Tag Archives: Larry Brooks

Plot structure review: The Wee Free Men

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Instead of writing a review this Sunday, I spent my day analyzing the structure of The Wee Free Men, a book I reviewed several weeks ago.

About a month ago I decided to analyze the structure of the books I review on this blog as one of a number of steps I’m taking to improve my writing. I’ve been using thriller writer Larry Brooks’ four-part plot structure as a guideline. You can read a summary of that structure here.

To my delight, The Wee Free Men follows Brooks’ structure well, deviating only at the very beginning, where there’s supposed to be an immediate hook. The first several pages of The Wee Free Men may hook for readers familiar with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, but the rest of us need to read on in faith, trusting that things will soon get interesting. They do.

So far I’ve analyzed the structure of three books. This is the second that generally matches the guidelines I chose to investigate, which please me because it confirms the guideline has practical value for me as a writer. I’m also feeling good because it’s taking me less and less time to analyze the structure of the books I read. Progress!

Next week I’ll be taking an intensive Friday-through-Sunday course on three-part plot structure, so I probably won’t have time to blog. The week after that I’ll be back with a review of Liesel & Po by Lauren Oliver.

Does The Ruins of Gorlan fit the standard plot structure model?

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I’ve spent large chunks of the past two days trying to figure out if the successful first book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series, The Ruins of Gorlan, fits into the plot structure described by writer Larry Brooks.

It doesn’t.

Let me back up a bit. I’m on a mission to learn more about how to structure a middle-grade fantasy that appeals to readers, so I’ve set out to compare the structure of the books I’ve reviewed so far on this blog with the structure described by Larry Brooks on his website. I chose that particular structure because I think I understand it fairly well, and most other descriptions of plot structure leave me as baffled as the question of why people buy and eat marshmallow Peeps.

My hypothesis was that although most books probably wouldn’t fit the structure like hand in glove, they wouldn’t deviate by much, either. There might be a chipped fingernail here or there, but no actual missing fingers. This was true of the first book I analyzed, The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan. However, no matter how I slice and dice The Ruins of Gorlan, I can’t make it fit the glove, not even a little bit.

The attempt was a fail from the word go. There’s no hook at the beginning of The Ruins of Gorlan unless you chop off the prologue. If you axe the prologue, though, you can argue there’s a hook at the outset of chapter one. There the reader learns the young main characters must choose their future occupations the next day, and there’s a chance the applicants will be rejected, in which case they are doomed to become . . . electrical engineers! No, I kid you. I put that in for my husband. They’re doomed to become farmers, which irritated me a lot because I grew up in a farming area and consider farming a noble and worthwhile occupation.

There are one or two candidates for an inciting incident and a big midpoint event in The Ruins of Gorlan, but after that, things really fall apart. I even tried looking at the book as two different, sequential stories: one about two boys finding their paths in life and defeating three bullies, and the other about dispatching the evil Kalkara monsters. That didn’t work either.

Nevertheless, many readers adore this book, and those readers include my son. He first read this book two years ago, at the age of twelve. Since then, he’s read every other volume in this series. Why? He likes the characters, the descriptions of apprenticeship training, the ordered society described in the book, the slow build to action, and the thorough descriptions of battle in a later volume in the series. “Most writers build up to battles,” he says. “They make it really suspenseful, but then they only give you a little action before they switch to the aftermath. Here you get the whole battle.”

So what about the prologue? I strongly suspect these few pages would have garnered the manuscript an instant form-letter rejection from most if not all agents in the United States.

“Tell me about that prologue,” I said to my son. “What did you think of that?”

“Oh, I didn’t read it. I never read his prologues. I skip right to the first chapter.”

Interesting. Next I’m moving on to a third victim, The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett.

Successful middle-grade fantasies: how closely do they stick to plot-structure formulas?

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Underwood typewriter. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

This week I set out to test the idea that commercially successful middle-grade fantasies stick fairly closely to a certain plot structure. If that turns out to be the case, I also want to learn how closely they stick to the structure. In other words, what’s the range of variation?

My reason for doing this is simple. I’m a writer, and plot structure is my Achilles’ heel. Test readers and other writers tell me I’m good at creating engaging characters. I’ve learned to put these characters in peril, my action scenes are healthy enough to pass muster, and dialogue is my greatest strength. However, something’s still lacking. Two of the nine people who have read my middle-grade fantasy did so quickly and enjoyed it. The rest are slogging through as a favor to me. They find it easy to put the story down for weeks or even months, and some never pick it back up. So what gives? How is my work different from the world of writers who successfully engage a large number of readers?

