As promised, I did some work last night to reshape NEXT BOOK’s plot into a traditional three-act structure.
Except once I got started, I realized that my outline for NEXT BOOK already fit a fairly standard plot structure: the Hero’s Journey.
The two plots are similar, in that they both follow the general “exposition, inciting incident, midpoint, rising action, climax, falling action” shape, but the specifics of each path are slightly different and YOU KNOW I’M ALL ABOUT SPECIFICITY.
I don’t want to get too spoilery about what I’m planning to write, but I’ve already shared enough about NEXT BOOK that very little of this should be new information. At this point, my outline goes something like this:
Our 30-something graying-haired heroine feels stuck in her responsibilities and MILLENNIAL BURNED-OUT.
She meets a mysterious stranger* (one of the two ways to start a story, if you believe the cliché) who’s all “you’re interesting, let’s have dinner.”**
Since she’s a 30-something woman in a year that is very like 2019, she’s all “um this is not how it’s done these days, also I don’t have a free hour on my calendar until April and maybe I don’t even want to deal with men right now” and nopes out.
The very next thing she does, according to my outline that I wrote before I reminded myself of what the Hero’s Journey actually was, is visit her grandmother. Because eldercare is one of her many responsibilities, and also because Grandma’s got some intriguing information to convey.
At this point, I was all huh, that’s the Refusal of the Call followed by the Meeting With the Mentor, wonder how the rest of my outline fits into the Hero’s Journey and it turns out that it fit, like, 80 percent perfectly and the rest can be handled by tweaking or not caring.***
If you would like to learn more about the Three-Act Structure and/or the Hero’s Journey, Reedsy has some excellent posts on each, with infographics (I love a good infographic):
How to Write a Novel Using The Three-Act Structure
The Hero’s Journey: an Author’s Guide to Plotting
And at this point I do think I’m actually ready to start writing. Which is good, because that’s my favorite part of the process. ❤️
*Yes, I know you’re thinking “but she said this would be a portal fantasy,” where do you think the mysterious stranger came from?
**The minute I figured out the whole “if you eat a food, you have to leave your home and live in a strange world” thing was not just a big deal for fairies, but also for Greek mythology and literally the story of Genesis, was a BIG MINUTE.
***Even some of the episodes I had originally written into my outline fit the Hero’s Journey — “our heroine Slacks her friends to ask whether they would theoretically go through a theoretical portal if they had the theoretical chance” counts as Gathering Allies, and the friends turn out to be very helpful at the end, NO SPOILERS.