How to Write a Story, Part 3: Throwing Rocks at Your Hero

Okay, so you've been finding your writing chair and sitting in it for at least thirty minutes to an hour each day.  Very good!  And now, in addition to your list of awesome ideas, you know who your hero is.  Maybe she's a talking a bear who wants to be an accountant, a bad guy trying to turn good, or a princess who is desperate to escape from her castle.  It matters not at all, as long as you've decided on a hero and given him or her a problem to solve (or get beaten by).

Like architecture, ship building and rocket construction, stories have a basic structure.  The great news about this structure is that it is totally easy to understand.  As a matter of fact, it takes about one blog posting to get the essentials down.

The bare bones are these:

It's probably easiest to talk about story structure in movie terms.  Movies almost always have three three acts, and these acts have names.  Act One is called the Set Up.  Act Two is the Confrontation.  And Act Three is the Resolution.

In a two hour movie, this breaks down to roughly 30 minutes for Act I, 60 minutes for Act II, and 30 minutes for Act III.  Screenplays are about a minute of movie time per page, so they wind up being around 120 pages.  These are just rules of thumb, but what's important is the basic math of it.  The beginning is about 25% of your story, the middle is 50%, and the end is also 25%.

Here's what you do in each act.

Act 1:  Tell your audience who your hero is, how they live at the start of the movie, and then stick 'em with the problem.

Act 2:  Torment your character with their problem.  Have them use logical methods (the ones that occur to you) to get out of their fix.  And with every new attempt to solve the problem, make it worse.  Of course, you need to give your audience hope that things are just about to get better, but in Act II they won't (or else your story will be over).

The end of Act 2 should be the worst moment of all.  The last attempt to fix things should totally backfire and cost them everything; their hope, their possessions, their friends, and all else that matters in their world.  This is the low point of the whole story, so really make it awful.

Act 3:  Solve the problem in a cool and unexpected way, then show how your character lives now that she has overcome her struggle.

There's a little more to it, but this more than enough to get you started organizing the ideas you've brainstormed into the appropriate spots in your story.  And don't feel like your story has to be a movie or two hours long, or any of that.  Just use the math we discussed to break your plot into it's basic pieces.

And finally, there is a real easy way to remember all of this is:  In the first act you chase your character up a tree, in the second act you throw rocks at them, and in the third act help them climb down.  

That's it!  Now off to your writing chair.