Story Diagrams and Plot Structures Compared
Every plot structure is a drawing before it is a rule. Freytag drew a triangle. Screenwriting teachers draw a line cut into three pieces. Game writers draw trees. The drawing tells you what the model pays attention to: rising tension, turning points, cause and effect, or choice. Pick the wrong one and you spend weeks forcing your story into a shape that measures the wrong thing.
This guide compares ten common structures. For each you get the shape, what it does well, where it breaks, which medium it fits, and how to draw it: what the nodes and lines stand for. For a slower walk through the classic novel models, the older plot structure guide for novelists goes deeper.
Before you draw: nodes and lines
A story diagram has two kinds of marks. Nodes are units of story: scenes, beats, chapters, choices, or story states. Lines are relationships: "causes," "comes after," "mirrors," or "the player can go from here to there."
Decide what each means before you start, and write a one-line legend on the diagram. Most messy diagrams are messy because one arrow means "happens next" and the arrow beside it means "is caused by."
Freytag's pyramid
Shape: a slope up to a peak and a slope down. Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement.
Good at: stories built on a single central reversal, especially tragedy, where fortune turns at the top and the rest is consequence.
Where it breaks: most contemporary audiences will not sit through a long falling action. Map a modern story onto it and the peak lands near the end, not the middle.
Suits: stage plays, tragic literary novels, musicals whose act one finale is the peak.
How to draw it: scenes as nodes on a horizontal time axis, each placed vertically by stakes. Connect them and mark the peak. If your peak sits at 85 percent of the length, you are really drawing a Fichtean curve.
Three-act structure
Shape: a line split into setup, confrontation and resolution, with two hinges (the act one and act two breaks) and usually a midpoint that turns act two.
Good at: shared vocabulary. Everyone on a production understands "the act two break." Easy to time and check.
Where it breaks: act two sags if all you know is "complications go here." It says little about character change on its own.
Suits: film and television first, then commercial novels and graphic novels.
How to draw it: a line in three spans (roughly a quarter, a half, a quarter is the usual rule of thumb, though it varies). Scenes are small nodes; the inciting incident, both breaks, the midpoint and the climax are large ones. Screenwriters can pair this with a beat sheet to name the moments inside each span.
The hero's journey
Shape: a circle. Someone leaves a familiar world, crosses into an unfamiliar one, faces trials and a central ordeal, gains something, and returns home changed, bringing it back to the people they left.
Good at: quests and coming-of-age stories where the outer trip mirrors an inner one. The circle reminds you the ending should echo the opening.
Where it breaks: used as a stage-by-stage checklist, it produces stories that feel assembled. It assumes one protagonist and a leave-and-return pattern many stories lack.
Suits: fantasy and adventure novels, family films, games with a home base and an expedition loop.
How to draw it: a circle cut by a horizontal line: familiar world above, unfamiliar below. Stages are nodes placed clockwise. The two points where the circle crosses the line are your thresholds out and back.
Kishōtenketsu
Shape: four parts: introduction (ki), development (shō), a turn that brings in something seemingly unrelated (ten), and a reconciliation showing how it connects (ketsu).
Good at: stories driven by perspective rather than conflict. The turn can be a change of viewpoint that recasts everything before it. Four-panel comic strips often use it.
Where it breaks: a story that depends on an antagonist and escalating stakes will feel like it is missing a gear. If the ketsu does not land, the ten looks random.
Suits: four-panel strips, slice-of-life comics, short fiction, quiet exploration games.
How to draw it: ki and shō as nodes in a row, ten placed off the main line, then two lines converging on ketsu, one from shō and one from ten. That convergence is the structure, so make it visible.
Seven-point structure
Shape: hook, first plot turn, first pinch, midpoint, second pinch, second plot turn, resolution. Hook and resolution are opposites.
Good at: planning backward. Write the resolution, then the hook as its mirror, then the midpoint where the character shifts from reacting to acting. Pinches apply pressure from the opposition.
Where it breaks: seven beats for a whole book leaves big gaps. It is a skeleton, not a scene list.
Suits: novels, especially series books that each need a clean arc, and season arcs in serialized comics.
How to draw it: seven nodes on a line, with a curved connector from hook to resolution labeled with the change ("alone to trusted"). Pinches sit below the line, pushing up.
Beat sheets
Shape: a numbered list of named moments with target positions in running time or page count. Several popular systems exist, often called save-the-cat style sheets, and they differ in names and counts.
Good at: detailed pacing: where the low point falls, what the scene before the climax should feel like.
