Inside the Wonder World, Lesson 31

Plot Paradigms

Welcome to my Friday edition of Substack, which features my paid posts: Inside the Wonder World.

Those paid subscribers who stick with me for a year will get a free copy of the book as soon as it’s out.

Inside the Wonder World is the working title of my developing craft book on writing and publishing for young readers. I’m bringing it to you in pieces, both to help you learn something more deeply (lessons and exercises included) and to push me to finish this lofty goal.

Here’s the next lesson!

Plot Paradigms

Aristotle was the first to identify the basic 3-act structure of story. A paradigm is a pattern, and plot follows a pattern, starting with that structure. Since Artistole’s Poetics was written, many plot paradigms have been developed, analyzed, and graphed, in many shapes from circles to triangles, as we’ll see.

But the important thing to remember about plot paradigms is that they provide a foundation to story, which in my view is wonderfully expressed in this quote from Jack Bickham, Writing Novels That Sell:

“A story is the formed record of a character testing conflict, told from a point of view.”

I like this quote because the plot is a “formed record”, but in this definition it only exists in conjunction with the character, testing, conflict, and point of view (which I take here to mean the theme and emotion.) And this relates to the fundamental principle that story is about the arc of change in the character who moves through the plot, or the “formed record”.