And no, I’m not about to claim to have finished one. I’m on the other end of that spectrum. I just happen to be approaching this one with a seriousness that some other attempts have lacked. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. “This is the one I’m really going to finish.” Surely I’ve never said that about any of those other projects.

As it turns out, writing a novel is a different beast altogether from writing a short story. Part of my novel difficulties has been that, while honing my writing skills in my early career, I had to train myself to get the story out there fast. As such, I grew to equate depth of description as frivolous navel-gazing. This plot has got to move! I need to tell this whole story in 7500 words. Or 5000 words. Or 1000 words. Or 750. Yes, that was a regular target for me in flash contests.

One of the things that accompanies such brevity is the possibility of holding the whole plot in your head at once. This makes story structure an easier thing to mold, at least for me. This week, as I attacked the outline for the LitRPG novel that has captured my imagination (Dungeon Crawler Carl rocked my world), I realized my plot-in-a-nutshell method wasn’t going to cut it.

As I mentioned, I’ve been at this writing thing for a long time. I have no formal training as a fiction writer or any other kind of writer. I didn’t even take any writing classes in college; my ACT score exempted me. So most of what I know is self-taught. Not to suggest that I pulled it all out of thin air. It came from books. Writer’s Digest and Elements of Fiction Writing and Lukeman’s The First Five Pages and Gotham Workshop books, and yes, Snyder’s Save the Cat. I’ve seen more videos and con panels on story structure than any man should ever be asked to endure. But somehow, after umpteen million times, I finally started to wonder if I needed to think about story structure while I made my outline.

Why should I think about it? Don’t I know it by heart? Don’t I live and breathe and eat and poop story structure? Apparently, I do not. Because today, when I created an extra column in my outline spreadsheet to enumerate which story beats were happening in which chapter, the story clicked.

Once I got to the “oh yeah, Save the Cat made a lot of good points:” thought in my head, I realized I had trouble recalling what those good points were. Back through YouTube, again finding a gem in this Reedsy, vid summarizing the 15 cat-saving beats. Then I found this handy chart from this article. I’ll tell you what–these percentages really helped!

I locked myself in at 40 chapters. If the actual writing of the story demands 38 or 42, I’ll be flexible, but the plan was 40. That put the Catalyst at the beginning of chapter 5, the debate stretching through chapter 8, the B story kicking off about chapter 9, Midpoint at 21, Dark Night of the Soul in 31-32… I already had ideas of where I wanted the story go, but this more than anything else let me lay the brickwork for the yellow road to the Wonderful Land of Novel. Was it new information? Not really. Now I know how my Precalculus students feel when they factor their 457th trinomial and suddenly understand what they’d been doing in all 456 that came before it. Or in a more relatable metaphor, I felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. Sometimes you need a little framework to nudge the ball back on course.

I’m not counting chickens before I even have eggs. I know I’m on step 3 out of 93 just to get a draft. I just wanted to share the feeling of relief and ease I experienced when I finally applied this structure deliberately. That coupled with my recent trend toward over-writing instead of the short story induced under-writing suggests that maybe this time will be the one that gets all the way to The End. I can’t wait to start putting words to page.

I’ll let you know how it goes.