It took me a month of intensive work to figure it out. I talked with my test readers and with other writers. I bought a one-month subscription to Writer’s Digest online tutorials and listened to as many tutorials as I could. I searched the Web for advice and started reading and reviewing one middle-grade fantasy a week to learn more about the genre. Gradually the mist has cleared, and even I–not the brightest porch light on the block–can now see the crux of the problem is structure. My plotting deviates from traditional plotting, and not just by a little. It lives in a galaxy far, far away. I’m not saying everyone has to stick to traditional structure to succeed, mind you, but I figure the folks who successfully color outside the lines probably know where those lines are. I don’t.

It’s clear that I need to get a better grip on plotting. Unfortunately, most descriptions of story structure frustrate me. I just don’t get them. I can generally follow the writer or speaker until they’ve explained what an inciting incident is. After that, they lose me. The rest either sounds like magic (too vague) or rocket science (too complex).

Finally, though, I found a description I understand, although I had to read it several times before I even comprehended the basics. The description is by thriller writer Larry Brooks, and you can find it here, on his website. In brief, as I understand it, the structure goes something like this:

  • 0%, page one: a hook that gets you interested. Could be an intriguing voice, mysterious or otherwise fascinating bit of information, humor, or action big or small. Something promising, anyway. In the section that follows, you learn about the hero’s status quo, their story to this point, and what they have to lose. You get some foreshadowing of things to come.
  • 20%, inciting incident (also called plot point one): A change in the hero’s status quo caused by the antagonist, be it a storm, bad guy, or whatever. The hero’s circumstances shift and s/he now has a need, quest, or goal but doesn’t yet know how to take effective action. If the hero tries to take action, s/he’s thwarted by an inner demon or demons.
  • 35%(ish): a reminder of the serious nature of the antagonist.
  • 50%, midpoint: Reader, hero, or both get information that changes their understanding of what’s happening. The hero can now be proactive rather than reactive.
  • 60%(ish): another reminder of the serious nature of the antagonist.
  • 75%, plot point two: Hero gets final information needed to fully succeed. No new information or characters after this point.

This structure isn’t universally accepted as the gold standard, but because I more or less get it, I decided to use it as my baseline. That is, I’ll map out the structure of the middle-grade fantasies I’ve reviewed on this blog to date and compare them with this structure to see whether, how much, and in what ways they deviate. If nothing else, I figure this will give me a better grasp of this specific way of structuring plot, which by golly is more know-how than I have now. The next step will be to come up with a nice, trite plot of my own and see if I can actually put the technique into practice. Knowing me, it’ll take a try or two . . . or twelve.

I’ve structure-mapped one book so far: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. As usual, it took me donkey’s years, but I’ve learned a lot. The Lightning Thief deviated from the baseline plot structure, but not by much. For one thing, the writer included all the basic structural elements, and for another, each element appeared in the correct order and in approximately the place it should be.

The biggest deviation was the length of the second third of the book–the part between the midpoint (when the hero starts being proactive) and the second plot point (when the hero gets the last bit of information needed to complete the quest). This section was twice as long as is standard according to the baseline structure. Mr. Riordan seems to have realized this and gives the reader two reminders of the terrible nature of the antagonist during the section instead of the standard one.

I also learned something else: I read too fast and miss stuff. During this second, slower reading of this book for structure, I found I’d missed a ton of humor in this book. I bet the book’s target audience, reading at less than warp speed, would not miss this humor. I will now revise my review of The Lightning Thief to give the humor a much higher mark than I originally did.

I’ll keep dissecting the structure of middle-grade fantasies and I’ll keep you posted about what I find. If I manage to do this with a nice, large sample of books, eventually I might even be able to check whether a book’s Amazon.com sales ranking is higher if it sticks closer to the formula–another of my hypotheses.

By the way, a couple of weeks ago I promised to write a list of middle-grade fantasy subgenres, and I haven’t forgotten that promise. It’s going to take longer than I thought, though, because I haven’t read widely enough to have a good grasp of the wide range of middle-grade fantasy that’s out there–everything from mermaids to steampunk. I’ll keep reading, though, and I’ll keep blogging.

Happy New Year!