Plot & Structure
by James Scott Bell · James Scott Bell
James Scott Bell's Writer's Digest guide to building a novel's plot: the LOCK system, three-act structure, scene construction, openings, middles and endings, and plotting approaches for both outliners and discovery writers. Readers learn to diagnose and fix structural problems in a manuscript.
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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.
BYU Creative Writing Lectures
Learn plot structure from bestselling author Brandon Sanderson in these BYU Creative Writing lectures. Master storytelling techniques today!
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.