Story Structure

1. Basic Act Structure Overview

*This is an oversimplification of the structure of story. This is what I came up with that helped me start to understand how a story is structured and conveyed. I am a visually oriented person and therefore needed to show myself a layout of the whole picture in as simple of form as possible, then learn from there.

So what is a Story? As told by Robert McKee, it is “For better or worse an event throws a character’s life out of balance arousing in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-personal). He may or may not achieve it. This is Story in a nutshell.”

What I derive out of that is:

A story needs a willful force. A character that is somewhere and needs to go somewhere else. The Beginning.
A story needs obstacles. On their way somewhere else, they are confronted by other forces. Obstacles to contend with. The Middle.
A story needs a resolution. Where did the character end up? Did they rebalance? Did they get to where they set out to go? The End.

Now I’ve learned that a story isn’t restricted to just that context, in fact, that a story is only one section of the everlasting continuum of a bigger story. Simply put, stories are fractal. We could zoom closer in or further out, but they are always part of their smaller or larger story.

Looking at the structure of a single told story, it can be broken into 3 parts. The beginning, middle and end, also seen as Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. And for each smaller section of the story, the same principle applies. The character starts somewhere (beginning), confronts an obstacle and makes a choice (middle), then the truth of the choice is manifested, bringing us to the end. Its the same pattern, just on differing levels of magnitude relative to the whole story. Even the story itself is a section of a larger story that could be told. Below is a graphic that shows how a basic story is structured and parts defined. This is not a formula. If I were to apply this to a story it would in a way have its own fingerprint of how its beats, scenes, sequences and acts played out. And even there, others have broken it down story structure into many ways, just like I’m doing here. Redundant right? But I guess what I’m saying is, there is an underlying pattern that exists in all stories but it is that pattern that also makes each story unique.