3 Ways to Apply the 6 Elements of Story Structure to Your Novel

How to use one story structure tool to edit every part of your story.

The best story structure is the one you can apply to your story.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing a lot of story theory on the podcast. Today, I’m getting back to application.

In this episode, I’ll show you three ways to apply the six elements of story to your novel.

You’ll learn:

• How to apply one story structure to your story in three ways
• How I edit even the smallest moments of a story to make them punchy and exciting
• Two bonus ways to use this story structure
• And more!

One of my favorite things about this story structure framework? It works at every level of story.

That means that once you learn it, you’re prepared to edit your entire manuscript, your scenes, and more.

In today’s episode, I’ll show you how.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Get the Scene Analysis Worksheet: alicesudlow.com/sceneworksheet
• Ep. 8: What Is a Scene? The Ultimate Guide to Write and Edit Amazing Scenes
• Ep. 25: 4-Act Structure: The Simple Structure to Edit Your Novel (And Why 3 Acts Aren’t Enough)
• Ep. 42: The 6 Essential Elements of Every Novel, Act, and Scene
• Ep. 43: Why the 6 Elements of Story Are the Key to All Great Stories

Transcript

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every time you have an arc of change, you can use the six elements of story to map it. That means that each act starts with its own inciting incident. Each act progressively builds to a turning point. Each act, forces the protagonist to face a crisis choice and take action on it in the climax. Each act has a resolution that's different from how it began. Outlined the six elements of all four apps. And you've got yourself a robust outline for a story in just 24 sentences. Welcome to your next draft. For the last few weeks I've been talking about story structure specifically. I've been talking about my favorite approach to story structure, the six elements of story. First I shared what the six elements of story are and how they work. Then I shared why I love this structure so much and why I use it in every story that I edit. And this week, I'm going to keep talking about the story structure. There's a lot to say. And in this episode, I want to get practical again. Let's talk about how to apply the structure to your stories. If you haven't listened to the previous two episodes in the series and that's okay, I'm going to start off with a recap of the six elements of story. Honestly, even if you have listened to those episodes, and this is old hat to you, I still think this recap is helpful. The more that you encounter the structure, the more familiar it will become and the easier it will be to apply it to your stories. If all this is new to you and you'd like the full, deep dive. I recommend that after this episode, you go back to the beginning of this series. Start with episode 42, which you can find it. Our Sobo. Dot com slash 42 or at the link in the show notes. And once we finished the recap, I'll show three ways that you can apply the structure to your stories. Recap first, what are the six elements? The six elements of story form one arc of change things start one way and they end another way. In order to change, they go through the following six steps. One, the inciting incident, something disrupts the characters normal and kicks off the action of the story To progressive complications. The conflict escalates as more complications happen. These events might make things better or worse, but they certainly make things more complicated. Three. The turning point, the largest, most problematic, progressive complication, which forces the protagonist to respond in some way. For the crisis. In order to respond to the turning point, the protagonist must make a difficult choice. This is a choice between two bad things, a best bad choice. Or two good things. Irreconcilable goods. Five. The climax the moment when the protagonist takes action on the crisis, choice and experiences, the consequences. And six, the resolution. The new normal after the climax, something has changed since the story began with the inciting incident and readers. Want to see what the world looks like now? And there you go. The six elements of story. One arc of change. Want to see them all written out. I have a free worksheet that you can download. It's called the scene analysis worksheet and you can get it at Alice sedler.com/scene worksheet. The cool part is it applies to more than just scenes as you'll see very soon. Now in last week's episode, I showed why I love this approach to story structure so much. And there are a few reasons, but here's the big one. This structure is recursive. You can use it at every level of story. Zoom out and look at an entire novel and you can find the six elements zoom in and you can find them within every act within every scene and more. This structure, scales up and scales down, which means that you can learn this one approach to story structure and apply it all over your story. Which begs the question. Where should you apply the six elements of story? The simple answer is everywhere. That said I do have three core places that I recommend you try it out. Here are the places where I use the six elements of story most often, and where I recommend that you try them to. The first level I recommend you look for the six elements of story is on the scale of your novel as a whole. Can you find the six elements in your whole novel? Now, when you look for the six elements in an entire novel, you'll find that a lot of the story is progressive complications. You don't have to list every single, progressive complication here at that point, you'd just be listing everything that happens in the story. At this scale, I particularly like to look for. What's the inciting incident. What kicks off the story? What hard choice does your protagonist have to make about three fourths of the way through the story? And what's the climax. What is the big event that your story is building up to? Even with just those three things, he'll be able to tell a lot about your story. The second level I recommend you apply these six elements is within each act of your novel. I like to think of novels in terms of four acts, a four-part progression from the beginning to the end. You can learn more about how four act structure works and how to apply it in episode 25 of the podcast. I find that episode@alicesubtler.com slash 25 or at the link in the show notes. The thing about acts is each act is its own arc of change. You can actually identify a value shift happening within each act. Uh, starting state at the beginning of the act and an ending state at the end of the act. And every time you have an arc of change, you can use the six elements of story to map it. That means that each act starts with its own inciting incident. Each act progressively builds to a turning point. Each act, forces the protagonist to face a crisis choice and take action on it in the climax. Each act has a resolution that's different from how it began. Outlined the six elements of all four apps. And you've got yourself a robust outline for a story in just 24 sentences. And the third level that I recommend you apply, the six elements is on the same level. The