Today, I’m guest posting on Live, Write Thrive, with a post titled “Did the Classic Authors Use Story Structure?” Here’s an excerpt:

Structuring Your Novel (affiliate link)

Here’s an interesting question for you: When was story structure invented?

I think many of us tend to believe structure is a recent development. After all, the likes Jane Austen and Charles Dickens could hardly hop by Amazon to buy the latest writing how-to book or zoom over to Writer’s Digest Workshops for an online class. The whole notion of learning how to write fiction seems to be a relatively modern invention. And structure, more than almost any part of storytelling, would seem to be something that must be learned.

But here’s the brain tickler. If writing how-to books and workshops weren’t available in the olden days, then was story structure (and, indeed, all of story technique) something the classic authors had no notion of? And if that’s true, how come they wrote books that are still selling the pants off some of us modern whippersnappers?