What Is Classic Novel Structure?

NOTE: The book, How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter, explains and uses Classic Novel Structure as the basis for writing any novel.

Classic Novel Structure is the basic set of narrative building blocks used for most novels ever written, ever published. It is the novelistic expression of a sequence of dramatic events that form the deepest structures of modern long–form storytelling, almost universally recognized in other forms of writing such as screenwriting for movies and TV.

You’ve heard of Inciting Incidents and Quests, maybe, perhaps even of Midpoints and Dark Nights Of the Soul. Or maybe you haven’t, but still you absolutely know what they are. You’ve almost certainly heard of plays, movies and maybe novels having acts: Act One, Act Two, Act Three. Classic Novel Structure is all of this. It is the system that is comprised of all these elements. But it is also everything you need to achieve in fulfilling these ‘beats’ and ‘acts’.

Classic Novel Structure is very ancient, or at least, its core ideas are. Two and a half thousand years ago, the philosopher Aristotle introduced the concept of a story having a beginning, middle, and end. The 19th–century German writer, Gustav Freytag, was one of the first to develop this into a theoretical structure. The American academic, Joseph Campbell, in the 20th century, expanded on this with his hugely influential Hero’s Journey theory in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which outlined complex acts and narrative thresholds, which is the basis of many later storytelling theories.

There are excellent story–telling guidebooks, like Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat (and the related Save the Cat Writes A Novel), Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering, and John Truby’s Anatomy of a Story, that provide detailed guidelines for plotting long–form stories such as movies and films on the basis of this universal storytelling structure. This book will teach you to understand Classic Novel Structure, and how to apply it in your novel. What is unique about it is that it will do this chapter–by–chapter.

Why Use Classic Novel Structure?

It provides a clear outline for your story, helping you stay on track during writing and a structural checklist for your editing. It ensures proper pacing, maintaining reader interest at key dramatic moments, and helps create a cohesive narrative where all elements contribute to the plot’s purpose and resonance. Even if you choose to break from the structure, knowing the rules gives you the freedom to innovate with confidence. These are the basic, universal rules of storytelling, and you can learn them.

When Can You Use Classic Novel Structure?

You can use it for planning your novel, creating an outline that includes major plot points and beats, and forming your story's skeleton, before you start to write. You can use it for writing your novel, following its outline to ensure you hit key beats and building the dramatic and emotional arc of your novel, whether you create a detailed chapter plan in advance or need help to think ‘What’s next?’ as you are working. And you can use it for editing your novel, identifying pacing issues, narrative gaps, or weak plot points, in completed drafts, ensuring you are strengthening the overall structure, and creating a complete, resonant final book.

Classic Novel Structure: A Brief Step–By–Step Breakdown

What does this look like in real terms? Below is a list of all the major plot points and beats in a novel according to Classic Novel Structure. You do not need to remember all this here. It is just to show you what we will be working to, and what different proposed chapters outlined later will include. However, mastering this structure will be an enormous advantage to you as a working novelist, as well as providing a dramatic backbone to your novel that will be immediately recognizable to readers, agents, publishers and reviewers.

1. Act One: Opening Image/Hook (0–10% through the book)

This first part of the Set–Up introduces the central character, their world and personality before they go off on the Quest at the heart of the novel.

2. Inciting Incident (10–15% through the book)

Some event or piece of information is given to the central character which makes them aware of the Quest and invites them to join it. They will now begin to debate whether to do so.

3. Break Into Act Two (25% through the book) Joining the Quest

Because of some event, pressure or personal decision, the central character will decide to join the Quest. (NOTE: The Quest is not necessarily a dramatic, mythic adventure. It might be the story of a relationship or an individual’s internal journey.)

4. Act Two: Fun And Games (25–50% through the book)

Having committed to the Quest, the central character goes off and meets new characters, enters a new world, falls in love, gains new knowledge, begins an investigation, etc. This is the first part of the Confrontation, which will generally become more serious as it progresses.

5. Midpoint (50% through the book)

About halfway through the book, some event or new information will start to make things either happier or more dramatic, but either way, it tilts the novel into its second half, and thus towards the resolution of the Quest.

6. Golden Time and/or The Bad Guys Close In (50–75% through the book)

After the Midpoint, there might be a happy phase called the Golden Time (for example, the central character falls in love) or a more ambivalent one. But either way, eventually, a phase called The Bad Guys Close In will begin, where the antagonistic force in the novel will start to add pressure on the central character.

7. Break Into Act Three (75% through the book) ‘The Disaster’

A huge, usually negative event or development will force the book into its final, decisive phase. At this point, it will seem as if the Quest has either completely or largely failed.

8. Act Three: Dark Night Of The Soul (75–80% through the book)

Following the Disaster, the central character will move through despair and reflection before finding a way to resume the Quest. Thus the Resolution phase begins.

9. Climax (85–95% through the book)

As the name suggests, this is the climax of the book. It can be a grand battle, or a lovers’ reunion, or anything, but it is the dramatic culmination of the story. The Quest is resolved.

10. Denouement (95–100% through the book)

After the Climax comes the Denouement, in which we are in the world after the resolution of the Quest, and we see the emotional culmination of the story.

So, very briefly, that’s it: that’s Classic Novel Structure. You might be thinking that this is the most wonderful insight into how to structure your novel. Or you might be thinking that this is restrictive and overwhelming. I can assure you there are lots of ways to use Classic Novel Structure, and it can be a flexible and creative inspiration without being too strict. But most novels will use some version of this, and the fact that you will become so intimately aware of and confident in applying it, can only help you as a novelist.

This is an excerpt from How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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