Where it breaks: followed literally, they make stories feel familiar because so many writers use the same ones. They are tuned for feature length and get awkward for long novels.
Suits: features, pilots, commercial genre novels.
How to draw it: a timeline with percentage ticks. Beats are nodes at their targets. Add your actual scenes as smaller nodes and draw a line from each beat to the scene that fulfills it. Gaps and crowding jump out.
The Fichtean curve
Shape: a jagged climb through crises, each higher than the last, to a late climax and a short fall. Little setup before the first crisis.
Good at: thrillers, horror, anything that must grip from page one.
Where it breaks: with no valleys it exhausts readers, and it tends to underbuild character because there is little quiet time.
Suits: thrillers, action films, survival games, webtoons where every episode needs a hook.
How to draw it: a sawtooth on a time-and-tension grid, one node per crisis. If two peaks are the same height, one is doing redundant work.
In medias res
Shape: open mid-action, then fill in the past through flashback, dialogue or discovery. It is an opening strategy layered on another structure.
Good at: creating questions fast. The audience wants to know how the characters got here.
Where it breaks: if flashbacks take over, momentum stalls. If the opening's stakes depend on missing context, it reads as confusion.
Suits: nearly everything: film and comic openings, epic poems, game prologues.
How to draw it: two parallel tracks, chronology on top and telling order below. Events are nodes; lines connect each event's place in one track to its place in the other. The crossings show every jump.
Parallel and braided timelines
Shape: two or more storylines told in alternation, sometimes in different eras, converging where they meet or explain each other.
Good at: dramatic irony, thematic echo, and mysteries where one strand explains the other.
Where it breaks: readers will prefer one strand. If the strands do not touch until the end, it feels like two books stapled together.
Suits: novels, prestige television, ensemble films, comics that can split a page between eras.
How to draw it: one swim lane per strand, scenes as nodes in their lane, and lines between lanes wherever one strand affects or echoes another. Count those cross-lines. None before the last act means you have found the problem.
Branching structures for games
Shape: a graph. Common patterns are branch-and-bottleneck (paths split and rejoin at key points), the hub (spokes from a central place in any order), and the full tree (choices lead to distinct endings).
Good at: player agency, with bottlenecks keeping scope manageable.
Where it breaks: pure trees grow fast, and every branch must be written and tested. Too many bottlenecks and choices feel cosmetic. For line-level detail, see writing branching dialogue for games.
Suits: video games, interactive fiction, visual novels.
How to draw it: nodes are story states (where the player is, what they know or did). Lines are labeled choices. Give bottleneck nodes a heavy outline and put conditions on lines ("only if the key was kept").
Picking and combining
Match the drawing to what your story is about:
- One big reversal: Freytag's pyramid.
- Production checkpoints: three acts plus a beat sheet.
- Someone leaves and returns changed: the hero's journey.
- A shift in perspective, not a fight: kishōtenketsu.
- A before-and-after arc planned backward: seven-point.
- Escalating pressure from page one: Fichtean curve.
- Two stories that explain each other: braided timelines.
- Player choice: a branching graph.
Structures stack. A thriller might use three acts for its spine, a Fichtean curve inside act two, and in medias res for the opening. Draw each layer separately first, or the diagram becomes unreadable.
Common mistakes to watch for:
- Mixed line meanings. Use different line styles for time order and causation.
- Too many nodes. Group 200 scenes into sequences or chapters and diagram those.
- Drawing the template instead of the story. Draw your real scenes, then overlay the template. The mismatch is the useful part.
- Never redrawing. An outline-stage diagram is stale by draft two. Redraw after each major revision.
Drawing story diagrams in Aevon
In Aevon, story diagrams are available in every project type, so novelists, comic writers, screenwriters, game writers and musical writers all map structure on the same kind of canvas. One diagram can hold a three-act spine and another a branching quest, both in the same project.
Because the manuscript editor links characters, locations, items and lore with @mentions, the diagram sits next to the material it describes instead of in a separate file. Timelines and attribute progression help with braided structures: you can track how a character's attributes change chapter by chapter and check that both strands are actually moving the people in them. The floating Ideas and Notes panel stays open as you move between the diagram and the draft, and split screen puts them side by side.
If the project changes medium, say a novel you decide to turn into a game, you can convert the project type and add the Game Studio module. Nothing is deleted, so your diagrams and world stay put. Start with a story diagram of the structure you have now, then redraw it in a second shape and see what it reveals.