#dramatic structure

Broadly speaking, I have a few different ways of outlining. 

For really short pieces, I don’t do any conscious outlining at all. I just sort of start and go, and see where it lands. With fanfic that tends to be easy? Drabbles and one-shots are short and scenes end up with a natural conclusion. I stop as soon as the ‘end’ feels right. With a smut scene that tends to be an obvious place - the characters do their thing, get off, and then flirt or there’s some establishment for what this means for them and where things are going next, and then it’s over. For not smut pieces, it’s similar in that there’s a central tension, and as soon as it’s resolved, I like to figure out the final emotional beat the piece should leave on and cut it there.

(Endings establish a lasting emotion. You can intuit as you go through a piece what the ending should feel like and what you’re building toward. It shouldn’t create a sense of whiplash for the reader, though it can be abrupt or sad if that fits the tone of the piece).

But let’s talk about longer stories. And let’s talk first about the beginning/opening original outline.

Outlining for longer pieces sometimes starts by following the same logic as one-shots and drabbles – that is, no outline at all. This is true for a few of my longer works, like Seventy-Three Seconds and These Violent Delights. With those works, I just jumped in. I didn’t have an outline in mind at the start, I just let my fingers type out words and it just sort of unravelled into the opening of a story, with a conflict built in that would have to be solved.

I say this only to highlight the fact that if you don’t have a full story idea in mind when you start - that’s okay. You can still start. It’s alright to jump in, if that’s what you need to do, and if outlining is causing you grief and getting in the way of just getting words out.

Because even when I start with no outline, and no real concept of where I’m going, I automatically end up with an outline quickly. This is probably the case for most people. And for most of my longer workers (AATJS, Tumbling Together, Melancholic Temperate, and Needs Must), I do start with an outline, one that looks similar to what the other stories’ outlines end up as.

And what that “outline” looks like, when I start, is just ideas in my head. Sometimes jot notes or conversations I’ve had with others about story ideas that I saved, but really, there’s no solid “A will happen, then B will happen, then C will happen” flow the way you might have an outline for an essay for school. There’s definitely never ever a “chapter 1 will have X, chapter 2 will have Y” right at the outset.

Instead of a concrete series of events, what there is is a series of what I call “milestones”. These milestones are scenes I imagine in vivid detail that I want to see happen in the story. A lot of these scenes come up earlier on in the story, but not always. And my original “outline” for a story involves basically these scenes connected by a string. I know the story will have to bridge the gaps between them, but I’m not fussed, I just know that I want the story to head in the direction to make them happen.

After I’ve got the milestones, I start to fill in the blanks. How do we get from A to B? I can do this mentally, or in writing. I don’t stress early on in the narrative about outlining the chapters, I just sort of let them write themselves and see what comes out, knowing that I have a specific scene or milestone that I’m building toward and all the words on the page are explicitly or implicitly working toward that scene. 

And then I get to that scene and - sometimes it happens exactly like I planned. And sometimes I have to completely change it because the narrative changes once you put it on the page and that scene no longer works the way you planned.

And when I talk about outlines changing, that’s a big part of what I mean: that in the process of building toward what I had planned, something has changed, and my plan no longer feels authentic to the narrative. And when that happens, I change the narrative. It’s that whole idea of “kill your darlings”. I might’ve already written out that milestone scene (more than once, if I really like it) but that doesn’t mean it actually works with the story I’m trying to tell. And liking that scene doesn’t mean that scene likes itself. 

And so the outline updates. And writing becomes this beautiful iteration of imagining scenes and milestones for the narrative, filling them in and the blanks between, then editing and updating and changing it because it’s necessary, as the story has grown beyond what’s in my head.

As to how I decide what to change? Well, most of everything I write is in the service of the characters. They guide their stories. They have to be consistent in some manner within their core selves, and if they’re not then I’m doing something wrong. I write for and about people. With that in mind, when I hit a roadblock and realize something doesn’t work, I ask myself what would/should the characters be doing in this situation. I ask myself if there’s enough tension, enough release of that tension. 

And I work hard - and I mean well and truly - I spend a lot of my outlining energy on narrative build. I only discovered this past year that not everyone learns about this in grade school, but narratives tend to follow this standard form, which apparently is called ‘dramatic structure’, and I use it strongly in my story scaffolds:

Exposition / Setting / Introduction 

Initial incident (introduce the conflict and characters)

Rising action (build tension into the story)

Climax (highest point of narrative tension)

Falling action

Resolution

I adhere to that like it’s my writing bible when it comes to how I set up a story. Except with fic, I get to skip the vast majority of the exposition and setting when it comes to introducing the characters. Which suits me well - I really like jumping right in. And even when I do have an AU or exposition to bring in, I still aim to jump kind of straight to the initial incident then give exposition throughout. I like to open with a ‘hook’.

