot point, where everything shifts again and drives us toward the finale.

The third act brings resolution. The bomb is defused or it explodes. The lovers kiss or part forever. The question posed in act one finally gets its answer.

This structure feels so natural that many people assume it dates back to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who wrote about drama in his work called "Poetics." But this attribution is actually false.

Aristotle never argued for three acts. He proposed a two-act structure—what he called desis and lysis, Greek words meaning binding and unbinding. Think of it as tying a knot and then untying it. The story creates complications, then resolves them. No middle act required.

The confusion arose because a Roman scholar named Aelius Donatus, writing in the fourth century A.D., described a different approach in his commentary on the plays of Terence, a Roman playwright. Later, in 1979, a screenwriting teacher named Syd Field popularized the three-act structure in his influential book "Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting." Field credited Aristotle, and the misattribution stuck. To this day, screenwriting courses around the world teach the three-act structure as if it were ancient wisdom, when it's really a twentieth-century invention built on a medieval misunderstanding of Greek philosophy.

Kishōtenketsu: Stories Without Conflict

Here's something that might surprise you: the three-act structure assumes that conflict is essential to storytelling. The hero wants something. Something opposes them. They struggle. They win or lose.

But what if that's not the only way to tell a story?

In China, Korea, and Japan, a different structure evolved over centuries. It's called kishōtenketsu, and it divides stories into four parts rather than three. The name comes from Japanese, but the form originated in classical Chinese poetry.

The first part, ki, introduces the situation. The second, shō, develops it further. So far, this might sound similar to Western structures. But the third part, ten, does something unexpected. Rather than escalating conflict, it introduces a twist—a change in direction, a new perspective, something that makes you see everything differently. The fourth part, ketsu, brings everything together into a conclusion.

What's radical about kishōtenketsu is that conflict isn't required. The twist in the third section might simply offer a different viewpoint, an unexpected connection, a moment of revelation. This allows for stories that feel fundamentally different from Western narratives—stories that meditate rather than battle, that surprise rather than confront.

When the film "Everything Everywhere All at Once" won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2023, critics noted that it seemed to follow kishōtenketsu rather than traditional Hollywood structure. The movie's wild tonal shifts and philosophical resolution felt unfamiliar to Western audiences—not because the filmmakers were doing something wrong, but because they were drawing from a different storytelling tradition entirely.

Gustav Freytag and the Pyramid

Before Syd Field, before Hollywood, before even the invention of cinema, a German novelist and playwright named Gustav Freytag tried to crack the code of dramatic structure. His 1863 book "Die Technik des Dramas"—The Technique of the Drama—became one of the most influential works on storytelling ever written.

Freytag imagined the shape of a story as a pyramid. It rises from the introduction through what he called the "rise"—the building of tension and complication. At the peak sits the climax, the moment of highest intensity. Then the story descends through the "return or fall" toward what Freytag dramatically called the "catastrophe"—the final resolution.

This pyramid shape influenced everything that came after. The three-act structure is essentially Freytag's pyramid with the middle bulged out. The five-act structure, popular in Shakespearean drama, places the climax precisely at the center.

But Freytag had blind spots. He focused almost exclusively on European drama and dismissed stories from other cultures. In 1895, a French writer named Georges Polti pushed back against this narrow view. In his book "The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations," Polti argued that there wasn't just one story structure but many—and that valuable examples could be found in traditions that Freytag had ignored.

The Shape of Emotion

Around the turn of the twentieth century, scholars began asking a different question. Instead of mapping the events of a story, what if you mapped the emotions?

In 1905, a professor named Selden Lincoln Whitcomb proposed something innovative. In his book "A Study of a Novel," he suggested that different stories might have different emotional shapes. He even drew diagrams—visual representations of how a reader's feelings might rise and fall as a story progressed.

