How I Found My Father in Story Structure

My father had an engineer’s brain and an artist’s heart. He was happiest when puzzling over a problem that ended with a solution he could create with his two hands. That could be anything from the sewage system he dug in our backyard to the dinghy he taught us to sail to the award-winning shorebirds he carved later in life.

My older brother followed in those fabricative footsteps. He worked his way up from carpenter to general contractor to a stint as chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council. I’ve always been amazed at how he and my father could go out there to shape things in the physical world when most of my life’s been focused on the two-dimensional realm bound by a page or screen.

But when I began to wrestle with how to create longer narratives than a poem or a product promotion on the back of a package, Dad’s building gene finally kicked in. I read everything I could get my hands on about story structure, convinced that if I could find the right plan, I could simply follow it to build a better book.

When I discovered Larry Brook’s Story Engineering, I thought I had found it. Here was a path that combined some of the classic milestones in a narrative that I’d read about in a step-by-step guide to story success. But there was a lot of information to synthesize in Brook’s book. So I dug into my design skills to try to make sense of what I was reading, playing with one schematic after another to try to transform the words I read into a tool I could use.

I guess it worked. When I shared my story blueprint with Brooks, he was kind enough to let me feature it in a blog post on his site and use it in. It details how I used my template to follow the concepts Brooks laid out to create Autumn Imago, the novel I published with HarperCollins. (Feel free to download my “story blueprint” for a closer page-by-page view, and to use it if you’re a writer like me who’s always looking for a new tool to plan your plot.)

Eventually, I turned the blueprint into a map I could use to plot every chapter in my book before sitting down to write them into life. The map below shows my starting point for The Corpse Bloom. It includes notes on the story’s premise, theme, characters, conflicts, major plot points, and the timeline for the tale. I’ve used it as a starting point for most of my other books too. The process of boiling down where I’m going before I start penning eighty, ninety, or a hundred-thousand words allows me to proof not only the pace of my plot, but also the consistency and depth of the message I’m trying to share.

And yet, for all my love of story structure, I’ve come to realize that the kind of plan I’ve built can become a trap. I remind myself of all the hours my father sat happily covered in sawdust to feel his way toward creating the thing he’d conjured in his mind. So once my map is made and I sit down to type “Chapter One” I try to forget about my map for a while and follow my muse instead. And every time I do, I find the kind of revelations no amount of planning could reveal.

If you want to enjoy those kind of twists and turns that take place in The Corpse Bloom, I suggest that you only scan the graphic below after clicking to inspect it instead of reading every line. Because the surprises that spring up when you surrender control to believe in a work of fiction are the same kind that make life richer too.