Does your plot need to follow a set structure?
SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses surprise twists in Tana French’s The Searcher. If you are interested in plot structure, you should read this post anyway, then read the book—armed with foreknowledge, you’ll be able to identify tiny clues and red herrings you would otherwise miss.
If you pull out your writing craft books and look for advice on plot structure or search online for plot templates, you’ll find an enormous variety. (I’ve discussed many: see these reviews of Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid, Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, James Scott Bell’s Write Your Novel from the Middle, and John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story.) I’ve spent time mapping them out against one another, seeing if I can spot commonalities. I’ve tried applying them to my clients’ work. I’ve even considered their structures as I developed the plot of my own novel. Each time, however, I find that whatever template I’m trying to apply doesn’t naturally fit the work I’m trying to apply it to—like I’m trying to fit a tiny, exquisite doll’s coat onto a toddler having a tantrum.
One writer or editor might be able to distill the story structure that works for them into a generalized template, but that structure might not be workable—or even comprehensible—to another writer. This is true even within genre fiction. Outside genre fiction, I’m seeing more interest in non-Western story structures or structures that follow shapes that aren’t an arc.
The truth is I think every story has its own unique rhythm and structure. Rather than rely on story templates, I lean on my reader sense to tell me when a manuscript I’m editing drags or zigs when it should zag. I map out the plot as it unfolds, scene by scene, and see what it has to tell me. I zero in on those areas that feel weak or wrong and try to decode where the story has departed from its own specific, individual plot logic. I consider which strands from within the story might be moved, bolstered, or invented to fix the problems. While this doesn’t lead to a neat template you can apply to many books, it does lead to a method you can use to study your own work and the work of others.
Let’s apply this technique to Tana French’s The Searcher and see what we discover. As I’ve been doing for all of these Novel Study posts, I started my analysis by charting the details of each scene on a spreadsheet, similar to this one, for Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I then zeroed in on the plot until one underlying structure stood out to me, captured in Image 1, below.
Image 1. Structure of The Searcher
Setup, slow build, action cascade
The Searcher builds slowly. We don’t get a page-one murder; what we get instead is a jumpy retired cop from Chicago, Cal Hooper, who needs to find out who is lurking around his house so he can put his cop radar to rest. French also launches a backstory question that is gradually answered over the course of the book: What happened in Cal’s professional and personal life that brought him to this remote Irish town where he has no connections?
A: Setup
Through the first four chapters, French doles out hints that partially answer that backstory question: Cal is divorced, and he isn’t as close to his adult daughter as he’d like. He left policing because everyone involved—cops and community alike—seemed angry and unable to communicate effectively.
French continues to add new story questions in each chapter, to draw us deeper into the novel. We’re introduced to a character named Lena who shares Cal’s wry manner and practical bent: will they become romantically involved? Cal identifies his lurker—an adolescent kid named Trey—but what does Trey want? Cal wonders about his tenuous place in Ardnakelty: has he already put a foot wrong, perhaps just by buying the abandoned house he’s fixing up?
Cal tries to decode the meaning of other events around town: the mauling of a sheep, and a dispute between his neighbor, Mart, and a young local, Donie. He tells himself these problems are not his responsibility any longer but fails to turn his cop radar fully off. Finally, in chapter five, we come to the question that drives the main action of the book: Trey has heard Cal was a cop—a fact he thought he had carefully hidden from his new neighbors—and wants Cal to find his older brother, Brendan, who disappeared several months earlier.
B: Slow build
Chapters six through thirteen continue to unfold slowly and steadily. Cal is reluctant to get involved but finally does so, finding that the investigation makes his restlessness disappear. We learn that his ex-wife accused him of being addicted to lost causes; he thinks she might be right. This section of the novel mostly involves Cal traveling around Ardnakelty and the neighboring town of Kilcarrow to interview Brendan’s friends and ex-girlfriend, but French deploys two punches of action to increase the feeling of pace (the starred boxes in Image 1). In chapter eight, another sheep is mauled—this time one belonging to Cal’s neighbor, Mart, who plans to stake out the field of PJ Fallon, Cal’s other neighbor, and catch whomever or whatever is doing the killing. And in chapter eleven, Cal is invited to the pub to sample poteen, the potent local moonshine. He understands from the start that he is being tested, but the test morphs into something between a warning and a threat. (I’d be curious to know if French added one or both of these scenes during revision, seeing that this stretch needed some additional propulsion.)
