Track, Derail, and Change
My current working model of structure
I’m listening to the godlike Jonatha Brooke apparently randomly performing a concert to webcam, and she’s just said “finish the song that scares you”…
…so, despite living in fear of having my words tagged as bad writing advice and read out in a screechy voice on WriterDojo, I thought I’d share my current working model for the structure of a novel.
The caveat is that this is just how I myself am approaching the structure of my novels at the moment:
Got it? You’re illuminated! I can stop now.
More explanation?
Sigh. I can almost hear that screechy voice, but I’ll risk it.
After the surprising Beginning gets the story going, the meat of a genre novel is something like this:
Somebody is struggling to follow a Track towards an objective.
Somebody or something is struggling to Derail them.
Somebody or something undergoes Change, usually by pursuing a third struggle, during which they collect insight tokens or power ups that they can blow to win the Ending.
During the Ending, Change resolves the conflict between Track and derail in a surprising but satisfying way.
Typically, the protagonist starts out on a track, gets derailed by the antagonist, but a relationship formed along the way brings change that helps them solve the plot.
In some Thrillers, the protagonist is engrossed in an interesting track, and has no idea that secret antagonists are working on a derail. They only start consciously resisting quite late, and even then they may not see the entire scheme. Ken Follet’s A Dangerous Fortune is like that.
In more Action or Adventure oriented-stories, the derail is early — Ninjas drop through the roof, or dwarves turn up at the door — and yearning for the lost track generates conflict, especially during the ending.
Netflix Romance plots tend to run the Derail and Track in parallel, milking the conflict between the two — it’s important here that Derails and Tracks are struggles in their own right, and may not be directly Romance related — she’s reviving her beloved grandmothers country inn, he’s trying to prove himself by buying up all the real estate in the small town… sparks fly blah blah.
I suspect in Heist stories, the protagonist has the derail, and the antagonist the track. Finally, in Hardboiled stories, somebody other than the Protagonist does the Changing.
I find this a good way of making sense of stories I like, and it has the virtue of just three parameters.
Macbeth
Derail: Wife pursues her murderous ambition by proxy.
Track: Macbeth works towards being the ultimate warrior leader.
Change: All the evil deeds erode Macbeth’s soul.
Star Wars
Derail: Obi-Wan Kenobi joins the fight.
Track: Darth Vader struggles to protect the Death Star so it can complete its mission.
Change: Luke starts on the path to becoming a Jedi.
This certainly seems to work as a taxonomy.
Does it help in the planning stage of a new work? I’ll let you know.