This idea spread. Joseph Esenwein picked it up and applied it specifically to short stories. Kenneth Rowe copied it almost word for word—without giving credit—in his book "Write That Play." The playwright Arthur Miller, author of "Death of a Salesman," used Rowe's approach to craft one of the most celebrated American tragedies ever written.

The concept eventually reached the author Kurt Vonnegut, who in lectures would draw what he called the "shapes of stories" on a blackboard. A comedy, he explained, looks like an arc rising upward—things start bad and get better. A tragedy is an arc falling—things start good and get worse. His most famous shape was what he called "Man in Hole": the protagonist falls into trouble, then climbs back out. Simple, memorable, and surprisingly universal.

The Literary Critic Northrop Frye and the Seasons

In 1957, a Canadian literary critic named Northrop Frye published "Anatomy of Criticism," a book that proposed something ambitious: a unified theory of storytelling based on the cycle of seasons.

Spring myths, Frye argued, are comedies. Not necessarily funny stories, but stories where things move from bad to good—like Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," where confusion and mistaken identity resolve into marriages and reconciliation.

Summer myths are utopian fantasies—visions of paradise and ideal worlds. Think of the final section of Dante's "Divine Comedy," where the poet ascends through heaven.

Fall myths are tragedies, moving from fortune to disaster. Hamlet. Othello. King Lear. The great plays where noble characters are destroyed by their flaws or by fate.

Winter myths are dystopias—nightmare visions of corrupted societies. George Orwell's "1984." Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Stories that warn us about where we might be headed.

Frye also proposed two master shapes that all plots follow. The first is U-shaped: equilibrium, descent into disaster, then ascent to a new stable state. This is comedy in the classical sense. The second is an inverted U: rise to prominence, then descent to destruction. This is tragedy.

These shapes might seem abstract, but think about how often they appear. A romantic comedy follows the U: two people meet (equilibrium), face obstacles and misunderstandings (descent), then overcome them and fall in love (new equilibrium). A gangster film follows the inverted U: a criminal rises to power, then is brought down by rivals or the law.

The Hero's Journey

No discussion of story structure would be complete without mentioning Joseph Campbell, though his ideas have become so ubiquitous that they've almost become invisible.

In 1949, Campbell published "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," arguing that myths from cultures around the world share a common structure. He called this the monomyth, or the hero's journey. It goes something like this: A hero lives in an ordinary world. They receive a call to adventure. They cross into a special world. They face trials, allies, and enemies. They undergo an ordeal and receive a reward. They return home, transformed.

George Lucas explicitly used Campbell's structure when writing Star Wars. Luke Skywalker lives on a desert planet (ordinary world), receives a message from Princess Leia (call to adventure), crosses into space with Obi-Wan Kenobi (threshold crossing), faces trials in the Death Star (ordeal), and returns to destroy it (reward and transformation).

The hero's journey has been extraordinarily influential—and extraordinarily criticized. Many scholars argue that Campbell cherry-picked myths to fit his theory, ignoring stories that didn't match his pattern. Others point out that the structure privileges male protagonists and Western storytelling conventions. Still others note that reducing all human stories to a single template flattens cultural differences and makes everything feel the same.

By the late twentieth century, a philosophical movement called poststructuralism challenged the very idea that universal story structures could exist. Thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued that claiming to find shared deep structures across all human cultures was logically impossible—and probably revealed more about the biases of the researcher than about any genuine universal truth.

Linear and Nonlinear

So far, we've been discussing what happens in a story. But there's another dimension to structure: when things are revealed.

Most stories are linear. They start at the beginning, proceed through the middle, and end at the end. Events unfold in chronological order. Cause precedes effect. Time marches forward.

But not all stories work this way.

Nonlinear narratives scramble chronology. Events are revealed out of order, requiring the audience to piece together what happened and when. Orson Welles's 1941 film "Citizen Kane" opens with the death of its protagonist, then jumps back to explore his life through fragmented memories. Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film "Pulp Fiction" presents three interconnected stories with their timelines shuffled like a deck of cards. The French filmmaker Alain Resnais made a 1993 film called "Smoking/No Smoking" that explores parallel timelines—what might have happened if characters had made different choices.

