Understanding Story Structure

How do you scaffold a story? You may have heard about things like Freytag’s Pyramid or the 3-Act structure, but while those tools are helpful in a vacuum, it feels hard to actually hang a working story off of this abstract scaffolding.

Great stories don’t just follow certain pre-assigned trajectories—they use real life as a trellis. Let’s look at how storytellers experiment with story structure in ways that are easily applicable to your own work. 

Short Story Recommendation: “The Embassy of Cambodia” by Zadie Smith

Read it here, in The New Yorker.

This novella-length story is quintessential Zadie Smith, an English-Jamaican fiction writer whose incomparable wit and irony often explores race, class, and the effects of colonization. (Her first novel, White Teeth, which she wrote while she was an undergraduate, might be the funniest thing I’ve ever read.)

“The Embassy of Cambodia” has a few structural quirks. For starters, it’s written in the first person plural, with a “we” narrating the story of Fatou, a maidservant from the Ivory Coast who tends to a wealthy family in Willesden, Northwest London. Who is this “we”? It is the people of Willesden, speaking from a collective voice, observing from some higher perch Fatou’s quiet search for selfhood.

Also of note is the way this story is sectioned. Though it’s a novella-length short story, it has “chapters,” and those chapters are sectioned as O-1, O-2, through O-21. Those numbers resemble the way the points climb up in a badminton match, with badminton being a central image of the story, and with the “game” ending at 21 points.

Fatou is a character who has endured great hardships, and her hardships are all tied, in some way, to the aftermath of British colonization. Her journey to Willesden included stops in Ghana and Rome, and everywhere she has worked, she has been some kind of cleaning woman or servant with little time or space allotted to herself. Here, in Willesden, she certainly lacks privilege (at one point she questions whether or not she is, technically, a slave), but has been able to sneak away time for herself, including her Monday morning sojourns to the local swimming pool. It is on these sojourns that she sees badminton constantly played over a wall that surrounds the Embassy of Cambodia.

Smith’s story deftly excavates the awkward racial juxtapositions that result from colonization. That awkwardness occurs within every element of the story. The setting, Willesden, is somewhat multicultural, but only concerned with race insofar as it relates to class status. As a result, nobody expects the Embassy of Cambodia to be there, as it is “not the right sort of surprise” the residents would expect. Those residents, the “we” of the story, inform the story’s point of view. Fatou is narrated with plenty of sympathy, and yet, there is a constant sense of outsiderness, with the multitudinous narrator highlighting every possible way that Fatou doesn’t fit in. Thus, the plot and characters each relate, in some way, to this sense of outsiderness. Fatou takes the poor hand she was dealt in life with grace, but the attempts she makes of asserting her own place in the world are inevitably met with scorn.

That scorn is what drives the story to a close. Fatou saves one of the children of her employers, the Derawals, from choking on a marble. Rather than give gratitude, the Derawals can no longer look Fatou in the eye, and eventually they fire her, as she cares “more about the children than the cleaning.” There are plenty of ways to interpret this. I would argue that the Derawals did not like feeling indebted to Fatou. In saving their child from a stupid death, Fatou has exerted some form of power over them that transcends race and class, and the only way to retain this power is by firing Fatou. This, despite the fact that they already practically own Fatou—she doesn’t even have access to her own passport. All of this happens at O-21, with Fatou presumably having O points, and the society that basically owns her saying: game over.

Fatou eventually moves in, for a short time, with Andrew, a fellow African immigrant who introduces Fatou to the Catholic church. Andrew tells Fatou (and the reader) the most salient line about race and suffering: “A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.”

In other words, people who are not used to suffering cry the most when they first suffer. People who are used to suffering rarely cry in response. Fatou and Andrew are characters who have suffered, who come from a people that have suffered for centuries at the hands of colonization. They will likely never grow comfortable in a world that has laid claim on them, on their land, and made of them a diaspora. The Derawals, despite themselves being foreigners of England, have closed themselves up to suffering. They refuse to suffer, or to have anyone, not least an African woman, claim power over them. With power and suffering as focal points of the story, so much of present day race relations become startlingly clear. Zadie Smith’s genius lies not just in her story’s structure, her characters, and her wit, but in the way she isolates the complexities of race and colonization to these crystalized dynamics.

The story ends with the people of Willesden watching, silently, as Fatou waits for the bus to leave, and watching her watch the badminton game play over the wall of the Embassy of Cambodia. The final sentences—”We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.”—highlight the point of the story’s structure, and the alternating senses of hope and dread that underline this story’s racial power dynamics.

Notes on “Creating a Strong Story Structure” by Paula Hawkins

Read it here, in LitHub.

Structure is essential to storytelling. Even stories that don’t have a clear or logical structure need some way to organize the details, plot points, and character decisions that ultimately result in a satisfying story. While you don’t need to have a structure set in advance (and, actually, it’s better that you leave room for experimentation), you will benefit from having, at the very least, an organizing principle for your fiction.

What is structure? Most fiction writers are familiar with Freytag’s Pyramid, the most conventional form of story structure. In Freytag’s Pyramid, a story uses tension and conflict to raise the stakes towards an inevitable climax, in which the tension reaches a breaking point and the outcome of the conflict is determined. Freytag’s Pyramid is used by both literary and genre fiction writers, and it’s a good jumping off point for scaffolding a story.

However, it’s not the only way to tell a story. In fact, Hawkins’ essay encourages us to think about structure in more concrete terms. She gives the example of her novel The Girl on the Train, in which the story’s scenes are organized around the protagonist’s commute.

Another obvious example is Zadie Smith’s story “The Embassy of Cambodia,” which is structured around mini-chapters that are labelled after the points system of a badminton match. Within that structure, Fatou lives her own very structured life, which includes mass and coffee with Andrew on Sundays, and sneaking away to the community pool on Monday mornings.

Structure doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, good story structures will often emulate the daily lives of its characters. In other words, you can find inspiration for structure within your own daily life. Many characters are navigating their conflicts through the pace of everyday life, so a story can be organized around weekly trips to the laundromat, a monthly book club, or a daily interaction with a barista.

Is that enough to structure something as long as a novel, or a series of novels? Of course, the longer the work is, the more intricate the structure. Novels typically require subplots, as well as secondary and even tertiary characters, which each drive the story forward in their own important ways. In a novel, routine life often breaks down at some point, just as it does in Smith’s novella, in which Fatou eventually loses her job.

Thus, the storyteller’s role is not to use structure as a predictable backdrop for a story. Nor should structure be treated solely as scaffolding: it is integral to the story, necessary for the characters to bring about the story’s resulting themes, conflicts, and climax.

Rather, structure should enable the storyteller to freely explore the terrain of their story. It is the difference between rock climbing and free soloing a mountain range. With rock climbing, the support of a rope gives you more freedom to explore, and if you don’t like one path, you can choose another. Free soloing might seem uninhibited, but it gives you a rather narrow path to the finish line, and you’re much more likely to fall.

In your own fiction, don’t try to figure out every single plot point. Doing this will restrain your storytelling, and you might end up passing on great ideas. Rather, give yourself a simple structure to begin with—a structure that might be thematically relevant, or that fits within the mold of your main characters’ personalities—and then let your imagination do the rest.