BYU Creative Writing Lectures
Brandon Sanderson
Learn plot structure from bestselling author Brandon Sanderson in these BYU Creative Writing lectures. Master storytelling techniques today!
More resources on Plot Structure
Helping Writers Become Authors
K.M. Weiland's long-running craft blog and podcast covering story structure, character arcs, outlining and scene construction. Readers get a consistent structural vocabulary of beats, arcs and act turns for diagnosing why a draft stalls and revising it.
Story Grid
Editor Shawn Coyne's method for analysing narrative, using a spreadsheet that tracks genre conventions, obligatory scenes and value shifts scene by scene. Applying it gives a concrete diagnostic for where a manuscript loses tension or breaks reader expectation.
Poetics (Butcher translation, full text)
The earliest surviving treatise on dramatic construction and the origin of the whole with a beginning, middle and end, plus the complication/unravelling split that later act models formalise. Covers plot unity, reversal, recognition and the ordering of incidents in about forty pages.
Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique
A film scholar tests the three-act model against ten Hollywood successes including Tootsie, Alien and Groundhog Day, concludes it fails to describe them, and proposes four roughly equal parts: setup, complicating action, development, climax and epilogue.
Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story
Yorke, a former BBC drama executive, reconciles three-act, five-act, and monomyth models into a single shape and argues why narratives take it, drawing on psychology and examples from Macbeth to Mad Men.
Dan Harmon — Story Structure 101–106 (Channel 101 Wiki)
Dan Harmon's essay series laying out his eight-step story circle, a compressed adaptation of the monomyth built for short-form television. Six installments move from the basic circle to act breaks, character need, and pilot construction.