He left policing because everyone involved-cops and community alike-seemed angry and unable to communicate effectively.įrench continues to add new story questions in each chapter, to draw us deeper into the novel. Through the first four chapters, French doles out hints that partially answer that backstory question: Cal is divorced, and he isn’t as close to his adult daughter as he’d like. 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? 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. I then zeroed in on the plot until one underlying structure stood out to me, captured in Image 1, below. As I’ve been doing for all of these Novel Study posts, I started my analysis by charting the details of each scene on a spreadsheet, similar to this one, for Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Let’s apply this technique to Tana French’s The Searcher and see what we discover. 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.

I consider which strands from within the story might be moved, bolstered, or invented to fix the problems. I zero in on those areas that feel weak or wrong and try to decode where the story has departed from its own specific, individual plot logic. I map out the plot as it unfolds, scene by scene, and see what it has to tell me. Rather than rely on story templates, I lean on my reader sense to tell me when a manuscript I’m editing drags or zigs when it should zag. The truth is I think every story has its own unique rhythm and structure. Outside genre fiction, I’m seeing more interest in non-Western story structures or structures that follow shapes that aren’t an arc. 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. 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. I’ve even considered their structures as I developed the plot of my own novel. I’ve tried applying them to my clients’ work. (I’ve discussed many: see these reviews of 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. If you pull out your writing craft books and look for advice on plot structure or search online for plot templates, you’ll find an enormous variety.

The searcher novel