This isn't just a cinematic technique. Novels do it too. In her 2019 book "Meander, Spiral, Explode," creative writing professor Jane Alison catalogs nonlinear narrative patterns: spirals that circle around a central event, waves that crest and recede, meanders that wander through time like a river.

Why tell stories out of order? Sometimes it creates suspense—we know what happened but not how. Sometimes it mirrors the way memory actually works, jumping and associating rather than proceeding in neat sequence. Sometimes it forces readers to become active participants, assembling the story themselves rather than passively receiving it.

Interactive Narratives

And then there are stories where you don't just consume the structure—you create it.

Interactive narratives give audiences choices that shape how the story unfolds. The simplest version is the gamebook, popularized in the 1980s by the Choose Your Own Adventure series. "If you want to open the door, turn to page 47. If you want to run away, turn to page 63." Each choice leads to different consequences, different paths, different endings.

Video games have taken this much further. Modern games like "The Witcher 3" or "Mass Effect" feature hundreds of hours of branching narrative, where player choices accumulate into meaningfully different stories. Some games, like "Disco Elysium," use narrative structure as their primary gameplay mechanic—you're essentially playing a conversation, with each dialogue choice opening some possibilities and closing others.

Creating interactive narratives is extraordinarily difficult. Authors must imagine not one story but many parallel stories, all of which must be coherent and satisfying. They must anticipate choices they might never have made themselves. They must build structures that accommodate freedom while still providing direction.

This is fundamentally different from traditional storytelling, where the author controls everything. In interactive narrative, control is shared. The author provides the scaffolding; the audience builds their own structure within it.

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Comics offer yet another approach to structure—one that's simultaneously visual and textual, operating in space as well as in time.

A typical comic employs a simple four-stage structure. First, the setup: characters are introduced, a situation is established. Second, the complication: a problem arises, an opportunity appears, something disrupts the status quo. Third, the response: characters react to the complication, attempting to resolve it. Fourth, the denouement: the aftermath reveals whether the response succeeded.

But comics can also do things that prose and film cannot. A reader can see an entire page at once, taking in multiple panels simultaneously. A skilled comics artist can use layout itself as a narrative device—fragmenting panels during chaos, stretching them during slow moments, breaking the grid entirely for scenes of transformation or transcendence.

This spatial dimension adds complexity to structure. A comic isn't just a sequence of events; it's an arrangement of images on a page, and that arrangement shapes how the story feels.

Why Structure Matters

After all this history and theory, you might wonder: does any of this actually matter? Can't good storytellers just tell good stories without worrying about acts and pyramids and seasonal myths?

Perhaps. But understanding structure offers something valuable: it lets us see beneath the surface of stories we love. Why does this scene feel inevitable? Why does that twist surprise us? Why do we cry at this ending and roll our eyes at that one?

Structure also helps explain why stories from different cultures can feel so different. Japanese and Korean narratives influenced by kishōtenketsu have a contemplative quality that Western three-act stories often lack. Stories that play with nonlinear chronology engage our minds differently than straightforward narratives. Interactive stories make us collaborators rather than mere consumers.

And structure evolves. The arguments that Aristotle had with himself in the fourth century B.C., the diagrams that Selden Lincoln Whitcomb drew in 1905, the pyramid that Gustav Freytag imagined in 1863—all of these shape the stories being told today. When a film like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" blends Eastern and Western traditions, when a video game like "Disco Elysium" turns narrative structure into gameplay, when a novel like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "Before We Visit the Goddess" arranges its chapters by emotional resonance rather than chronology—these innovations build on twenty-five centuries of thinking about how stories work.

The scaffolding is invisible. But it holds everything up.