Making sense of it all - creating structure in your fiction

So how do order your great idea, brilliant characters and compelling sense of place into something that people will actually read?
When it comes to structure, some authors opt for the beginning, middle, end approach, a traditional and proven format which has served short story and novel writers well down the decades.
Others go for deliberately confusing the reader, creating stories which are
not clear at the start but which slowly reveal themselves. They may do it by
concealing where the action takes place, or perhaps who the central characters are. Or keeping back the salient piece of information that the reader needs to make sense of everything.

Some writers go for the flashback approach, beginning the story with an incident then working backwards to explain how we arrived at this moment. Knowing what happens at the end can make the events that unfold that little but more poignant.
However you do it, a bit of planning at the start – what happens when? – will save a lot of rewriting further down the line.

 

John Dean