: Re: 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

@Bryan361

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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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