: How to avoid formulaic fictional structures while still using tried and tested techniques? There are several books that provide an excellent breakdown of the elements that make a good story or

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I prefer Robert McKee’s Story to Save the Cat and the Hero’s Journey stuff. Instead of telling aspiring writers what pattern a story must follow from beginning to end, McKee talks about elements that can be combined in various ways.

For example, he defines an “act” as a series of scenes culminating in a major reversal of a character’s condition. You need to have acts. You don’t need to have three acts.

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In painting, using a canvas and paint is not becoming a slave to rules.

As in any expertise field, you can find "rules" (I would call them patterns) and frameworks. The difference between them is that a pattern is proven to be beneficial in particular circumstances, while the use of a framework, as James stated in the answer above, is up to you.

Storytelling is a field that looks to raise reader's feelings, and usually a good way to assure some of them is the well known three-act structure. The overall tension should be incremental, the climax should be somewhere near the end, the set-up should be near the beginning, etc. There are some basics that is risky to play with, and there are more particular structures which you can use at your discretion.

Note that I'm not saying you can't play with them. You can do whatever you want, the hard task is to make it funny to read. I would feel cheated by a story without a climax at the end. But then, I look at Tolkien as he put the climax near the middle of the last book and kept babbling to the reader ad nauseam 'til the end, and he is getting more and more fans each year.

A last word about your Save The Cat reference: As Larry Brooks explains in his books Story Engineering and Story Physics, there are plot points in concrete milestones of the story (as concrete as a particular page, if we're talking about a short story like a script), but they are not the only plot twists and events. In fact, they don't even need to be the most shocking ones, nor the ones that are meant to be the most important to the reader. He just says they have to be fullfilling certain tasks for the main plot strand, and that's all.

Don't let structures use you. Use them instead.

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There are what many would consider formulas out there, and they have their purpose. I prefer to think of them as a framework. These common themes and trends can help make sure we dont forget anything that makes a story a full experience. My personal favorite is Joseph Campbell. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a comparative mythology. He distills the similarities in the stories from around the globe into the 'Hero's Journey'.

I find this diagram a particularly useful representation. Like the answer above mentioned it is how you differ, challenge and change the narrative that makes a story great (well ok it can make a story great...sometimes it makes a story terrible). In my writing I have used the below to formulate the overarching story and then write my way within. Though when I proofread and review I often find that this path appears in subsections of the story as well. There are steps in the life of any character, and the steps are important because these things that recur in fiction are common to humanity...they are what help pull readers in because things are familiar. How you execute and twist the expected is what makes a story great (in my opinion).

I would say don't be afraid to utilize these frameworks/formulas...they exist for good reason, just make sure along the way you make it your own.

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