Freytag Who? A New Plot Diagram
Discover a new way to diagram your story’s structure
Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use Greek Dramatic Structure to outline your story’s narrative and your protagonist’s external goal.
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I’m going to level with you right now. The title of this post is a lie. The plot diagram outlined in this lesson is not new at all. In fact, it’s so old that ancient Greek playwrights used a similar structure for their plays. Regardless, this particular diagram might be new to you and your writing life. I first discovered this plot visualization when I was a student at the University of San Francisco. My thesis advisor, Lewis Buzbee, introduced my class to this diagram in his long fiction workshop. As he drew this three-act structure on the board and explained the rise and fall of the protagonist in each act, my mind was blown. This was a crucial moment in my writing life because up until this class, I had identified as a discovery writer and abhorred the thought of outlining. But the elements of this diagram completely clicked with my understanding of story. There, in that Kalmanovitz classroom, I realized that using this diagram (and any outline in general) could save me time in both the drafting and revision processes.
Overall, I liked this particular diagram because Freytag’s Pyramid never worked for me as a writer.
If you went to school in the United States, at some point your English teacher probably drew a triangle on the board and noted which points represented the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (or denouement if you’re fancy). While this structure is great for teaching young readers the components of a story, it never helped me write a more effective narrative. But this diagram of Greek Dramatic Structure (GDS) was a game changer for me because, unlike Freytag’s Pyramid, this diagram is built directly around the character’s external goal.
Whether you’re an outliner or a discovery writer, Greek Dramatic Structure can benefit you because it’s a concrete checklist for two crucial craft elements:
Your story’s structure
Your character’s external goals
Before we dive into the structure, it’s important to note that this craft lesson is for traditional western storytelling. There are countless other ways to tell stories across cultures. I teach western storytelling craft because this is the tradition that I write in. As you go through this lesson, please take anything that will improve your writing life and scrap everything that won’t.
Greek Dramatic Structure Map
Greek Dramatic Structure is broken into three acts.
Act I:
Broken Place: The problems the protagonist has before the start of the story.
Guiding Questions:
Who or what is troubling the protagonist before the story begins?
How is this struggle preventing the protagonist from being satisfied with their life?
Movement toward Light: Act I is generally a movement toward something positive for the protagonist. In this act, they find out what concrete thing they want to win, stop, escape, or retrieve by the end of the story and decide to go after that thing.
Guiding Questions:
What is the protagonist’s concrete, external goal?
Who is in their way?
What do they have to do to achieve their final goal?
For more on external goals, check out my thread on character goals in film and literary fiction.
For more on internal goals, check out my thread on narrative design.
Act II:
Fall toward Darkness: In Act II, the protagonist gradually falls into darkness and eventually arrives at their lowest point in the story. By the end of Act II, they are the furthest they will ever be from their goal.
Guiding Questions:
What is the protagonist’s first step toward pursuing their goal?
How does the force of antagonism create unexpected consequences for the protagonist’s actions?
What terrible thing happens when the protagonist reaches the low point of Act II?
Act III:
The Evening Out: The conflict evens out in Act III as the story ends. Effective endings are rarely completely positive or completely negative for the protagonist. Even if they achieve their goal, they still lose something along the way. In 99% of effective endings, the protagonist can never truly return to the same Broken Place that they were in at the start of the book.
Guiding Questions:
How does the character succeed (or fail) at their ultimate goal?
What concrete things do they gain at the end of the novel?
What did they lose along the way?
Let’s look at how Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame function as a single narrative in this structure. Spoilers ahead for both of these movies.
Act I:
Broken Place: After the events of Captain America: Civil War, the Avengers have split up due to in-fighting.
Movement toward Light: The Avengers want to stop Thanos from killing half of the universe’s population, so they reunite and make a plan to stop him.
Act II:
Fall into Darkness: Despite all their efforts to stop Thanos from collecting the infinity stones, Thanos obtains the final stone, snaps his fingers, and erases 50% of the universe’s population. This is the low point of Act II and the end of Infinity War.
Act III:
The Evening Out: Thanos is defeated and all of the people snapped out of existence return. But the Avengers lose Iron Man and Black Widow, and the Guardians of the Galaxy lose Gamora.
Now, if you’re a literary fiction writer like me, you might be thinking, “Well, yeah. Of course this works for high concept genre. How do I apply this to my quiet novel about a dysfunctional family?” We’ll look at a literary fiction example in a second, but first, it’s a good idea to confirm your character’s internal and external goals. In general, most literary fiction writers have a deep understanding of their character’s internal conflict. It’s important to know your character’s external goal just as deeply. What concrete thing is your character trying to win, stop, escape, or retrieve by the end of the story?
Let’s turn to a short story as an example of strong external conflict in literary fiction. Check out “Anything Could Disappear” by Danielle Evans if you haven’t already. The following GDS outline spoils this story.
Act I:
Broken Place: Vera is a broke, 21-year-old from Missouri with no direction in life. She must deliver an illegal substance to earn money and start a new life in New York.
Movement toward Light: When a neglectful mother abandons her two-year-old child, Vera decides to illegally adopt him without notifying law enforcement.
Act II:
Fall into Darkness: Vera delivers the substance to a courier company that dabbles in illegal drug transport. The office hires Vera as their receptionist, and she begins her life in New York with baby William. As authorities close in on the office’s illegal activities, Vera discovers that William’s thought-to-be absent father is actually searching for him. Vera eventually decides to return William to his father.
Act III:
The Evening Out: Between stealing a child and being involved in a drug ring, Vera must now disappear under a new identity. Although she does the right thing by reuniting William with his family, she loses her sense of purpose by the end of the story.
Using Greek Dramatic Structure
If you’re a discovery writer, I recommend answering the guiding questions above by jotting down bullet points along the diagram. You can do this either before or after you write your first draft, whichever is most useful to your process. This exercise will help you see if there are any macroscopic weak points in your story’s structure.
If you’re an outliner like me, the diagram below combines GDS with some of the beats from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat (check out the novel version if you write prose). If you want detailed definitions of each beat, pick up a copy of Save the Cat for your chosen genre.
I don’t include all 15 of Snyder’s beats in this GDS template because I prefer to see broad strokes with this structure. In my experience, these 12 components from Save the Cat work great for outlining a short story. For novels, I typically use this GDS map in the very early stages of my outlining process. My goal with this exercise is to verify that my character has a strong enough external goal to sustain the story before I start writing. When creating a detailed novel outline, I use the Hero Goal Sequence Paradigm from Eric Edson’s The Story Solution.
Recap
Use Greek Dramatic Structure and the guiding questions above to develop your story’s external plot. Try it out and tell me about your experience in the comments. Are there other story structures you swear by? If you’re a discovery writer, tell me about your process. I want to hear it all in the comments section below.
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See you then,
Kat