🪄📐 On the Magic of Design Principles
And how to find one unique to your story
This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about design principles in storytelling, which is not a concept I remember hearing about until I read this fabulous Substack post by
, which was in turn inspired by this other fabulous Substack post by .Both mention that the term was originally coined by screenwriter John Truby and appears in his 2007 book The Anatomy of Story. To quote Stein quoting Truby:
The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole. It is the internal logic of the story, what makes the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It is what makes the story original.
Some examples will illustrate this best, or at least the understanding I have gleaned from these posts and thinking about how this works in my own fiction and connects to the ideas of emotional superstructure that anchor my craft analysis here on Lit in One Sentence.
Cicero’s post delves into why she found the 2024 Booker Prize winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey to be such a page-turner when previous winners had failed to similarly hold her attention. She concludes that one of the most important factors is its memorable structure:
Orbital takes place over 24 hours as six astronauts and cosmonauts make 16 orbits around the earth in the ISS. They experience a sunrise every 90 minutes. They twist and curl around the earth over and over again, confined for the duration of the novel to this small space. […] With such a unique structure, it works that not much actually happens during those 24 hours. There are no explosive fights, no near-death experiences, no sounds of alarm from mission control, but the simplicity of the structure allows the narrator to dip in and out of the astronauts’ minds, giving us their histories in little vignettes of memory.
I have not read Orbital yet—though this certainly makes me want to—so I will not attempt to write a finely-crafted superstructure sentence about whose head we’re in, what they’re doing, and why it matters for this book. But I’ll bet that if I did, the words “astronauts” and “orbits” would appear in it. And that is how the book is structured, which you can see in its table of contents: 16 orbits, sometimes further broken into their ascending and descending phases.
That structure immerses us in something unique about what it’s like to be in an astronaut’s head, that they are experiencing time in orbits, and so are we while we’re reading about them in Harvey’s book. It’s certainly not the only way one could design a story about astronauts, but it conveys something of superstructural importance through the unique way the book is organized.
Stein’s post describes how a design principle elevated her new novel If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You, forthcoming this August and available for pre-order now:
The designing principle of my gothic novel is a crumbling Hollywood mansion, where a millennial approaching forty must get up close and personal with the generation coming to replace her. In the draft that went on submission in September 2023, I had a shocking third-act twist.
Nine months later, after my novel finally sold to Ballantine, I had a conversation with my editor Jesse, who told me, “I’m not saying you have to change the twist. It just isn’t yet connected to the house.”
The house had to become the plot twist.
I spent the next five months rewriting the third act and that one note from him made my novel 1000% better.
Once again, I won’t attempt an emotional superstructure sentence for a book I haven’t read yet, but I’ll bet the words “hype house” or “mansion” or even just “house” at the very least would appear in it. The house was already a uniquely important element of the book’s plot, and elevated the manuscript by becoming a uniquely important element of its twist structure as well.
I encountered a third example at a recent event with
for their new novel A Sharp Endless Need. The book follows intensely competitive queer high school basketball players during their senior year of high school. At the event, Crane described struggling to come up with a structure for the book before realizing, “duh, it’s a basketball game.”As with Orbital, this is evident right from the table of contents, which is broken down into “First Half,” “Halftime,” “Second Half,” and “The Final Score,” with the sections further broken down in to chapters like “1: Pep Talk in the Huddle,” “2: Tip-Off,” “3: Hard-Earned Buckets,” “4: Time-Out #1,” and so on.
I’d read the prologue before this event, and the lyricism with which it captured obsessive desire had already shot the book to the top of my TBR list. But I had missed what the prologue was actually titled: “Pregame Pump-Up.” That added something for me, as someone who has spent exactly zero minutes of her life in highly competitive sports locker rooms. It gave me, the not-very-athletic lit nerd, a visceral understanding of how a pregame pump-up actually feels, because it was written as a pregame pump-up, in the style of a pregame pump-up, and not just ordinary-feeling prose that happens to depict a pregame pump-up.
Much as the structure of Orbital immerses us in something unique to the experience of being an astronaut, this structure immerses us in a headspace that will be uniquely familiar to basketball players. The structure helps us go from simply reading about the characters to seeing the world more directly through their eyes, and getting to feel more directly what it’s like to be them.
Which is kind of the whole point of fiction, isn’t it?
Our Stories Will Have Organizing Principles Whether We Design Them Intentionally Or Not
I found myself voicing a complaint on a recent editorial call: I open up so many manuscripts that are ostensibly about different things, yet the experience of reading them feels the same. (Happily, this was in contrast to a story for that call that felt like nothing any of us had read before, garnering it rare universal love from the team.)
Design principles might not be the only way around this, but they seem like one powerful way to break a story out of the sameness feeling that it threatens to have with lots of other stories.
Because if we don’t choose a unique design based on something critical to our story’s emotional superstructure, we will end up organizing the book some other way, likely in a way that many, many other stories are organized. In three acts, say, or in a straightforward chronology or a hero’s journey or an initial state to rising action to climax to resolution. It’s not that these organizing principles won’t work well enough; on the contrary, they work well enough for many, many, many stories, and so are less likely to thrill than a structure that’s unique to the story at hand.
How to Find a Unique Design Principle for Your Story
Write out your story’s emotional superstructure sentence. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just 30 words (give or take) capturing what is unique about your story’s main character, journey, and stakes.
Mine those words for ideas. Do any of them suggest a structure that will help us see the world in a way that is unique and specific to your character(s)? When, after reading the posts by fellow Substackers that I mentioned above, I asked this question of the novel project I’ve been immersed in all year, the answer was immediately apparent and the results of this reframing have been blowing my mind for weeks.
But the superstructure might not always contain an obvious design principle, or might suggest a structure that does not actually yield good results when applied to your story. I’ve also been working on a short story project, and although its superstructure did suggest two possible design principles, one was too boring and generic to be of much use while the other was far too archaic and academic and would probably not have produced great results on the page either.
By this point, I was too excited about what the design principle was doing for my novel project to just let it go for my short story. So, I decided to try designing my own design principle and that process has been producing a similar magic that works well for this particular story, which is very different from the novel.
I’m sure there are many ways to craft a unique design principle for your story. What worked well for me in this case was taking my character’s overall journey—which I knew from early drafting and writing a superstructure sentence I loved—and asking what stages she herself would break this up into, if she had to do that in her own words.
The results were instantly better and much more unique to this particular story than the basic three-act structure I had been subconsciously defaulting into, because I hadn’t explicitly tried to think of anything better. They were also better than the way I had been roughly marking the turning points of the three acts, based on where my characters were physically rather than on their underlying emotional states.
Thinking about design principles has for me solved a struggle that superstructure alone had not, which was how to approach the next level of structure down from the very top. Superstructure captures the story’s overarching uniqueness in terms of main character, journey, and stakes. Yet, when I thought about applying it one level down, I always figured what I needed to do was break it up into a traditional three-act structure or similar and write superstructure sentences for each of these.
While I suppose there’s nothing wrong with this still, it always felt like an especially creativity-killing step to me, taking a uniquely exciting idea and forcing it to fit back into a familiar pattern someone else came up with ages ago. Design principles, however—either existing patterns arising in connection with your story or new ones you create especially for your story—provide that next level of structure down in a way that’s still fresh and exciting and rooted in the uniqueness of your story. And I think, at the end of the day, readers will really feel the difference.
I hope you find this as helpful as I do!
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