Structure is Your Friend

Finding the right structure can make your story soar

Hello there.

If you don’t know me, I’m the author of several novels, including the USA Today bestseller The Child Finder and the award-winning The Enchanted.

Today I want to talk about structure.

A well-crafted book is equal parts grounded and divine—it is enmeshed with the patterns of life, and yet also takes us someplace beyond. If we want to write a book that works, we need to have structure.

Pic of me and the brilliant Willy Vaultin. We may have been talking structure. But probably not.

Structure is the unseen roadmap the reader follows. It’s the comforting landscape they feel grounded on without even knowing it.

They trust in the journey, because they can feel intuitively you are taking them someplace.

Everything in our world has structure. Structure feels innate. It feels biological. We live in houses that have structure, we walk on streets with patterns. Nature is full of structure.

When a book lacks structure, it doesn’t just fizzle. It collapses. This is what people mean when they say they stopped reading because a book wasn’t going anywhere. Or that it meandered.

Not having a clear structure is like asking a reader to enter a building without stairs or elevators and somehow find their way to the fifth floor. Most are going to balk at the door. If they look inside and see a construction mess—or worse, a yawning hole of words—they are out of there.

Lack of structure is not artistic. It’s just a mess.

Structure is not the same as plot. Plot is the story you are going to tell. Structure is the organization or pattern of the storytelling.

There’s plenty of structures you can find online, from the classic three acts to more complicated beat sheets.

But trying to force our story into a random structure can feel like putting on a really itchy suit. It just doesn’t work. This is especially true when we are writing from the heart. We don’t want our story to feel manufactured.

This is why I suggest a more organic, creative process: Let your story inform the structure. If the story comes from the heart, it comes with a map, too.

Here are some different and effective ways to approach structure:

Cadence. Your voice has a cadence, a rhythm, to it. This makes for a structure the reader can feel, like music in the background. Once you have that cadence, think about the story you are telling, and how it fits into the rhythm.

Artifacts: books can be structured around letters, flight logs, diary entries, or any other artifact—real or imagined—you want to use.

Character: Is your story built around one character? That’s a structure right there: the structure of a life. Beginning, middle. End.

The natural world. Think of days and nights, moons and seasons, nature and waves. The Overstory by Richard Powers is an example of a structure based in nature. He used the biology of trees, including concentric rings, to structure his book.

Subject: Say you are writing a story set at a racetrack. You could structure your book around the races, from starting gun to finish. Or your memoir on dissociation could be structured not around what you remember, but the hollow places where you do not.

Time: The ticktock is an age-old approach to storytelling. Having a time constraint—a race against the clock—is an effective way to structure a story. You can divide the book into days or weeks and you’re off to the races.

A few fiddly bits:

Your structure should be consistent throughout the book. If you start with one structure (say, ticktock) and then switch to another (artifacts) the reader can get confused and lose their way.

It’s okay to write your story and figure out the structure later.

If you are troubleshooting a book that isn’t working, consider the structure. Maybe your thriller would work better using artifacts to organize the story. Or maybe you want to use the natural world to tell your memoir. Take some risks and have fun.

I’d love to hear where you are at with your book. If you leave a question in the comments—it doesn’t have to be on structure, but can be anything writing related—I would be happy to answer. I love helping other writers. I lead a stressful life with my day job in justice, and connecting with other writers is a balm.

Good luck writing everyone—even in these darkest of times.

And also, consider ordering my forthcoming novel, based on my real life experiences exonerating innocents. It’s called The Talking Bone and you can order it here.