How it works

Dan Wells presented the Seven-Point Structure in a 2010 talk at the Life, the Universe & Everything symposium, adapting it from the Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator’s Guide. Its central advice is to design the ending first. A writer plans the resolution, then the hook as its opposite, then the midpoint that carries the hero from one state to the other, and builds the remaining points around those anchors.

Every beat is a single point. The Hook at 0% shows the starting state, the opposite of the ending. At 25%, Plot Turn 1 brings conflict and changes the hero’s world. Pinch 1 at 37.5% is the first thing to go wrong, pressure that forces the hero to act, and the Midpoint at 50% moves the hero from reaction to action. Things get worse at Pinch 2 (62.5%), where the plan fails and the hero seems lost. Plot Turn 2 at 75% hands them the final piece, and the Resolution at 100% is Wells’s name for the climax, where the main conflict is settled.

The positions track Larry Brooks’s plot points and pinches almost exactly, though the second pinch does different work. Brooks uses it to remind the reader of the antagonist, while Wells makes it the hero’s darkest moment, at 62.5%, well ahead of the shared lowest point near 72%. With the Resolution standing in for the climax, there is no separate aftermath, and no inciting incident is named. The emphasis falls on the arc between two opposite states.

It’s at its best when the ending is already clear. Writing the Resolution and the Hook as a matched pair, brave against cowardly or loved against alone, makes the midpoint easier to find. In a series, each plotline can carry its own seven points, and interleaving them shows where storylines collide. The gaps between points are long, especially before Plot Turn 1, and need subplots or smaller cycles of trying and failing to fill them.