The Poetics
Plot is the soul of tragedy.
Events gain dramatic force through their relationship to one another. Aristotle’s account of tragedy asks how an action becomes a complete whole, and how a reversal or discovery can change its meaning. It gives you a way to examine why an ending follows from what came before.
How it works
Events gain dramatic force through their relationship to one another. Aristotle’s account of tragedy asks how an action becomes a complete whole, and how a reversal or discovery can change its meaning. It gives you a way to examine why an ending follows from what came before.
Reversal changes the direction of an action. Recognition changes what a character knows. They can occur together, but describe different effects. Consider a discovery that transforms an apparent rescue into a danger: the new knowledge changes what the action means.
A beginning, middle and end describe the completeness and relationships of an action. To use this lens, ask which events make later events possible or necessary, and whether the ending follows from those relationships.
Aristotle does not assign reversal or recognition to a fixed percentage of a story. The positions on this chart are editorial illustrations, not rules from the Poetics.
The framework, part by part
Positions are illustrative comparison references, not universal timing rules.
- Beginning (0%–15%, Ordinary world): Something that needs nothing before it, and from which the rest follows.
- Complication (desis) (15%–70%, New world): Everything from the beginning up to the change of fortune.
- Reversal and Recognition (70%, Lowest point): Peripeteia flips the action; anagnorisis moves the hero from ignorance to knowledge.
- Unraveling (lusis) (70%–95%, Climax): Everything from the change of fortune to the end, including the suffering it brings.
- End (95%–100%, New normal): Something that follows from what came before and needs nothing after it.
Use it for
Tragedy and drama, and any story where the turn of fortune is the point.
Watch for
The “three acts” came later; Aristotle described two halves and a turn.
See how your story works.
Explore 30 approaches to story structure through short films and illustrated guides. Bring an idea or a draft, build your outline, and compare how different frameworks organize its events.
Free to use. No account needed to write. Save a backup to keep your work.
A short film on every structure
Each of the 30 structures has a 90-second animation that draws its shape beat by beat, and a page with every beat, how its parts work, questions to try, and when it can help. Start with one you’ve heard of.
All 30 structures on one timeline
Each row is one structure. The story runs left to right, from the first page (0%) to the last (100%). Bars are beats that last a while; diamonds are single moments. Drag the red line to any point, and the list below shows the nearby beats in each structure.
- Bar: a beat that lasts a while
- Diamond: a beat at one moment
- Red line: the point you’re reading
- A blank stretch: that structure names no beat there
- Act II-A and II-B are the two halves of Act Two, split at the midpoint.
Rows 1 to 13 follow Robert Carlson’s Ultimate Story Structure Chart (2015). Rows 14 to 21 are the structures readers of that thread asked him to add, and rows 22 to 30 are nine more we added. Positions combine source conventions and editorial estimates. Use them to compare approaches; they are not universal timing rules.
† Credited on Carlson’s chart. We found no primary source; the tree line is also credited to George Abbott and George M. Cohan.
Outline your story in any structure
Choose a framework and give its prompts a few sentences. Compare suggested placements in other frameworks to find a useful question or a different way to develop an event.
Pick a structure you know
Not sure? Try one of these, or any of the 30.
Write a sentence for each beat
A beat is one turn in the story, like the Catalyst that knocks your hero’s life off course. Each beat comes with a question to help you answer it.
Compare another framework
The comparison suggests where your notes could fit. Review each match. You decide which prompts matter to your story.
We wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a Save the Cat! outline. These excerpts from our outline of Baum’s 1900 novel show how suggested placements change between frameworks. Unmapped prompts describe this partial outline, not a flaw in Oz. Pick any structure you know and try it with your own story.
Sketch your story’s ups and downs
Kurt Vonnegut drew stories as a line that rises when things go well for the main character and falls when they go badly. Draw yours from left to right and we’ll name the classic shape it’s closest to.
Take it to the page
The free 91-page guide has the full chart, a chapter on each structure, printable worksheets and beat calculators for films, episodes and novels.