Another brick in the wall

Structure is something I really struggle with, to me it is the hardest thing of all.  It's a bit like trying to put a tent up in a high wind, you just get one bit staked down and then the wind gusts and another bit goes billowing off beyond your reach. I find it relatively easy to come up with an interesting situation and from that it can be quite fun to tease out a plot.  But how do you tell it?  In what order?  That's the killer question.  Do you begin at the beginning and follow a clear, neat line to the end? Do you start halfway through and look back and then forward? Do you have one omniscient  narrator who can see into the heart of every character, or do you opt for a single point of view?

As you can see, I have lots of questions (this is just a very small sample) but questions are good, questions mean that you are thinking. Answers can be a little harder to come by, but I suspect that to a degree it is a case of trial and error.  When you set out, stories have their own impetus, they will be told and they tend to come spilling out every which way, so it can be a fine line between re-structuring something and going for some rather tight editing. That's why beginnings are always such a headache, because you have to re-jig things until you hit your stride. Making radical changes to the structure further on in your narrative can be difficult, because the longer your story gets, the more there is to haul around and the more unwieldy the material becomes.  Post It notes and index cards can be worth their weight in gold in these situations. If you're really struggling with something, it can be an idea to throw the whole thing up into the air and (metaphorically) see how the pages fall.

Sometimes it can help to think laterally.  If you want an exercise that may help you shed some light, write three scenes which are linked thematically, not necessarily by plot, and see where that leads you...

....to another door!