Jul 2, 2024 

 Act I

1. Disturbance
   • Key Points: The story begins with an immediate disturbance that disrupts the protagonist’s ordinary world. This should be a compelling event that hooks the reader by introducing trouble or conflict right away.
   • Importance: The disturbance sets the tone and establishes the initial conflict, ensuring that the story begins with action and intrigue. It avoids the “Happy People in Happy Land” fallacy, where a peaceful beginning fails to engage the reader​.
2. Care Package
   • Key Points: Highlight a relationship where the protagonist shows concern for another character. This relationship should demonstrate the protagonist’s caring nature and create emotional stakes.
   • Importance: The Care Package humanizes the protagonist, builds reader empathy, and provides a personal stake in the story. It often involves a bond that predates the story, which can motivate the protagonist throughout the plot​​.
3. Argument Against Transformation
   • Key Points: The protagonist resists change, preferring to maintain the status quo. This internal conflict shows their reluctance to accept the call to adventure or transformation.
   • Importance: This stage is crucial for establishing the protagonist’s initial beliefs and flaws, setting up their character arc. It highlights their fears and resistance to change, which will be challenged throughout the story​.
4. Trouble Brewing
   • Key Points: Introduce hints or signs of larger conflicts or problems on the horizon. These can be mysterious events, gathering threats, or foreboding signs suggesting bigger issues ahead.
   • Importance: Builds suspense and prepares the reader for the main plot. It signals that the initial disturbance is part of a larger issue, creating anticipation and tension​.
5. Doorway of No Return #1
   • Key Points: The protagonist makes a decisive move or faces an event that forces them into the main action of the story, leaving their ordinary world behind. This is an irreversible step that propels the story into Act II.
   • Importance: This moment marks the end of Act I and propels the protagonist into the adventure, committing them to the journey ahead. It often involves confronting significant stakes or making a crucial decision​.

Act II

6. Kick in the Shins
   • Key Points: Early in Act II, the protagonist encounters a significant obstacle or setback. This challenge tests their resolve and deepens the conflict. It’s often the first real test of their commitment to the journey.
   • Importance: Reinforces the stakes and keeps the reader engaged by showing that the protagonist’s journey will be difficult. This stage is crucial for building momentum and escalating the conflict​​.
7. The Mirror Moment
   • Key Points: The protagonist reflects on their situation and realizes they must change to overcome the main conflict. This is a pivotal emotional moment often involving self-examination.
   • Importance: Deepens character development and clarifies the protagonist’s internal struggle, setting up their transformation. It usually occurs around the midpoint of the story​.
8. Pet the Dog
   • Key Points: The protagonist shows kindness or compassion to a weaker character, often at a personal cost. This act further humanizes the protagonist and builds reader empathy.
   • Importance: This moment reinforces the protagonist’s likability and moral character, even amidst their struggles. It creates a bond between the protagonist and the reader by showcasing their humane side.
9. Doorway of No Return #2
   • Key Points: A significant event or realization that pushes the protagonist into the final act, heightening the stakes and commitment. This is another irreversible step that leads to the climax.
   • Importance: This transition into the climax ensures the protagonist is fully engaged in resolving the central conflict. It sets the stage for the final confrontation and the resolution of the story’s main plot​.