But anyway, when “outlining”, I have to have some idea, even if I don’t put it into words, of what the climax of the story is. Everything else in some way needs to be in service of that. All the tension and release and everything else needs to build, ultimately, to that moment, where the conflict is resolved and it all clicks. Then I speed through the falling action and resolution quick because after the climactic moment of any given story, my own personal attention wanes with it (when I’m reading, I mean). After things are resolved at the climax, you know it’s just housekeeping, so if the falling action drags on and on and on, why would I bother continuing to read? I know they get to have a happily ever after (or whatever the case is) so this doesn’t matter except to give me a bit of closure. 

So when my outlines change, it’s partly because I’m fucking up something to do with this dramatic structure. I’ll realize that I’m resolving a major aspect of the conflict too soon, and have to turn it into a more minor release of tension. Or I’ll realize that I have a scene planned for later in the story but if I keep it where it is, it’ll be after the main conflict is resolved. It might be the resolution of a more minor conflict, but at that point, something is out of order. For me, personally, I don’t like to leave too much to mop up after that climactic moment, and I don’t want to have other semi-serious conflicts left that are going to be creating any real amount of tension in the reader still.

Final notes before I get to some examples: I have a strong tendency for my stories to unfold in three clear acts. Almost all of them can be separated that way (though Tumbling Together is a little meandering and doesn’t fit quite so well, but that’s half because the conflict of that story changes about halfway through in a weird way…). And each act tends to have it’s own minor conflict and resolution, to help give the readers a build and lift to buoy them through the story to the major moment of climax. And though those aren’t explicitly part of the outline in a conscious way, I have outlined my more complicated stories as being in three acts before to help me figure out where to place scenes and how to have things build.

Now, to bring some of this down to earth in a more concrete way, I’m gonna use some examples of how I outlined different fics.

I’ll start by talking about AATJS, which had the most outlining I’ve ever done. In that story, Len and Barry are soulmates and it creates a massive clusterfuck lasting 275k words. I had hashed out the story idea/outline with a friend as a quick conversation, and the basics of it were them bonding and Barry panicking about it, Barry avoiding Len and hiding his bond, and Len doing increasingly vexing shit to more or less get his attention, the military getting involved and kidnapping (and torturing) Len because of his connection to Barry. 

Those were like, the basics. And led to a few especially vivid mental milestones for me in the early stages of writing: Barry panicking after bonding was very vivid and narratively essential, a scene where Len gets in a bar fight and gets his knuckles cut up and bruised and Barry goes to comfort him about it, even though they’re not on good terms, but it creates some softness between them, a scene where Len steals something halfway to get Barry’s attention and Barry is really pissed at him for it, and a scene where Len’s tied to a chair being interrogated by Eiling, and his bond with Barry is being used against him.

If you’ve read the fic, you might recognize that not all those scenes happened, and didn’t all happen like that. What did happen is that I had to answer the question of “how does Len see Barry’s soulmate mark and thus bond with him?” and the answer was that he’d have to fight alongside Barry to be in a situation where he sees it, and the obvious answer to kick Barry’s ass and also tie the narrative to the military was Grodd, so I just kind of threw Grodd into the story without thinking. 

And then things built with Barry hiding the bond from his family and friends, and I needed to introduce more shit going on on Len’s side as he’s kind of spiralling, and other Rogues accidentally wrote themselves into the plot. And Len does steal something which pisses off Barry, but instead of being to get his attention, he does it with Mark Mardon and completely different motivations. And the fallout from that created a whole different mess for me to solve. And shortly after I started working on the fic, a new milestone presented itself as necessary: the moment where Barry and Len actually come together, and start being honest with each other, which is a really poignant scene where Barry basically offers himself to Len because they’re both suffering in this toxic way, and they realize a lot about each other and realize how much they each care about the other. And it was pivotal for the narrative, but built itself into the outline only after I began to work on the story.

