Some writers plan before they write. Others write to find out what their novel is about. If you write to discover, at some point you’ll have a whole draft and a nagging feeling: something isn’t quite working, but you can’t say where.
That’s what looking at structure after the fact is for. Not to cram your novel into a mold, but to see it from above and find where it limps.
Pick a template (it’s not a contract)
A structure template is a list of moments that tend to show up in stories that work, in a certain order and roughly at a certain point in the book. In revision, it’s a lens. It lets you see your novel in a way you can’t from the inside.
Which one depends on what you want to look at:
- Wake the Dragon is very specific: fourteen pieces, each with a name and a place. If you’re not sure, start here. It’ll tell you some uncomfortable things, which is exactly what you want right now.
- Three Acts has fewer pieces. It works well if your novel is unconventional and a very detailed template gives you more noise than clues.
- Your own beats. If nothing fits, make your own. That counts too.
In Sunday Plot, you pick the template in Structure. Your scenes don’t move and don’t get lost: they stay where they were, waiting in “Scenes without a beat”.
Put each scene in its beat
Now go scene by scene and ask where it falls in the story. Not by the page it’s on, but by what it does.
In Wanted: One Dragon, the scene where Mara and Alex find the cracked shell in the bakery oven is “Upside Down.” The mystery changes shape (nobody stole the egg, it hatched) and Alex starts to believe her. Even if it sits in chapter 14 of 20 in your draft, that’s where it goes.
For the borderline cases:
- If it could go in two beats, put it in the one where something changes. A scene that only sets things up belongs to the beat it’s setting up.
- If it follows a side thread, it may not need a beat at all. The scenes where Mara and Alex argue and end up laughing at the same thing can go with their subplot, the romance, instead of a beat.
- Don’t trust the order. A beat might end up with scenes from three different chapters. That’s not a mistake. It’s information.
Look at the gaps
Once everything’s in place, the empty beats show up. And that’s often where the trouble was hiding.
Say the draft of Wanted: One Dragon jumps straight from “All Hell Breaks Loose” (the glass case is empty) to Mara deciding to investigate, with nothing in between. “Somebody Else’s Job” is empty. Mara never hesitates, never thinks about locking herself in the library and waiting it out. Is that a problem? It’s a flexible piece, so maybe not: some protagonists don’t hesitate for a second. But with Mara, you miss it. Without that doubt, her decision weighs very little, and the reader doesn’t feel what it costs someone who’s spent a year waiting for anyone to invite her out for coffee.
Is every gap a problem? No. It depends. Ask yourself:
- Does the reader miss something? If your protagonist’s change seems to come out of nowhere, probably yes.
- Does that moment happen, but inside another scene? Then it isn’t missing, it’s hidden. Good to know.
- Is your novel just not built that way? That’s an answer too.
Sunday Plot flags a beat with no scenes when the beats on either side of it have some. It’s a question, not an order.
And the ones that don’t fit anywhere
In the end, a few will still be sitting in “Scenes without a beat”. They usually come in three kinds:
- Subplot scenes. Give them their subplot and you’re done.
- Notes to self. Eight pages on the history of the egg since it arrived in town is research. It belongs in the Story bible (an object card, a rule of the world), and in the novel a single line the reader can follow is enough.
- Scenes where nothing changes. All three times Mara questions the hairdresser, for example. These need merging or cutting. Not today, though. Knowing is enough for now.
Switching templates without losing anything
Sometimes you pick a template, place half the book and realize it doesn’t suit you. You can switch. In Settings, “Change template” shows you how it would look first. Each old beat moves to the new one that falls at the same point in the book, and its scenes go with it. Whatever you wrote in each beat is kept with the old name in front, along the lines of “[All Hell Breaks Loose] The glass case is empty”.
And if no template feels quite right, you can add, rename and remove beats in Structure. Removing one doesn’t delete its scenes. It just leaves them without a beat.
For today
Pick a template and place only the scenes from the first quarter of your novel. Check whether any beat is left empty, and next to it, write one line: do you miss it or not?
In Sunday Plot, that’s the step “Pick a structure to sort what you already have”, inside “Look over what you have”. Ten minutes to choose; the rest at your own pace.