When I wrote my first novel, I didn’t know anything about story structure, conflict, or even the three act rule. I just downloaded YWriter and plugged away, ending up with a novel that had a slow but creepy first half, then everything goes nuts after that.
For 180,000 words.
My first re-write of that added another 9,000 words, but didn’t fix the pacing any.
I somehow just assumed that my writing a good novel (and it is good!) would guarantee that people would buy it, it would be a success, and I could buy a house somewhere that the landscape would inspire more writing.
And I’m not alone. This is how most beginning writers think.
It wasn’t until I moved back into screen writing that I discovered that screenplays have a definite structure, and that you have to conform to that structure.
Being innovative, I wondered – hey, maybe I could apply this to my novel writing?
As I moved along, I began to realize (four novels into it) that I HAD to apply this to my novel writing.
Stories are structure. The sooner you learn this, the faster you’ll get over the objection phase and into the writing phase.
What one thing will make your book 100% better immediately? An inciting incident, a single event at the beginning of your story that drives the plot and all of the characters.
So why do you need an inciting incident?
- Readers need a reason to keep reading. This is a hard rule to learn. If you don’t give a reader a compelling reason to keep reading, they won’t buy any more of your books. It will be great to sell 10,000 copies of a book, but horrible to sell zero copies of the second. An inciting incident makes a novel come alive. My wife told me my second novel was “perfect”, but I’d lost something in the third. Since my second novel starts out with a tension drawing incident, by the time you’re four chapters in, a reader is emotionally invested in the characters.
- An agent needs a reason to keep reading. If you send your thirty or fifty pages to an agent and there’s nothing to drive the story, you’re not selling your ability to write. Without that, no agent, no publishing contract, no income, no career. We write because we enjoy it. We write because we need to. We write and eventually, the desire to do nothing but writing compels us to keep writing for a living.
- A publisher needs a reason to keep reading. This is the last stage in your career goals – write, agent, publisher. After that, it’s the book release party, etc. Well, in actuality, it’s the drudgery of successive rewrite requests, THEN the proofing, THEN etc. And finally, there’s your book on the book shelves. But if you don’t give the publisher a reason to buy it and you, you’re right back to square one.
- Your novel needs it for good reviews and good sales. We can pretend we’re artsy and don’t care about money, but in reality things like groceries and gas for our cars demands we bring in a living. If you write a book that’s drudgery to get through, your book will not pull in good reviews. And nobody reads a book review of a novel that says, “this is awful” and runs out to buy it!
- Your novel needs it for shelf life and longevity. Some writers manage to pull in a million dollars a year just on sales of their back catalog. If someone is not driven to read your books over and over again, it diminishes sales of your book after its initial run. Making $100,000 off of a single book is great, until you look at that ten years down the line! The key to making a successful living as a writer is to make the books something you can read over and over and over again.
Conclusion
Without knowledge of story structure, you’re fighting an uphill battle all the way, and may never see publication. We all want to see our book on store shelves – it’s not too hard to simply learn some basic structure and get it to serve you and your novels!
