What I See in Stories

Often, in the midst of their personal turmoil, people are flooded with their emotions. In that condition, it is a challenge to perceive and understand your own story arc. When someone shares their story with me, I have a talent for noticing the story structure inside it.

Doing so is so natural to me that I don’t always realize that the person I’m speaking with doesn’t see their own story the same way. Sharing what I notice has had mixed results, but I’ve grown better at this over time.

Let’s walk through a quick example—even very short stories have structure if you learn to look for it:

When I was twenty-two, a friend called and said, half-breathless with shock: “I just lost my job.”

Remembering all the times she’d complained work, I replied, “Good. You hated that job.”

“True,” she said slowly. Then with growing frustration, she added, “But it doesn’t feel good at the time.”

She was still reeling, stung by the rejection of being fired and stressed by the unexpected need to look for another job.

My mind, however, was reviewing her whole story. Instead of considering her valid discomfort, I’d already skipped over her current experience and the messy job-hunting period. Instead, I’d jumped ahead to the next chapter, i.e. my friend finding a job she liked better. After a pause, I did tell her that I was sorry she’d lost her job.

We were both looking at the same story in her character arc. We just weren’t looking at the same spot in the story.

To explain what I mean, we need to dive deeper into the way I tend to structure stories, so we’re going to take a look at story structure in two ways:

• The way I learned in school

• My version

Then we’re going to re-examine this story through this lens.

The Structure of a Story

Once, flipping through my elementary school textbook, I found a diagram of story structure which looked roughly like this:

In a story, a character is just clicking around in their regular life (exposition) until something happens to knock them out of the original normal and into the conflict (the inciting incident). External events occur that challenge the character (conflict), and these escalate for a while (rising action). Then the most intense event occurs (the climax), and as this final event is resolved (falling action), the character enters a new normal (denouement).

That’s the external structure of a story—what is on the surface, visible outside the characters. It’s “what happens” in the plot.

At the same time, each character has an interior journey, which occurs under the surface action. The story’s outer movement is entwined with the character’s inner shifts.

Intuitively, you know the rhythm of this, especially if you read a lot: an external event around a character triggers an answering realization in a character, often called “an epiphany.” Epiphanies usually create character growth, because increased understanding on the inside of a person tends to create more informed action on the outside of a person.

Viewed together, the external and internal happenings look something like the image above.

You can think of the internal happenings as a net running under the story’s driving conflict. It catches everything that the character feels about the action of the story.

Typically, the epiphany and the climax don’t happen exactly at the same time. It’s hard to feel like new possibilities are opening up for you in the shock of getting fired, the same way it’s hard to have a deep epiphany about the power of friendship when you’re in the middle of fighting a dragon. Characters, like people, need a little time to integrate what happens to them, which is why the epiphany often takes place during or after the falling action.

In an exceptionally well-constructed story, it is possible to weave together a final climax and final epiphany in the same event, but to make it believable, you have to earn that by laying the groundwork, usually by planting smaller but related epiphanies and climaxes along the way. In other words, you built to those two elements happening together.

I wanted to introduce the story structure the same way I learned in school, because that might also be the way you learned—you can just build on your previous knowledge.

However, that’s not how I refer to story structure throughout the JourneyPen Project. I use my own language when I think about a story, and we’ll dive into that next.

Story Structure: Shelby’s Version

As I’ve discussed before, not all writers and storytellers approach their narratives in the same way. Some, for example, don’t consider both the inner and the outer conflict at the same time.

However, since you’re here, I’m assuming that you’re curious about my writing process in particular.

I can’t actually separate the character’s exterior and interior paths. For me, it’s like they’re always dancing with each other, and something would be missing if either one didn’t show up for their half of the performance.

Like the language around story, and the integration of interior and exterior character arcs, the shape of a story’s structure is pretty malleable according to the writer.

Because I learned about it so young, I often think about it in the exact same shape as the way I learned about it in school.

However, a few months ago, when discussing the novel I was drafting, I drew a picture to show the story’s structure, and it looked like this:

A story’s structure can also look like whatever you want.

Here, however, I’m going to use the same shape as what I learned in school:

And when I am planning out and/or trying to explain my own story structure, these are the terms I use:

• Backstory: the original normal at the start of a story.

• Catalyst: whatever gets the main action of the story started.

• Murky Middle: Everything that happens between the catalyst and the significant shift, including both the external and internal happenings.

• Significant Shift: both the most intense external event and interior development in the story.

• Resolution and New Understanding of Self: the new normal at the end of a story.

External Happenings, Internal Happenings, and the Significant Shift

Almost all stories—even jokes, even advertisements—have the external happenings.

For me, the juicy part is the internal happenings. This is what excites me enough to tell a story, and it’s what keeps me fascinated through all the endless revisions.

School will often separate out the climax and the epiphany, and you’ll need to continue to do so if you’re still in classes that grade you on that.

But when I’m structuring stories, whether a fictional one I’m writing or a real life one I’m noticing, I lump both the climax and the epiphany into a significant shift.

I do so, because I literally can’t separate them. To me, these are the same event. This approach may be different from other storytellers, including you.

For me, the significant shift is an unstoppable as an ocean wave: the same way that the momentum going into shore must return to the sea. The climax creates an answering epiphany that sinks deeply into a character’s self-understanding.

In other words, when something big happens, you learn something big from it. That’s the natural unfolding—you can’t stop that rhythm any more than you can keep a wave on the shore.

Literature scholars may speak about the climax and epiphanies separately, because academics categorizes things into tidy boxes.

But life isn’t like that. When you go through an experience, you feel it—you are immersed. You can’t remember that experience without an echo of the emotion washing over you too. This emotion—and the meaning you attach to it—may shift over time depending on what else unfolds, but in life, you can’t completely separate internal and external experiences.

So, why separate them artificially in storytelling?

Story Structure: Longer Stories

This seems simple, and you may be wondering if it’s too simple, especially for a longer story, such as a novel or a character arc over a book series.

But whether the story is long or short, the structure is the same—at least for me. You can see the whole arc as one story, but you can also see it as many stories one after the other.

In other words, longer stories will have multiple mini-catalysts as well as several murky middles, which will peak in smaller significant shifts along the way. In a novel, for example, chapters often have a central conflict with a mini-significant shift in them. Not every catalyst challenges the character to the same degree, and not every exterior or interior event has the same impact. Sometimes, that conflict is a fight scene, and sometimes, it’s a character having an intense chat with her mother.

That’s one way: you can view them as a series of shorter stories, linked together, each with their own backstory, catalyst, murky middle, significant shift, and resolution (and new understanding of self).

You can also view a longer story as the same overall story pattern, just with a longer, bumpier, and much more interesting Murky Middle.

Also, to save space, I’m just abbreviating “Significant Shift” to “Shift” below this bar. Just know that I still mean “significant shift.”

As I mentioned earlier this Season, I’ll be sharing more stories that help me illustrate the upcoming tools. The format is three linked stories: each story is complete in and of itself, so they can be read separately. However, the three stories also build on each other as one full, more nuanced story. This is what that looks like.

So, now that we have a common language around story structure, let’s circle back to the story about my friend losing her job, and re-examine its structure.