Why I love yah! So many of the writers I work with are literary writers and we all struggle to find our own unique structures.
The mystery structure is one I often send my writers to, even if their project isn’t really a mystery, as the structure gives a nice template from which to draw inspiration for their own. Melodie, can you outline a basic mystery structure, and perhaps flag places where writers commonly trip up?
Okay, and now I'm distracted. DANGit. I'll go back to 2. later. Now, on to my fave topic:
Structure.
No, I'm not a panzter. I do work to a structure. Most important - I NEVER START WRITING UNTIL I KNOW MY ENDING. Never. Not even with a short story. In a crime/mystery/suspense book, everything points to the ending. I may have a plot percolating in my head for a year, before I finally see it in technicolour. Then I sit down to write.
Structure: Here's what I teach:
Many authors (including me) use the three act and finale structure. Here we go:
Structuring your Novel: Three Acts and a Finale with Melodie Campbell
Many novels follow the three acts and a finale structure.
(A Purse to Die For is a good example of a book written with this structure.)
Your novel is divided into 4 parts, approximately (but not always) 25% each.
_X________________ X___________________X___________________X________________
Inciting moment Crisis 1 Crisis 2 Crisis 3
Inciting moment: The book starts with the moment at which
something causes change.
People don’t like change. Something has to happen to force them out of their usual routines. That’s the inciting moment. (In
Rowena Through the Wall, a medieval warrior walks through Rowena’s classroom wall into the 21st century. This is the inciting moment. She
can’t ignore it.)
In
A Purse to Die For, the old grandmother dies. All the family members are drawn together at the huge family home for a funeral and the reading of the will. (Inciting moment.)
Crisis 1 is usually caused by an external source (meaning not something the protagonist did.) In
A Purse to Die For, a murdered body is discovered on the lawn of the family home.
In the best novels,
Crisis 2 and 3 are usually disasters caused by something the protagonist (or another character) did. It could be something they tried to do to fix the first crisis, but that makes things worse and worse.
In
A Purse to Die For,
Crisis 2, murder 2 occurs. One of the cousins is murdered, directly as a result of something he does.
In
A Purse to Die For,
Crisis 3, Gina is abandoned in the forest during a snow storm. Her own gullibility and recklessness led to this.
This is the black moment, where all seems to be lost.
In
A Purse to Die For,
Finale, Gina reasons out the identity of the murderer while trying to keep moving to keep from freezing to death. Will she be rescued before she dies or is murdered?
>>>As the novel progresses the tension increases as the stakes for your protagonist become higher.<<<
