thank you hello and welcome to my weekly writing q a this week's writing question is from roon the Canton who shared this via email um he asks I am plotting and planning the rest of my 90 000 word fantasy novel and it came to wonder about how to reach the pinch points and the three major plot points um while reading your blog posts on the subject I came to wonder how many minor setbacks would be psychologically tolerable for a reader before they put the book down I mean writers can always only throw in so many
obstacles that the story never ends that we never get to the first plot point or the first pinch point but at some point we've got to put the foot down and get on with it so how many is acceptable I'm afraid the answer might be it all depends on the story but are there any pointers like with the percentile when what should be in what place Etc so I really like this question um but just to get us started I will just really quickly Define story structure as I teach it and primarily how I teach
it it has to do with structural timing which has to do ultimately with the pacing of a story I talk about dividing a story into eight equal parts and timing a major turning point roughly around each of those moments and each one has its own specific you know role within the development of the story so he's talking specifically in this instance about the first plot point which Begins the first act around the 25 Mark and the first pinch point which is a slightly smaller Turning Point around the 37 percent mark and I think that he's
right it's like it does depend on the story but more specifically it depends on two considerations and one of them is simply genre um different genres want different piecing basically say you're writing a thriller you're going to want to have something happening you know as often as possible maybe even on every page versus say a Literary story which um it's probably going to be much more leisurely where something might happen and you might spend chapters you know dissecting it or developing it or or talking about the character's reaction to it so it it does depend
on on considerations such as those which ultimately are about pacing and the other thing to consider is the length of your story so in a shorter form fiction whether it's a short story or a movie a two-hour movie or a relatively short novel and what he's talking about is a 90 000 word fantasy which is relatively short for that genre so any any shorter um story and the shorter the story it is the more precise you're going to want your timing to be your structural timing of those turning points to be in order for the
pacing to work throughout the story and to make sure you're not shortchanging any of the other sections in the story if you're writing something that's longer then you have a little more wiggle room it certainly does not have to be timed down to the percentile or the page or whatever you've got more wiggle room to add more chapters in between things and develop them more where necessary as long as the pacing works that's what it all comes down to you know if it's feeling like it's dragging in certain areas or it's too rushed in other
areas that's probably a sign that the structural timing needs some tweaking um but I think as far as as you know adding in extra events in between the major turning points um again in some stories you have a turning point happening you know noticeably on almost every page certainly in every chapter and in others things take their time a little bit more but there's there is so it is about like knowing your audience and what they want um and what they're likely to Bear kind of within their expectations for the genre but beyond that it's
it's more about what makes sense within the story what development is necessary it's certainly you know possible to flog a dead horse and and throw in all this these these little turning points and events and complications when they're not really necessary because the main show of a story is always going to be the structural through line as defined by those main structural turning points so you don't want to overshadow those you need enough developments in between to logically get to each of those structural moments but they should be you know the the main enchilada as
I call it and the thing that that readers are here for I have structurally analyzed many novels mostly where like there's lots of stuff happening but it's hard to kind of find the actual major turning point it gets lost and it's minimized in some respects and doesn't have that impact that you ideally like it to have within the story where there's like no mistaking that this is it and something important just happened so anyway basically you're just going to want to consider the needs of your genre and the length of your story and analyze your
structural pacing based on both of those things and that's that's really what counts here so I hope that's helpful if you have a question about writing leave it in the comments on YouTube or Instagram and on and I'll answer one next week
