The plot thickens

Why even literary novels need the three P structure

There’s a persistent myth in literary circles – whispered in writing workshops, baked into Master of Fine Arts university courses, and reinforced in book reviews – that literary fiction doesn’t need plot. That the beauty of its language, the depth of its characters, or the poignancy of its themes somehow elevate it above such pedestrian concerns as narrative structure.

Now, I should show my hand here and say that I have played my own part in this snobbery – I’m sure I waxed lyrical in my twenties in university lectures about post-modernism and the importance of deconstruction, and I won’t even get started on my PhD thesis and its hypothesis on narratology in twenty-first century feminist literature.

There is merit to much of the intellectualism of ‘literature’ and, I would argue, the critical thinking component that is going to be ever the more crucial as we advance technologically…but there are dangers (and assumptions) too.

For example plot, we’re told, is for commercial fiction. It’s for thrillers and fantasies and screenplays. ‘Real writers’, the myth goes, don’t need such scaffolding. They write truth. They write life. They write…insert something I have also probably said when teaching a literary studies class.

But here’s the thing, even the most experimental, lyrical, slow-burning literary novel makes a promise to the reader. It sets expectations. It creates questions and tension. And if it’s any good, it delivers on that promise. Literary fiction doesn’t ignore plot structure – it disguises it. And if we’re willing to look under the hood, we’ll find the same engine as any great story.

A story needs a structure, and the structure needs to be visible to the writer, even if it's invisible to the reader.

Margaret Atwood

Which is why I want to talk about Brandon Sanderson.

Yes, that Brandon Sanderson – the prolific fantasy writer known for magic systems, plot twists, and prolific fanbases. In his 2025 writing lecture series, he outlines a deceptively simple framework for story structure: Promise, Progress, Payoff. Three Ps. Three pillars. A slightly different way to describe beginning, middle, end. And, in my view, a useful lens for any writer of fiction (even literary fiction writers) who want to challenge the idea that structure is somehow beneath them.

Let’s break it down.

Promise: what kind of story is this?

The Promise is what you signal to the reader at the beginning. It’s not just genre, it’s tone, voice, scope and stakes. If you open with a mysterious death in a quiet town, you’re promising something very different from a novel that opens with a woman eating oranges alone in a bare white room.

In literary fiction, the promise is often subtler, but it’s still there. It might be thematic: This is a novel about grief. Or tonal: This will be disarmingly funny, even as it breaks your heart. Think of The Bell Jar, which promises – and delivers – a descent into a troubled psyche, or The Secret History, which promises intellectual snobbery, beauty and murder.

Progress: something changes (and if it doesn’t there needs to be a very good reason)

Once the promise is made, the story has to move. That’s Progress. In commercial fiction, this might mean battles, investigations, heists or heartbreak. In literary fiction, it’s more likely to be emotional, relational or philosophical – but it must still feel like movement.

Progress can be slippery in literary fiction because it often doesn’t follow the classic rising action model. But it’s still there: characters shift, relationships deteriorate or deepen, tensions mount, understandings fracture and reform. Even if the world isn’t changing, the interior world should be.

In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro gives us an uncanny sense of slow, creeping dread – the kind that builds not through explosions, but through subtle revelations and the slow dawning of terrible truth. That’s Progress. Just in a whisper rather than a scream.

Payoff: fufil the promise – or subvert it with purpose

The third P is Payoff. The story must end in a way that feels earned – emotionally, thematically or narratively. This doesn’t mean everything has to be tied up neatly. But if your novel promises an exploration of alienation, it needs to arrive somewhere in that emotional terrain. Because even if a novel doesn’t feel like it makes a grand statement on that theme, that absence is a payoff in and of itself. The novel is saying, look closely, this is what alienation feels like: unresolved, cyclical, difficult to name. A refusal to offer neat answers is, in itself, an answer. It’s a structural choice that mirrors the messiness of real life. Payoff, in literary fiction, isn’t about tying bows, it’s about emotional and thematic resonance. It’s the quiet, lingering feeling that the novel ended exactly where it needed to, even if the reader can’t immediately explain why.

In reality there is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel:
great storytelling.

James Scott Bell

Too often, literary fiction is accused of drifting off, fading out, or leaving readers cold. But the most powerful novels don’t dodge payoff, they deliver it with quiet ferocity. Think of the final letter in Gilead or the devastating final image of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The emotion lands. The circle closes. The promise, however subtly made, is fulfilled.

Even Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – a gold standard of modernist, experimental fiction – quietly upholds the structure of Promise, Progress and Payoff. The novel opens with a promise: a family’s seemingly simple plan to visit a lighthouse, laced with emotional undercurrents and philosophical weight. Progress comes not through plot twists, but through the internal shifts of characters and the haunting ‘Time Passes’ section, which spans years and loss in a few elliptical pages. And the payoff? The final journey to the lighthouse and Lily Briscoe’s completed painting – small, almost anti-climactic events that nonetheless deliver emotional and thematic resolution. Woolf may have reinvented narrative form, but she still understood what every story owes its reader.

In fact, Woolf described the division of To the Lighthouse as an ‘H shape’, with the longer first and third sections, ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, representing the vertical lines, and the shorter middle section, ‘Time Passes’, as the connecting horizontal line. Promise. Progress. Payoff. This deliberate structure illustrates the extension and contraction of time, guiding the reader through the narrative's progression.

Structure isn’t the enemy

Sanderson’s Three Ps aren’t prescriptive. They’re descriptive. They don’t tell you how to write, they just remind you what readers need, whether they’re holding a space opera or a slow-burn family saga. Every novel, literary or otherwise, makes a contract with the reader. Some structure is how you honour that contract.

Any book, no matter how rebellious, no matter how deconstructive, no matter how innovative, ultimately has a beginning, a middle and an end. And, in turn, makes promises, enacts progress and delivers payoffs. Even if you don’t think they do…

In this way, the three pillar structure is not the enemy of artistry, it is the ally of story. Because without it readers flounder. And floundering readers rarely finish books.

Literary or not.

Megan x