And things changed and updated from there, all leading to a central climactic moment that combined the main and sub storylines into a single moment of resolution. The main storyline was Barry and Len’s romance, with a key conflict being their ability to be together authentically and in a solid, forever kind of way, because even though they’re soulmates, Barry has this hesitation through the whole story that evolves into not being able to say he’s in love with Len. And the subplot of the story (or one of them) revolves around the military, and Grodd, and it creates so much conflict throughout the story that I realized eventually that I couldn’t resolve it before (or after) resolving the other, that both of these narratives had to be resolved simultaneously. And every edit in the outline from then on was about making sure the story was building in a direction of resolving these tensions at once.

Okay, whew. This post is getting long.

Final bits - with Melancholic Temperament, my outline consisted of a couple of milestones scenes, and with a basic structure / scaffold in place. I wanted the first 2/3 of the story to involve de-aged Len, and the final 1/3 to involve grown up Len, and I had a few pivotal scenes in mind (young!Len misreading Barry’s intentions and propositioning him, adult!Len at the moment of re-aging) when I started, and most of the in-between outline was like “here’s the villain. Is she really a villain? Let’s explore that later. Also do young Len and Barry get together? It adds to the conflict and tension, let’s build to that. We need scenes where they get closer, and have this poignant kind of connection, possibly with Len having nightmares or with midnight conversations”. 

Some stuff wasn’t in the outline at all, like Mick just hijacked the plot and wrote himself into the story and I was like “huh, okay, hi Mick, what are you doing here?” but I didn’t let it change the ultimate narrative.

 With Needs Must, things have been bizarre in terms of outlining. Originally, the story was just an idea in my head that I never planned to write and it was just coldflash. I had some milestone scenes in mind, a lot because the fic was rolling around in my head for a long time (the first time they get together, the second when they realize it’s not cured and the sense of dread that sneaks into the narrative, a scene at some point in the story where Barry was going to go too far and Len was going to freak out, and Barry was going to back off and this was going to lead to them having to shift gears). 

But a lot wasn’t in the original outline in my head, and was only added once I switched to coldwestallen and started writing. Like the villain? Wasn’t in the original, and in the first version, was an actual villain. Kat in the current version is contrite and out of her depth and while not innocent of wrong doing, never intended for this to happen. But as soon as I pivoted to coldwestallen, a really important milestone the narrative (and thus outline) had to build toward was the moment at which they realize what’s going on with the ‘curse’.

And in terms of dramatic structure, I also had to make sure that moment didn’t feel like a resolution. Normally that would be the climax of a story, or come shortly before it: catch the villain, find out how to fix things, then fix them. But this story is a bit different, and the central conflict has never been the sex curse (though it’s tied up in it), it’s about these three characters falling in love. And the story can’t be done, and the tension can’t be released, until that happens.

So I used that scene to up the ante rather than letting it release the tension. And because it needed to go that way, if the real underlying conflict is these three people falling in love, then the curse itself had to lead them there and be resolved by that. I didn’t decide the curse was about falling in love until I decided that the story was going to be all three of them, and until I realized that I wanted a scene where the truth is revealed to them but doesn’t fix a damn thing and only makes it potentially worse.

And then there are a bunch of other outline changes within it. That scene where Mick finds out about the curse? There was a long debate about whether to keep or kill that entire piece, or move it in the story, and deciding what purpose it serves to the overall conflict and resolution. It almost replaced the potion Barry drinks, because I almost shortened the story by a good deal, but ultimately decided I wanted to extend the narrative and let it build a little slower so that Iris has more time in the narrative.

And Iris and Len slowly orbiting and falling into each other was originally only going to happen as / after the curse was broken. But then I realized, back to that dramatic structure, that if the central tension of the story comes from Barry’s ability to love Len, I had to move Len and Iris up. The conflict was originally going to be more about them being able to be together and getting together, but because of how the story naturally wrote itself (with the love as the central conflict moment), it started to feel unnatural if I were to resolve the curse and still have a chunk of the story and a conflict left afterward. In the original outline it would’ve been a whole act (act three) but the story wasn’t writing itself that way and I had to tie Iris and Len into the build up to the narrative climax that exists in the actual story, rather than the one in a bygone outline. And thus the current version of events in the story has unfolded.

So - major tl;dr here. 

My outlines more or less consist of knowing what the central tension or conflict of a story is (which sometimes changes a bit as it goes) and making sure everything else works in the service of building to the moment that’s resolved, then being able to wrap up really quickly afterwards with no major sources of tension left over. I pick scenes as narrative ‘milestones’ that act as a scaffold or guide for the rest of the story, and these scenes can change the but idea in them, of tension or of conflict, of what they accomplish for the broader narrative, tends to stay the same.