This year I’ve been teaching my way through seven key story steps by finding examples in memoirs, novels and stories to serve as models for our own projects—mine and my students’ books and stories. I’ve read the books I draw from, of course—Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many others. But in going back to find the midpoint, say, or the low point, I’ve learned an instructive trick.

I do the math. It shouldn’t work—these are creations of the artistic soul, after all. Intuitive unfoldings of creativity and imagination, each unique, wholly different from the others in both content and form. And yet—the numbers tend to lead me right where I want to go. Midpoint? I look at the total number of pages, divide it in half, and turn to that page. Lo and behold—within a few pages either direction, I’ll find it. Low point I discovered about ¾ of the way through each story. It requires paging around, but the math will get you where you need to look.

What does this mean? It means that the deep shared rhythms of story pulse through all our favorite books—and through us. Like the structure of a human skeleton, a similar under shape does not produce identical clones at all. It just makes movement possible, provides armature for individuality. And it mean that you can put some posts into place as you intuit, explore and invent your story, some structure to support the completion of the whole.

Struggling with your story? Talk to me in the comments below. I’d also love to hear about your relationship to the structure of story: boon or block?