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Understanding Story Structure to Finish Your First Draft

Map out your story.

We all have novels we’ve started and never finished. We get excited about the beginning and pound out the words, thrilled with the idea. And while we may stay enamored with the concept, we just … don’t know what happens next. We know the beginning and maybe the end. Maybe we know a scene or two that happens in the middle, but we can’t figure out the actions and dialogue that form the connective tissue between those moments.

Understanding story structure can help with this. Let’s talk about how to map out a story so that we can actually finish a manuscript. You can do this and understanding how to map out story beats and define key elements of your characters is the first step.

We’ll use the story beats method from Save the Cat plus elements from other books to create a roadmap to get us from beginning to the middle to the end.

Joelle Reizes, writing as J.D. Blackrose, is the author of The Summoner's Mark series and The Soul Wars, The Devil's Been Busy, and the Zombie Cosmetologist novellas from Falstaff Books, as well as numerous short stories, including “A Sure Bet” in the Valkyries Initiative from Hit World Press and "The Case of the Haunted Tiara" in the charity anthology, Queer Power. Learn more at her website.