This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 599th episode of the Helping Writers

episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. How perfect does your story's structural

timing have to be.

Structural timing is one of the most prominent features of story structure.

This positioning of the story's important turning points is one of the keys for creating a story that feels right to audiences.

As often is not when something seems off about a story, the problem can be narrowed down to wonky structural timing.

This means structural timing is one of the most accessible tools writers can use to

troubles shoot weak areas of a story. However, structural timing is also

an aspect of story structure that many writers find frustrating or confusing. How are you supposed to time a story when you may not even be sure how long

the finished draft will be? Doesn't following a precise map for a story's timing mean your story is more likely to feel formulaic to readers.

And perhaps most commonly, just how precise does a story's structural timing actually have to be?

I hear these questions often, particularly that last one.

Here's an email I received recently from Reader Theresa Klein.

She said, I have a question about the length of each act in a novel that I'm hoping you can answer.

I'm revising my book plot in prep for my second draft and I find that my first act is probably about half

the length it should be compared to how long everything else is more like 12.5% of the total

word count

rather than 25%.

So my question is, does it ever work

to have three acts that don't stick super close

to the 25%, 50% 25% breakdown or should that be my signal that my

...