Stephen King was one of my earliest influences as a fiction writer. In On Writing, King compares creating a story to uncovering a fossil. He tends to begin with characters and a situation rather than an elaborate outline. Put believable people into an interesting situation, he argues, and find out what they do.
Stephen King: Discover the Story
That approach still appeals to me but it certainly isn’t the only way writers are taught to write fiction.
Over the years, writers, teachers, editors, and screenwriters have developed dozens of theories about what makes stories work. Some emphasize character. Some emphasize conflict. Others offer detailed structures telling us what should happen and sometimes approximately when it should happen.
Most can teach us something. None is the one correct way to write fiction.
Aristotle: Cause and Effect
Interestingly, many of our modern ideas about story structure can be traced back more than two thousand years to Aristotle. In Poetics, Aristotle emphasized something deceptively simple: cause and effect. A story should have a beginning, middle, and end, but events shouldn’t merely happen one after another. What happens next should grow out of what happened before.
His ideas still leave us with some remarkably useful questions:
Does one event cause another?
Do characters’ actions have consequences?
Does the ending grow out of what came before?
Notice what Aristotle doesn’t give us: a checklist telling us exactly what must happen on page 50 or what every scene must contain. He gives us principles about how stories work. And there is a difference.
GMC: Goal, Motivation, Conflict
Debra Dixon’s Goal, Motivation, and Conflict (GMC) asks three wonderfully simple questions: What does the character want? Why does the character want it? What prevents the character from getting it? Those questions are particularly useful for character-driven fiction because they help us understand why our characters behave as they do.
Save the Cat, Build the Structure
Save the Cat, developed by Blake Snyder for screenwriting and later adapted for novels by Jessica Brody, takes a much more structural approach. It identifies fifteen story beats and suggests approximately where they should occur. For a writer struggling with plot or pacing, that roadmap can be enormously helpful.
Fictionary: Analyse the Scene
Then there is Fictionary, a contemporary system that analyzes fiction scene by scene. What does the character want? What is at stake? What changes? Does the scene have an effective entry and exit hook? Again, excellent questions.
Which Fiction Writing Method is “Right?”
The problem with any of these theories or systems comes when useful questions become rules. A system designed to help us understand why a story isn’t working can gradually become a checklist for deciding whether we’re writing a story “correctly.”
And that’s where I become wary.
Different writers work differently. Different stories work differently. A mystery does not move exactly like a romance. An epic fantasy should have a much slower rhythm than an action suspense novel. Even two novels by the same author may need very different approaches.
What all these theories share is more interesting than where they disagree.
Stories need to engage readers. Events need consequences. Characters need reasons for doing what they do. Something needs to change. Readers need enough information to understand what matters, enough uncertainty to keep reading, and enough resolution to feel that the journey led somewhere.
Those are principles. How an individual writer accomplishes them is craft.
So perhaps the healthiest question to ask about any writing theory isn’t, “Does my chapter obey the rules?”
It’s, “Is my chapter working?”
If it isn’t, GMC, Save the Cat, Fictionary, or another theory may help you understand why. If it is working, however, the fact that it doesn’t conform to one particular system may tell us more about the limitations of the system than about the limitations of the story.
A theory should give writers another tool. It should not become another rulebook.