Let's talk about structure

Why it matters, how to improve yours and what it's got to do with skeletons...

What is the very first thing I look at when a writer sends me a new manuscript to edit?

The plot? Characters? Or perhaps the voice?

Those things matter of course they do, but there is something that matters a lot more - the structure.

This is as true for a picture book as it is for a 60,000 YA novel.

Think of the structure as the skeleton of your story. A skeleton isn’t visible from the outside, but without one, everything else in the body would fall apart pretty quickly.

A book is the same, when it’s finished you shouldn’t be able to ‘see’ the structure from the outside - if it’s doing it’s job right, you’ll be so swept up in the story that you won’t notice it at all.

Why does structure matter so much?

The aim for any book is to draw the reader into the main character’s journey straight away and gradually build the pace until you come to a satisfying ending. This is a brilliant way to ensure the reader keeps wanting to turn the pages.

Without a solid structure, everything else can get a little ‘baggy’ including the pacing, tension, plot and characters. No matter how great the voice, theme or concept, you need a solid structure to hold everything else together.

The way I edit all books, whether they’re mine or someone else’s, is to consider the big picture first and that means the structure.

Once you’ve got the structure right, then you can hone in on everything else. The devil is in the detail after all. Characters, dialogue and voice are really important but there is no point polishing every word in a sentence if you have to scrap the whole paragraph because it doesn’t work structurally.

Not all writers like to plan, but if you do, I highly recommend thinking about the structure as part of that process. You can of course edit the structure afterwards, but doing it that way around may well require more significant rewrites.

How to plan the structure of your story

There are a lot of ways to think about the structure of a story but they often boil down to variations of…