Choosing a story structure

A story structure is a map of where a story turns: where the trouble starts, where it changes shape, where it comes to a head. None of them is a rule. They are different ways of describing the same thing readers feel as momentum, and each one puts its landmarks in different places. The right one is the one that helps you see your book, and that depends on what kind of book it is.

This page compares the twelve structures covered in this section, then suggests where to start for each kind of story.

The structures at a glance

The lengths are common starting points for each form, not targets you have to hit.

Start from what your story is about

The quickest way to choose is to ask what drives the book.

• A goal pursued against growing odds, ending in one decisive confrontation: three acts, or Save the Cat! if you want more landmarks along the way.
• A reversal of fortune, where the great turn comes in the middle and the rest is consequence: five acts.
• A journey that changes the traveller, out into a strange world and back: the hero's journey for an epic, the story circle for something smaller and more personal.
• A character who ends as the opposite of how they began: seven-point structure, which starts from that ending.
• Pressure from the first page, with no time to settle in: the Fichtean curve.
• A relationship, where the plot is two people getting together: romance beats.
• A puzzle the reader tries to solve alongside the detective: the mystery structure.
• A change of perspective rather than a fight, a story that builds to a new way of seeing: kishōtenketsu.
• One storyline, told tightly: the novella or, shorter still, the short story.

By kind of story

These are the structures Mythforge suggests for each kind of story, the best fit first. They are good places to start, not the only ones that work.

They share the same bones

Most of these structures are the same shape with different names for its parts. A story disturbs a settled life, commits its hero to a course, turns somewhere near the middle, collapses before the end, and resolves.

• Save the Cat!, the hero's journey and seven-point structure are all three-act stories with more named beats. Save the Cat!'s Break into Two, the hero's Crossing the First Threshold and seven-point's Plot Turn 1 are the same moment seen from different angles.
• Five acts split the three-act middle into rising action, a central turn and falling action. The comparison of three and five acts shows how they line up.
• The story circle is the hero's journey boiled down to eight steps and a character's need.
• Romance and mystery beats are genre maps laid over the same bones: the break-up and the wrong answer both sit where the three-act story's lowest point does.
• Kishōtenketsu is the real outlier: its turn is a twist of perspective, not a clash.

That means you can't really pick the wrong one. If the vocabulary of one structure helps you see your draft, use it; if it doesn't, try another and see what it shows you.

Structure is for revision too

You don't have to plan with a structure before you write. Many writers draft freely and then hold the draft up against a structure to see where it sags: a middle with no midpoint, a climax that arrives too early, an ending that doesn't answer the question the opening asked. How to revise a first draft covers that kind of read-through, and How to outline a novel covers planning, whichever way round you work.

Story structures in Mythforge

When you start a new manuscript in Mythforge you can start it from any of these structures. It sets up the manuscript for you: a word target for the book, its acts, and a chapter for every beat, each with a synopsis of what that part of the story does and a word target that is its share of the whole. Pick what you're writing to see the structures that suit it, choose how many chapters you want, and check the outline before you create it.

Nothing is fixed: rename, move, split or delete the chapters as the story finds its own shape. See Story structures in the feature guides for how it works.