scene is my favorite unit of story. It's usually somewhere between 1000 and 3000 words, although it can be shorter or longer. I have a full episode on how the six elements apply on the scene level, which you can find at Alice Southern. Dot com slash eight. But the idea here is that when you zoom in to the bite size level of story, the piece of story that we consume in just a few minutes, You still want to craft an arc of change that moves us from one of, into the story to the next. And this level is my favorite, largely because it's the perfect place to practice your storytelling skills. Scenes are short. They're quick to write, to edit and to read. At least they're quick in comparison to writing, editing and reading a full novel. It's still going to take you a lot longer to write a scene than to read one. And because they're short, you can see all six elements at play all at once on a small scale. You can practice how these pieces of story play together, how they impact each other and how they build an interesting story. Stories that work are made of scenes that work. So make sure that all six elements are working in your scenes. The entire novel, the act and the scene are the three levels of story that I work with most often. But you can also subdivide those into even more levels of story. Now when I first started practicing using the six elements and editing stories, I found it tricky to see the divisions between each part of story. Where does a scene start and end? Where does an act start? And if you're not used to thinking in terms of these divisions, yet it can be hard to tell. And the two bonus levels that I'm about to share are even more divisions of story, which means they're even more levels where you can debate about where different parts of stories start and end. So I don't recommend that you start with these bonus levels first, get comfortable editing your acts and your scenes. Then once you're confident there, you can explore these bonus levels for even more useful ways of thinking about your story arc. The first bonus level is sequences. Sequences are smaller than an act, but larger than a scene. There are a set of a few scenes within an act that all work together to form their own arc. For instance, maybe within an act, a few kids decide to put on a play. There's a scene where they decide to put on the play and choose their script. There's a scene where they gather their props and rehearse, and there's a scene where they perform the play. That's three scenes that work together to form this arc. In those three scenes, we have one goal that we're really pursuing and building upon in every scene. Now the act is longer. This is just one part of it. When sequence within it. And within that arc of three scenes, that sequence where we're pursuing that one goal, you'll have the six elements of story. Again, inciting incident through resolution. Zoom out from the sequence and you'll see them on the arc of the full act, zoom in on the sequence. And you'll see an arc within each of the scenes. But if you get right in the middle in between them, you'll see an arc of three scenes that form a sequence. The second bonus level is the beat level. Beets are smaller than scenes. One beat is one moment within a scene and a scene is made of many beats. Here's an example of how I edit beats. A lot of times I'll be working with a scene that's maybe 2000 or so words long and includes all the six elements at the beginning. There's the inciting incident. Then there are a few progressive complications. The turning point will happen somewhere in the middle of those 2000 words. And then there's the crisis and the climax and the resolution. It's a full arc of change. And the resolution will be, say 600 words long. Maybe it's a conversation between a couple of characters that sort of rounds out everything that's happened in the scene. That conversation is one beat, one mini events happening within the scene. And I'll read that conversation and think, I think there's something here. I think there's a little bit more that we can develop within this story. So I'll pull out those six elements and I'll look really closely at those 600 words. And I'll see that there's an opportunity there for us to develop another little arc of conflict. Another arc of change. That conversation between that couple of characters has its own tension to it. It has its own development to it, and it becomes even more interesting when we identify that change and craft another turning point crisis and climax within that little interaction. Remember the scene already had the six elements all present and working in it. We really zoomed in just on the resolution, just on one piece of those six elements. And if we didn't do anything to it, that scene would still work. But when you zoom in to look at beats, you can make even the smallest parts of your story, even more interesting and make them contribute to the story even more. Now I do not think that you need to edit every single beat of your novel, like this. When it comes to subdividing your story into editable parts, there's definitely a point of diminishing returns. Your story will contain hundreds, possibly thousands of beats. And if you enter a draft thinking. I'm going to edit my way through this manuscript beat by beat. You are setting yourself up for enormous detail-oriented overwhelm and frustration. Personally, I prefer to keep the beat level in my back pocket when I'm editing scenes. If I see a section of a scene or we have a few hundred words of story and not much momentum, or there's an interaction between characters where nothing changes. I'll zoom in and I'll study it on the beat level. I'll look for hidden opportunities to apply the six elements and make that slower beat more punchy and exciting. And there you have it. A total of five levels where you can apply the six elements of story to edit your novel. The three levels that I focus on most and where I recommend that you focus to are the novel as a whole. Each act and each scene. And the two bonus levels that you can explore when they're useful to you, our sequences and beats. So now it's your turn. Can you find the six elements in your story? Here's what I encourage you to do now. First, download my worksheet with all six elements by going to Alyce subtler.com/scene worksheet. And now, you know, the secret, this works at every level of story, not just scenes. Next choose a level of story, the novel as a whole, the act level or the scene level. Then pick up your manuscript and take a close look at that level. Think of your entire story or think of one act or one scene and look for the six elements there. Can you find them? If, so, congratulations, you've likely crafted a story that works and practiced with this approach to structure enough that you can spot it in your story. If not, don't worry. I look for what you can find and see what parts are difficult to spot. Now you have clues about what to focus on in your editing process. And remember writing and editing a novel is a craft. It's a skill that you develop with practice. The same goes for using the six elements of story. If they're a little tricky to apply at first, don't worry. Keep listening to this podcast and I'll keep sharing more tools, tips, and examples to help you master them. Until next week, happy editing.