C: Action cascade
The last eight chapters are a relentless crescendo of revelations, followed by a spurt of violence, and finally a tense, suspenseful resolution that feels like it could spiral back into violence at any moment. Chapter fourteen is, like chapter five, a pivot point in the book. Trey leads Cal to an abandoned house in a remote spot far up the mountain, and Cal discovers Brendan had equipped it as a meth lab. French uses reaction and introspection to make sure we understand the importance of this discovery: “Cal’s heart zigzags. For a second he can’t move. He wanted something that would burn off all the hazy possibilities and show him the solid thing in their midst. Now that he’s got it, he finds he doesn’t want it one bit. . . . A half-cocked kid in a huff can get himself into plenty of shit. A kid with method is less likely to get himself into shit, but if he does, the shit is a whole lot deeper.” Cal is sure now that Brendan has been killed; he doesn’t say as much to Trey, but he begins scanning the floor for bloodstains and then searching the brush outside the house.
Immediately after this chapter, French detonates a major plot twist: Mart informs Cal that Trey is a girl, not a boy as he’d thought, and warns him that the village will be up in arms if it becomes known how much time they are spending together. Cal understands it as another warning to leave the investigation alone as well—but he doesn’t correctly interpret Mart’s motive in making that warning. Regardless, he feels he doesn’t have any choice but to comply.
This pair of chapters—fifteen and sixteen—leave both the external and internal plots on a precipice. Cal hasn’t answered the central question of what happened to Brendan, and he is forced to violate his own moral code in lying to Trey. French uses a classic best-bad-choice scenario here: Cal can tell Trey the truth and risk that she continues to investigate and come around his place, endangering both of them, or he can lie to her about what happened to Brendan and about his own emotional investment in her, perhaps driving her off. Lying seems like the best option, but it leaves his already wavering moral compass spinning wildly.
What pushes the novel off this precipice is a cascade of violence in chapters seventeen through nineteen. When Trey doesn’t accept Cal’s lie and starts searching for answers herself, she is severely beaten by her own mother—who has been warned that worse than a beating will come if she does not compel the girl to stop asking questions. The attack on Trey once again forces Cal’s hand, and he, in turn, uses physical force to get Donie to reveal what he knows about Brendan’s ties to the Dublin gang that controls the drug trade in the village, believing they are behind Brendan’s death. Cal himself is then attacked, which makes him only more resolute. Before he can track down the leader of the Dublin gang, however, he discovers in chapter twenty that Mart was involved both in the attack on him and in the death of Brendan.
French has been careful to lay out the background pieces so we understand the motivations at play. Mart and his fellow entrenched, aging bachelors are obsessed with keeping the village protected from outside forces—in this case the corroding effects of meth, but also, more largely, the effects of cultural change. (Mart has some inkling that this resistance to change is not an unalloyed good. One of his brothers was gay and left for America decades earlier. Even with gay marriage now legal in Ireland, a measure he voted for, Mart realizes the village wouldn’t welcome his brother back.)
The resolution of the novel hangs on the question of how the violence of Brendan’s death, and the further violence triggered by Cal’s investigation, can be laid to rest. Earlier in his life, Cal’s first instinct would have been to call in the Guards, but he now understands that official justice isn’t always the same as moral justice, nor does it always serve the greater good.
In this same section of the novel, chapters fifteen and sixteen, we get two pieces of backstory that help us make sense of Cal’s choice here. First, the event that triggered his retirement from the police force was his partner almost killing a young, unarmed suspect they were pursuing. Second, the event that triggered the dissolution of his marriage was Cal’s response to the violent mugging of his daughter. Rather than spend time nurturing her, he helped the local police track down and arrest the perpetrator. His ex-wife makes it clear to him that his daughter would have preferred his presence to his action.
The justice that Cal could expect from police intervention would not bring Brendan back and would almost certainly result in Trey being sent into foster care away from the village—worse than a mother who loves her and is making her own best bad choices to keep her alive. Mart and his cronies did not mean to kill Brendan—only to beat him badly enough to abandon his meth scheme—and they have no motive beyond covering up the death to continue their violence unless provoked by some new outrage. (Cal has reason to believe that, even then, their response will be measured. The English fairy-hunter who moved to town has been judged ridiculous but harmless; the English writer who objected to badger baiting was run off but not killed.) Cal brokers a tentative peace: he will bring Trey evidence of Brendan’s death, and she won’t pursue the matter further.
The final chapter of the novel, the longest of the book, is a kind of self-contained quest. Cal is guided up the treacherous mountain by Mart, unsure the whole way whether he will come back alive. When he returns with Brendan’s watch, a family heirloom, it seems he has found the magic talisman that will restore peace to the community—perhaps even allowing him to build a new life in Ardnakelty and support Trey in the way he now knows he should have supported his own daughter.
This is, in essence, a three-act structure, although French’s first two acts are perhaps slower than is typical. Section A is roughly 80 pages; sections B and C are virtually the same length, both roughly 180 pages each. (At roughly 112,000 words, The Searcher is also longer than many mysteries and thrillers; 70,000 words is an average length.) The effect, for the reader who sticks it out, is an intense, immersive roller-coaster of action in the last third. Could it work for your book? Certainly it might if you have a slow-developing plot with lots of action at the end. Will it work for every book? It will not.
