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The Arachnid Novel Writing Method
A foolproof method of mixing pantsing and plotting
When I first started writing fiction, I didn’t have a clue about story structure. I thought you just had to tell a story somehow. I had watched many movies and read many novels, so I thought I implicitly knew what a story was.
I guess to a certain extent I did, we all do, but when I dived in and tried to tell a coherent story that was more than a few thousand words long, I began to flail, and with every chapter, it felt more and more like wading through treacle.
So I started reading up on various outlining methods. There are so many story structures that people have invented to help keep stories on track.
In the book “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel,” author Jessica Brody compares writing a novel to a long car trip. If you focus on the entire journey, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the endeavour. However, if you break it up and consider each leg of the journey separately, and focus only on one leg at a time, then the whole thing doesn't seem so insurmountable after all.
The three-act structure is the most famous structure. It’s confusing because the second act is twice as large as the others, and split by the midpoint. I never understood why it isn’t just called a four-act structure…