Act III

10. Mounting Forces
    • Key Points: The protagonist prepares for the final confrontation, gathering resources, allies, or inner strength.
    • Importance: Builds momentum and sets the stage for the climax, showing the protagonist’s determination and readiness for the final battle​​.
11. Lights Out
    • Key Points: The protagonist faces their darkest moment, appearing on the brink of defeat. This moment heightens the drama and tension.
    • Importance: Creates a critical turning point, emphasizing the protagonist’s struggle and the high stakes involved. It often seems like all hope is lost before the final victory​​.
12. Q Factor
    • Key Points: A key insight, skill, or resource that the protagonist recalls or discovers, giving them the means to overcome the final obstacle.
    • Importance: Showcases the protagonist’s growth and ingenuity, often involving an element introduced earlier in the story. It helps turn the tide in their favor during the climax​ (e.g. toys Q gave Bond).
13. Final Battle
    • Key Points: The protagonist confronts the antagonist or main conflict head-on in a decisive battle or confrontation.
    • Importance: Delivers the climax and resolves the central conflict, providing a satisfying conclusion to the narrative​.
14. Transformation
    • Key Points: The protagonist emerges changed, reflecting new wisdom, skills, or perspectives. This transformation is tied to their journey and character arc.
    • Importance: Concludes the protagonist’s arc and provides a resolution that ties back to the story’s themes and initial conflicts. It shows the growth and development of the protagonist as a result of their experiences​.

Checklist of Reminders

Here for easy reference are the Super Structure Reminders that appear throughout this book:

1. Disturbances don’t have to happen just at the beginning. You can sprinkle them throughout. When in doubt about what to write next, make more trouble.
2. When you show a character’s humanity, you link her up to the collective unconscious of the audience. Don’t be afraid to show: caring, flaws, foibles, doubts, inner conflict, love, passion, anger, frailty as well as strength.
3. Your lead is not just an action machine. She has beliefs and those beliefs get challenged by the story events.
4. The “off scene” exercise is great at any point in your writing or planning. When you don’t know what to write next, spend some time brainstorming what the other major characters are up to, unseen.
5. Another way to describe a novel is that it is about a character who confronts challenges by strength of will. If the character takes no action, she’s just being a wimp. Your Lead must never be a wimp! But sometimes things happen that are out of her control, and feel like a door is slamming behind her, as if in a haunted house. Think of these events as plot thrust.
6. Trouble is your business! Don’t be hesitant about plying your trade in every scene of your book.
7. The biggest changes we make in our own lives occur when we are thrust into a crisis. Enduring fiction is built upon that same thing: it’s about how a character, through force of will, fights life-threatening challenges and is transformed because of it. It’s only when we feel we must change that we do change. The mirror moment makes that clear to the character and, most important of all, to the reader.
8. If the lead thinks only of himself the readers get a negative impression, subtle as that may be. Petting the dog adds a much-needed counter to that vibe. It can be as big as saving a life, or as small as giving a kind word to someone in need.
9. Readers do not like to see the Lead helped out of trouble via coincidence. So don’t let this second doorway seem to offer that. A crisis or setback can happen that way, because it’s not help. It’s more trouble. But a discovery or clue ought to happen because the Lead has done something to find it, or earn it. It’s the result of her efforts or cogitation that opens the door.
10. No matter what kind of novel you write, the story ought to feel like the trash compactor in Star Wars. Your Lead is thrust into the situation of the novel. Then notices the walls starting to close in. In Act II, he’s still got time to get out of danger. But in Act III time has run out. The walls are about to crush him.
11. Some of the greatest endings – like Casablanca – involve sacrifice. Rebirth can only follow death, and death is very often the sacrifice of the thing the Lead wants most. It may be his very life, as in Spartacus and Braveheart.
12. A novel is about a character using strength of will to fight the forces of death. This fight cannot just be analytical. We are moved to action through emotion, not simply logic.
13. One way to describe the arc of a satisfying story is that it is, in the end, a quest for courage. In an outside-forces-type of ending, as in a thriller, the Lead must find the courage to fight against overwhelming odds. If he dies, we have one kind of tragedy, as in Hamlet. If it’s inside, the Lead must find the moral courage to do the right thing. If he doesn’t, the story becomes another kind of tragedy, the Lead left to suffer the consequences, as in Hud, the Paul Newman movie (based on Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry).
14. Readers love to worry. They love to worry about characters they are bonded with. What they worry about is how the Lead is going to ever get out of this story alive. Keep that question in their minds throughout, and give them a satisfactory conclusion at the end. They will thank you with their discretionary income.