Three-act structure
Let’s stick with the three-act structure for a moment and see what happens if we divide the book into three roughly equal parts, which would suggest act breaks at chapter eight and chapter sixteen. Image 2, below, shows the same color-coded plot elements from Image 1, with the width of each chapter bar proportionate to its page count. If we lay those breaks up against the important plot points of the novel, we uncover the ways in which the internal plot of the novel fuels the external plot.
Let’s pause for a moment to define those terms. The internal plot is the psychological and emotional journey your point-of-view characters take over the course of the novel, while the external plot is a series of events or actions—what happens in the novel. Ideally, the two work together to fuel the suspense of the book and keep readers turning pages. While I haven’t found John Truby’s twenty-two-point plot template helpful, I do like his formula linking internal and external plots: (W)eakness x (A)ction = (C)hange. Let’s see how this works in The Searcher.
Image 2. Act divisions in The Searcher
Chapter eight marks the moment Cal makes his first investigative moves, going to talk to Trey and Brendan’s mother. After the interview, Cal reflects on something his ex-wife once told him: “She said Cal was addicted to fixing things, like a guy jabbing on and on at a slot machine, unable to leave it alone until the lights flashed and the prize came pouring out. . . . Probably Donna was right, or a little bit right, anyway. The restless feeling is gone.” Doing this work again has fixed something in himself Cal had identified as wrong—giving him an internal reason to keep investigating.
Chapter eight marks the first spurt of active (rather than reported) violence in the novel, with the death of Mart’s sheep. On the other side of that imaginary act break, in chapter nine, Cal begins the interviews that immediately alert Mart and the rest of the community that he is turning over stones. Thus, chapter eight marks the last point in the novel where Cal could have prevented the long chain of events that are to follow.
Act two then, in this division, follows the classic structure of steadily rising action, with the revelation of Trey’s gender in chapter fifteen and the subsequent lie of chapter sixteen representing the all-is-lost moment we often find at that spot. More importantly, French has also chosen these two chapters to deliver those key backstories—about Cal’s partner and his daughter—that help us make sense of his choices through the remainder of the book.
Intensity of the internal and external plots
For the last part of our analysis of the structure of The Searcher, let’s examine the way the internal and external plot strands work together. In Image 3, below, I’ve listed the key moments in each strand and assigned them a level of intensity, based on the importance of the material delivered and/or the pace or content of the scene.
Image 3. Chapter intensities in The Searcher
Interestingly, French saves those most intense internal moments of chapters fifteen and sixteen until late in the book. She might have given us the flashback about Cal’s partner firing at the suspect earlier in the book, using it to raise the temperature while the external plot was still slowly coming to a boil.
Saving them gives her two advantages: First, she can gradually raise the suspense about what happened over the course of the novel. We are told just enough to know that there are dark stories lurking in Cal’s past, but we don’t know what they are or how they might alter our perception of him. Are we sure we can trust this narrator? We can’t know until he’s revealed more.
Second, the revelations hit harder at this spot, two-thirds of the way through the novel. We know Cal better, and we also know the stakes, both internally and externally, if he walks away from this investigation. If you look at the external plot, you’ll also see that the high-intensity internal scenes give additional fire to external scenes that are a lower temperature than what comes before or after.
As a result, when Trey shows up, badly beaten, at Cal’s door at the beginning of chapter seventeen, we are primed to be as overwhelmed and angry as Cal is. Trey is conflated with two vulnerable people—the young, unarmed suspect Cal and his partner were chasing, and Cal’s daughter—whom we’ve just learned Cal has failed in some fundamental way. We know instinctively that this is Cal’s chance for redemption.
The Searcher is the work of a writer at the top of her game, and it’s a novel worth studying for anyone writing a mystery or thriller. If you missed them, see my other posts on the novel, about the opening, French’s use of dialect and dialogue, and her use of description and setting.
Takeaways:
Use plot templates as a way to generate ideas or to spot missing pieces, but don’t feel that you need to cram your plot into a template that wasn’t designed for it.
Map out and study novels in your genre in just the way I’m doing here so you can see a variety of approaches. Then go back to your own novel and do the same mapping. What stands out now?
The scene-by-scene rhythms of your story are just as important—if not more important—than the overall structure. Do you open a new story question when you close an old one? Does one scene cause an effect in a subsequent scene, like a row of dominoes stacked to fall?
Use structure to help you decide where to place key plot moments or important pivot points. This structure doesn’t need to be made visible with part breaks; readers will intuit the underlying scaffolding if your placement is correct. Your novel might also have multiple structures with their own movements.
Notice the interplay between your internal and external plots: Do they fuel one another? Think strategically about whether to have each strand ebb and flow at different times, or whether in certain spots you want to dial up the intensity of both at the same time.