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The Forgotten Story Structure — The Fichtean Curve
This story structure isn’t on the tips of writers’ tongues like Three Act story structures or the hero’s journey, and that’s a shame for this structure’s simple nature works great for webcomics or novels because it focuses on crises. This structure also works for less plot-driven stories. (I’m going to include an article I love on the difference between character-driven stories and plot driven, even though I think every story is both knowing the facets of how we as writers divide them is a good thing to have in your back pocket.)
Fichtean is an interesting word. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was an English word but this is the name of a German philosopher. He was in the transcendental philosophy club, and believed in the Good, True, and Beautiful with capital letters. He was instrumental in the founding of German idealism. That’s just background information but you can see how this translates into this structure because it’s very straightforward, very to the point which makes sense because when I hear transcendentals I think of something that is ambiguous to the human mind but also concrete and this structure is ambiguous but solid. It starts with Rising action:
Rising action: The four Crises
So in this first point, think of it like that point of the roller coaster when you hear the clinks of the gears pulling the cart up the long ramp that you have to go towards. This part is always scary, but calm down because you’re still at a manageable height. You’re not flying through the air yet, but you can see the amusement park. You can see that one friend that was too scared to go on the ride standing with everyone's bags eating the cotton candy they promised not to eat.
See what I did there? I set the scene. That’s what you need to do in your story, set the scene with a sense of what’s to come. Now there’s the jerk that happens when the roller coaster cart starts to climb pretty fast, and you get to see the view of the park and everything around you but you’re still in your head waiting for the drop. Then there’s a moment when it stops and you look out and you’re like, ‘oh, that’s pretty’, before you absolutely drop.
That, my friends, is the first crisis. Something that is in my notes on this structure is that in each crisis your character…
