Recently I came across author and editor Jed Herne’s YouTube channel, where he discussed story writing. In his video “9 Plot Mistakes Every New Fantasy Writer Makes”, he discusses the “soggy middle” of many stories and his method to fix it, which is what he calls “seven-point plot structure.”

Now Herne focuses on novels, which are a much longer form than the films that I analyze, but I thought his structure was interesting and decided to document it. To be sure, he first mentions three-act structure, but points out that the length of act 2 is often what causes novelists to lose their way, and his structure is meant to avoid that by specifying more points.

Here’s the thing: all it really is is three-act structure with the plot points specified as if they were act breaks. If you look at his diagram, there are eight acts, with seven act breaks. If you compare that to my diagram for three-act structure, it’s not so different; it just formalizes a couple of things that should happen in act 2.

Here are his points:

1. Opening hook, which introduces the hero and his flaws and desires. This is basically the inciting incident and call to adventure in my model.
2. Plot turn one, where the hero is thrust into the extraordinary world and starts becoming active. This is what I call the hero’s motivation to act.
3. Pinch point one, where pressure is applied to the hero (usually by the villain), and the hero becomes more and more active, making decisions and moves the villain has to react to. This is part of the rising action I call plot twist 1.
4. Midpoint, where the hero fully moves from passive to active and resolves to fight the villain. This is the crisis, altho I characterize it as a crisis that causes the hero to realize that resolving the conflict won’t be as easy as he thought.
5. Pinch point two, where more pressure is applied, resulting in the hero’s low point. This is a combination of what I call the plot twist 2 and the defeat, which happens at the end of the second act.
6. Plot turn two, where the hero discovers a clue that helps them defeat the villain. This is what I call the secret key.
7. Climax, where the hero succeeds or fails to resolve the conflict, the same as my climax, but presumably his version includes the final setback.

I’ll quibble with Herne’s characterization of pinch point two, because, if the hero is brought to his or her emotional low point–that “all is lost” moment–62.5% of the way along, then what is happening between that point and plot point two, 12.5% later? Surely he or she doesn’t spend 63 pages in a 500-page book certain of failing?

And regarding the midpoint being the hero fully moving to being active, the third of Herne’s “nine mistakes” is a passive hero, so he obviously doesn’t recommend the hero be literally passive for the first half the story and only stop at the crisis. Rather, the crisis is where the gradually-more-active hero fully commits. Traditionally, it is specifically a crisis that makes the heroes realize that resolving the conflict isn’t going to be as easy as they thought, so they now have to fully commit to it.

And, in my opinion, there should be an 8th point: the heroes return home changed, get congratulated, and make a decision about the future. This is where loose ends are tied up and heroes get married. But maybe that’s just meant to be what happens after point 7, just like the introduction of the setting and characters is what happens before point 1.

Conclusion

This goes to show that there are various valid ways to structure a story (or at least to think of its structure), but good structures are all pretty similar, once they are boiled down.