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Back to Basics: Narrative Structure
- Izhan Arif
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Everything is built on structure. Things have a rhyme and reason, and stories are no exception. Stories in particular rely on narrative structures. While not every type of writer plans out their story in advance, every single type of story a writer creates has some sort of setup. Welcome to Back to Basics, for today’s course we’ll be talking all about narrative structure.
You'll find great visuals and links to further exploration throughout this course.
What is Narrative Structure?
To cut to the chase, a narrative structure is the way you present the story. Stories rely on characters and plots but there has to be a way for those characters to act and for those plots to unfold. It’s like a skeleton holding everything in place. If you consider yourself a storyteller, then narrative structure is the way you’re actually telling the story. But there’s lots of different types of narrative structures, and as I’ll demonstrate later, it’s not a "one size fits all" situation.
The Pyramid Structure:
Don’t quote me on this, but I’d guess this is the most common type of narrative structure a writer will see. It’s a style that’s actually taught pretty frequently in school classrooms. The Pyramid structure (or Freytag’s pyramid), is a narrative structure where there’s a clear escalation and de-escalation of events (rise and fall). We meet our character, get a sense of what their world is like, then have something big happen that kickstarts the story. The peak of the story’s drama is called the climax, and everything after that is how the story wraps up from there. The falling actions almost always have your characters overcoming whatever obstacle they had or beating whatever villains they were facing. As you can see from this great visual I found on Reedsy, this kind of narrative structure basically looks like a pyramid. There’s more nitty-gritty sections of the pyramid that can be discussed in pieces but for the sake of brevity, this is the simplified version. Now you know what it’s all about.
The Three-Act Structure
In the attached graphic I found at The Art of Narrative, you might notice that the three-act structure looks very similar to Freytag’s pyramid. There’s some definite similarities, but the three-act structure puts more emphasis on dividing the story into clear segmented parts. Act One is about getting us introduced to the world of our character, Act Two is when it’s “go time” and all of the gears of the plot are in motion. Act Three is the swan song where you need to send everybody home. The three-act structure is more common for writing movies, but I think it’d be a disadvantage if I didn’t even make an attempt to talk about it here. It’s another solid way to map out your story.
Non-Linear Storytelling
Pyramids and acts are all well and good, but what if you want to get a little bit weird? This lesson is all about specific rules but sometimes, you don’t have to play by the rules! Imagine a car on a road driving straight ahead. It makes sense for the car to follow along the road that’s laid out for it. If there’s a beginning, you’re going to get to an end. Usually you expect a story to unravel that same way. If I wrote a story with a timeline starting on January 1st, 2026, and it continues forward each day until it ends on January 7th, 2026, the story plays out chronologically. That means that it’s using linear storytelling.
Non-linear storytelling would be if that car swerved and drifted across the road, into the gutter, and all through the trees around the straight path. A story doesn’t have to go in chronological order. You can play with time!
Non-linear storytelling is most often done with flashbacks. We did a Back to Basics about flashbacks here: Back to Basics: Flashbacks. It’s really fun to get chaotic and messy with how you tell the story, but the great thing about non-linear storytelling is that no matter how many detours you take, you can still end up at the destination you want. If you want a great example of a non-linear story, I recommend the movie Memento.
The Hero’s Journey/Story Circle
Some narrative structures like the pyramid and the three-act structure emphasize rises and falls, but the story circle and the hero’s journey emphasize that what goes around comes around. I’m not trying to describe karma. What I mean is that eventually, a character comes back to where they started in their story, only now they’ve been changed by the events they’ve been through.
A writer named Joseph Campbell went around studying different tales and discovered that just about every single main character of a story went on a similar type of journey. He charted out a staggering seventeen different stages to that journey.
Obviously, that’s a lot to unpack, which is where the story circle comes into play. This type is a more condensed version of the hero’s journey, put together by Dan Harmon, whom you might know as the creator of the tv show Community.
The story circle reduces the seventeen steps into fewer slices that are a little more digestible. Apart from that, it works pretty much the same way as the hero’s journey. All you really need to take away is that these two structures emphasize the main character and how the story impacts them. We meet our character and through their adventure, they are fundamentally changed by it.
Conclusion
So to sum up, there’s quite a few different kinds of narrative structures and some prioritize different things. But while there are key differences, there’s also a lot that these structures have in common. They all emphasize that stories need beginnings, middles, and endings, and all of these structures have their own ways of getting you there.
For a deeper explanation on outlining your story and expanding some of these structures, check out this video from our conference: Tenesha L. Curtis — Book Outlining Basics
The Challenge:
Which of these structures is most common in your genre?
Why do you think writers in your genre use this structure more than others?
Let's talk about it on Discord!
Thanks for joining us for this Back to Basics course! If you tried this month’s challenge, you can share it on our discord. Thank you and I will see you all next time!
About the author:
Izhan Arif is an English graduate from the University of Illinois, Chicago. His interests tend to revolve around all things superhero, whether it be comics, shows, or movies! He also loves to write (go figure) and when he's not working on Back to Basics, he's also writing videos for WatchMojo!