Here’s Shawn Coyne, showing a way of seeing basic story design…
To keep it simple, you’ll need a beginning, middle, and an end to your Story. No matter how many acts you have (three to five to seven), you need a beginning to your Story, a middle section to your Story and an ending to your Story. As an editor, I don’t worry so much about figuring out exactly how many acts are in a book. For me, the Beginning, Middle and End are all that matter.
Shawn Coyne, The Story Grid
So, this insight from Shawn Coyne helped me experiment with the Bible as a long-form story.
Does the bible fit into the concept of the Beginning Hook, Middle Build, Ending Payoff?
Here is how Coyne explains this structure…
Boiling your pile of 400 pages down to BEGINNING, MIDDLE and END and setting aside all of the other pieces in your Story is the single best advice I could give anyone. Remember, Stories are conceptually simple things…
A storyteller hooks us …. And then we get a middle build that raises the stakes …. Lastly, we get an ending payoff that is both surprising and inevitable ….
It’s very useful to remember that the BEGINNING is all about HOOKING your reader…getting them so deeply curious and involved in the Story that there is no way they’ll abandon it until they know how it turns out. The Middle is about BUILDING progressive complications that bring the stress and pressure down so hard on your lead character/s that they are forced to take huge risks so that they can return to “normal.” The ENDING is the big PAYOFF, when the promises you’ve made from your HOOK get satisfied in completely unique and unexpected ways.
STORY distilled is…HOOK, BUILD, PAYOFF. That’s it.
Hook, Build, Payoff, by Shawn Coyne
So, here’s my initial take on what the Beginning Hook, Middle Build, and Ending Payoff in the story in the Bible may be.
But, once again, I’m out of my depth. I may be way off…
Beginning Hook
Movement One
From the Balance in the Creation to the Inciting Incident, the Fall of Man in the Garden
Movement Two
From the Expulsion from the Garden to the Flood
Movement Three
From the Flood to the Dispersion of the Nations at the Tower of Babel
Middle Build
This pointer helped me see where the middle build could begin…
The most obvious beginning point for restoration is God’s covenant with Abraham. God narrows the focus from all humanity to one man and his family. God will bless Abraham so that in time he may offer hope and restoration to all the families of the world.
The Story of Israel: A Biblical Theology, by C. Marvin Pate and J. Scott Duvall
I decided to use this verse, from the genealogy of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, as the structure for the middle build…
So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
So, what if there are three movements in the middle build?…
Movement One
From Abraham to David
Movement Two
From David to the Deportation to Babylon
Movement Three
From the Deportation to Babylon to the Christ
And, here’s the…
Ending Payoff
Movement One
The King Suddenly Comes
Movement Two
The Gospel Spreads to the Ends of the Earth
Movement Three
The Return of the King
Three movements each. But like we said, I know I could be way off.
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