Story Structure

Most of what I can say about story structure, I've said in my plotting series.  But when you've got your first draft in hand, your story's structure is probably still far from perfect.

The truth is, despite all the planning and preparations, writing is a chaotic process.    You can't plan every nuance of your story, because you can't plan what mood you'll be in when you actually write them.  As you slog through the pages, things may take unexpected turns.  A scene you intended to be very exciting might end up being a chore to write, or a seemingly innocuous scene might crackle with unexpected electricity.  This is okay--in fact it's good.  Always listen to your instincts in writing.  Remember, the outline doesn't determine your story, the characters do.

If you did your prep work, you walked into that first draft with a solid idea for your major turning point scenes, and your story has at least some structure.  But is it the right structure?  You might find that the Midpoint Sequence you planned on is not actually as strong as it should be.  You might find that your most climactic moment happened well before the structural climax.  Or you might find that a particular setting enhanced one scene, but that scene wasn't very important.

So the first step in developmental editing is to shuffle your story's building blocks around.  It seems daunting at first, but the truth is, once you reverse outline everything, it's a simple matter of copy-pasting things around, cutting out whatever doesn't fit, and filling in the cracks with "glue" (new writing).

Say you're writing about a teenage boy who learns he has cancer (you know me, I love misery).  Your Turning Point One was his diagnosis.  Your intended Midpoint Sequence was a night on the town with his friends, where he finds the courage to express his love for the girl who had friend-zoned him long ago.  Between those two points, in Act Two, you showed the boy and his mother dealing with the financial struggle his treatment caused, and it culminates in a big fight.  You were in a rotten mood the day you wrote the fight, and it turned into a really great scene with some hard-hitting dialogue.  The day you wrote the Midpoint Sequence, you were tired and stressed from work, and it just didn't quite build the way you wanted it to.

There are a perhaps infinite number of solutions to this situation, not the least of which is simply rewriting the sub-par scene.  But another approach might be to swap the location of these two scenes.  Have Act Two still deal with the struggle, but the scene of him partying with his friends could show him trying to escape from his mom.  Then in the Midpoint Sequence, they have their big blow-up, and things get said that shouldn't be said.  The some time after that, when the kid is even further down the spiral, have him express his love for this girl.

Here's another example:  Say the aforementioned mother-son fight takes place at home the first time around.  But in a preceding scene, you show the two of them at a carnival, doing "live like you're dying" type stuff.  You are a lifelong lover of carnivals, and you've worked hard to sculpt every nuance of the environment, so the scene has a lot of life to it.  What if you moved the fight into the carnival scene?  It presents all kinds of opportunities for increased conflict; instead of fighting in private, they're now making a public scene.  Maybe some stranger misunderstands what's happening and tells the kid to be more respectful to his mother?  Maybe the carnival staff wind up tossing the two of them out?  Maybe the kid turns a carnival-game water gun on her and the tension breaks in a fit of laughter?

Scenes don't always turn out exactly the way we expect them to, but sometimes this means they turn out better.  Once you've finished your first draft, consider taking the scenes that wound up the strongest and moving them where they will matter the most: the major turning points.

But if you're going to do this kind of cut-and-paste, why bother plotting at all?  Well, some of you won't.  And that might be fine for you.  But if you're doing your job, this type of re-arranging and deepening is going to happen some time.  The more of it you work out in advance, the less you have to do after the fact, and the more possibilities you'll be aware of when you do.  That doesn't necessarily mean you won't have to do any re-arranging at all, but it at least allows for the possibility.  For me, I prefer to work on structure as much as possible ahead of time, that way I can try it as many different ways as possible in theory, so when I get to the developmental edits, I already have some idea of the ways I can rearrange in actuality.

Structure is important, but it's not rigid.  There's always room to move things around, and to come up with fresh twists and turns.  Before you start worrying about grammar, word choice, and spelling, take some time to make sure your scenes are in the right order to tell the story you want to tell.