Reading Like a Writer

We all know that as writers we should be reading a lot. It’s one of the best ways to learn the craft, and Stephen King’s quote on the topic is legendary: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

While it’s great to beat your annual Goodreads challenge, quantity is not the only factor. How we read is at least as important. One effective way of learning the craft of writing from published novels is to do an exercise that exposes their skeletons.

Deconstructing a Novel

Take a novel you know relatively well—or one that compares to what you’re writing—and deconstruct it. This means pinpointing everything from the protagonist and antagonist to their narrative goals, the relationship arcs, and the key structural points. It’s easy to appreciate the magic of a novel but you won’t truly understand how the author achieved that magic without dissecting it for yourself. With most of the novels I’ve done this for, I’ve been astonished to discover the complexity behind what seemed like a simple and straightforward narrative.

Case Study: Jane Eyre

At first glance, Charlotte Brontë’s beloved novel, Jane Eyre, seems like a relatively clear-cut Bildungsroman (a genre that focuses on the protagonist’s maturation through various experiences). But once you start picking it apart, it turns out Brontë has done something more interesting and more complex than this. She divides Jane’s life into five stages of maturity—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, and married life—using setting as the key structural element so that each stage takes place in a different setting. Structurally, each of these sections has its own arc. Each has a distinct stasis, inciting incident and climax, but only a semi-resolution until the ultimate resolution at the end.

Why does this matter? For any writer struggling to handle a novel that spans a character’s lifetime, this becomes a structural answer to a very real problem: how to sustain causality when your chapters jump over large periods of time. When you deconstruct Jane Eyre, you learn exactly how to do it: by concentrating these periods of time in separate episodes, giving each an arc, and maintaining causality within each episode, thus allowing you to make big leaps in time without breaking the causal chain.

For Every Problem There Is an Answer

Want to tell a story that circles around one key event? Analyze The Godfather, where Mario Puzo has used an event structure to anchor all the various subplots around the attempted assassination of Vito Corleone.

Want to start your story after the inciting incident has already happened? Take a look at how John Steinbeck handles it in Of Mice and Men. He throws the reader into the middle of the story, only referencing the inciting incident in passing.

For every peculiarity of structure you can think of, there is likely an author who has tackled it brilliantly and can teach you what you need to know—if you sit with their novel and study it piece by piece.

Why Does Structure Matter?  

Narrative structure might seem like a mechanical affair until you realize it is what creates a reader’s emotional investment. We empathize with a protagonist who has a specific and tangible goal. We become even more invested if the stakes for them not achieving that goal are high—and even more so if those stakes are personal. Home run if we can relate to the goal and the character who’s trying to achieve it.

Because all the structural elements in a novel revolve around the protagonist’s attempt to achieve their narrative goal, each element has a part to play in maintaining or increasing the reader’s emotional investment in the story.

Stasis gives us an idea of what the protagonist has to lose, as well as cementing the underlying motivation that will form their narrative goal. The inciting incident is the disruption to the protagonist’s life that spurs them to action. The point of no return is the place at which the protagonist becomes stuck in the story and has no choice but to see it through to the end. Rising action involves obstacles that prevent the protagonist from achieving their goal.

Midpoint is the structural fulcrum in a novel that often signals some kind of shift. Maybe the stakes go up, the conflict deepens, or the narrative changes direction. Whether a novel has a false victory or an all-is-lost moment depends on whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy (not haha comedy, but in the old-school Greek dramaturgy sense). In a comedy, the protagonist will achieve their goal in the climax, so for maximum drama an all-is-lost moment takes readers to the edge of their seats worried that this won’t happen. In a tragedy, however, the protagonist does not achieve their goal in the climax and their transformation happens too late. In this case, a false victory is what you want to keep the reader emotionally invested in the story’s outcome.

The climax answers a question that was asked in the inciting incident: will the protagonist achieve their goal, or will they fail but learn something important in the process? The resolution brings together all the story threads and leaves us with a particular emotion.

A Deconstruction Checklist

Here’s a quick list of questions to consider when taking a novel apart:

• Who is the protagonist?
• How does the novel’s stasis show the protagonist’s underlying motivation?
• Where is the inciting incident?
• What is the protagonist’s narrative goal that crystallizes as a result of the inciting incident?
• What’s at stake if they don’t achieve it?
• Who is the antagonist?
• Can you identify the point of no return?
• What’s the midpoint and how does it impact the protagonist’s trajectory?
• When do stakes rise?
• What are the key relationships in the novel and how do they evolve?
• Can you pinpoint either a false victory or an all-is-lost moment?
• Where is the climax?
• What is the emotional payoff at the end?

In Conclusion

The time you spend deconstructing a novel to study its various parts and how they all fit together is as good as any MFA class. I know this because my writing partner and I took 21 classic novels and novellas apart to crack their code. We outlined their narrative structure in Story Skeleton: The Classics. There’s a reason why some novels work, why they create a certain magic and stand the test of time. Understanding these reasons is the first step in creating a masterpiece of your own. 

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Michelle is generously giving away an EBook of Story Skeleton: The Classics to 10 lucky winners. Click the Rafflecopter below to enter. Winners will be shouted out here and contacted via e-mail on May 24.

Here’s more about the prize:

Story Skeleton: The Classics

This book unlocks the secrets of twenty-one enduring novels—from Pride and Prejudice to The Godfather—revealing the plot points and craft genius that make them masterpieces. Discover the method behind the magic, and learn how to apply these timeless techniques to elevate your own writing and captivate readers for generations.

A novel’s structural elements can be organized strategically, creatively, unusually—but in a satisfying narrative, they’re all there in some form. That form might be surprising when you realize what the author has really done—which often isn’t clear the first or even second time you read a complex novel. But once you crack the code, it’s immensely satisfying.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

A huge thanks to Michelle Barker and David Griffin Brown for this generous prize. Good luck, everyone.

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