Does your plot need to follow a set structure?

This post discusses the entire plot of The Searcher, including the ending.

If you pull out your writing craft books and look for advice on plot structure or search the internet for plot templates, you’ll find an enormous variety. (I’ve discussed many in my previous book, All the Words, including 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 when it should fly 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 figure out 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 usual, I started my analysis by charting the details of each scene on a spreadsheet. (You can download my spreadsheet template at www.thebluegarret.com/novel-study-downloads.) I then zeroed in on the plot until one underlying structure stood out to me. While I organized the structure into three distinct movements, they don’t follow all of the rules of the traditional three-act structure.

See the first figure below for a visual overview of the movements: “Setup,” chapters one through five; “Slow build,” chapters six through thirteen; and “Action cascade,” chapters fourteen through the end. I’ve assigned each chapter an intensity score for both the internal and the external plots. The internal plot is another way to think about the character arc—the psychological and emotional change within the protagonist over the course of the novel. The external plot is the action—the answer to the question “What happens?” The first figure shows the total intensity score for each chapter, which will give you a sense of the overall pacing and action levels of the novel. The second figure shows the comparative intensity of the internal and external plots.

As we’ve seen in previous posts, 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?

Through the first four chapters, French doles out hints that partially answer the backstory question: Cal is divorced, and he isn’t as close to his adult daughter as he’d like to be. 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 the dispute between his neighbor, Mart, and a young local, Donie. He tells himself these problems are not his responsibility any longer but fails to fully shut off his cop radar. 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 Cal thought he had carefully hidden from his new neighbors—and wants him to find Trey’s older brother, Brendan, who disappeared several months earlier.

This, then is our dead body moment—marked on the plot-structure chart above by a cross symbol—except it arrives later in the story than is usual in the genre and in a way that is less clear-cut than usual. Brendan certainly isn’t in Ardnakelty, but we don’t know for sure that he is dead, much less that he has been murdered. Many characters in the novel insist that he has simply run away, but Trey refuses to believe it.

Starting with chapter six, then, we enter what I’m calling the slow build section. 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 pace. In chapter eight, another sheep is mauled—this time one belonging to Cal’s neighbor, Mart, who plans a night-time stakeout to 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 action.

Chapter fourteen launches the final part, what I’m calling the action cascade, 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—it’s marked by another cross on the plot-structure chart because the focus is on what happened to Brendan, the central question of this mystery novel. Trey leads Cal to an abandoned house in a remote spot far up the mountain (the scene whose setting details I analyzed in my post on setting and description), and Cal discovers Brendan had equipped it as a meth lab. French uses interiority to make sure we understand the importance of this discovery:

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, 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, marked by diamonds on the plot-structure chart—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.

In this same pair of chapters, we get two pieces of backstory that help us make sense of Cal’s choice. 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. His daughter needed comfort; the justice turned out to be important only to Cal. These two pieces complicate the understanding we had in the slow build section of the novel about why Cal left policing—and the United States.

These chapters are the high point of the internal plot of the novel. Why didn’t French deploy these stories earlier in the book, using them 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 has 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. (You can see the juxtaposition quite clearly in the internal-versus-external chart above.)

Chapter seventeen raises the intensity sky high again. 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. Because we’ve just read about two vulnerable people whom Cal has failed in some way—the young, unarmed suspect Cal and his partner were chasing, and Cal’s daughter—we know instinctively that helping Trey offers Cal a chance for redemption.

Cal, resuming the investigation into Brendan’s disappearance, 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. 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 broadly, 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 victim or the community. 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. Mart shows him the spot in the peat where Brendan’s body was buried, and Cal laboriously uncovers it. French has cleverly reversed the standard trope of the mystery novel, finally showing us the dead body in the last chapter, not the first. When Cal returns with Brendan’s watch, the proof of death Trey needs, 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. The setup section is roughly 80 pages; the slow build and action cascade sections are about 180 pages each. (At approximately 112,750 words, The Searcher is also longer than many mysteries and thrillers; 70,000 words is a typical length.) The effect, for the reader who sticks it out, is an intense, immersive roller-coaster of action in the last third of the novel. 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.

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