7-Point Story Structure: Dan Wells's Method for the Novel

The Hero's Journey describes fourteen phases, and the three-act outline imposes three. Between that highly detailed scaffolding and that overly loose skeleton lies a short, precise and remarkably sturdy method: the seven-point story structure, popularized by the American writer Dan Wells.

It's easy to see the appeal, since seven milestones are enough to hold up a novel and each one mirrors another. You start from the end, work out the beginning from it, and the road almost draws itself. It's a planning method, but it's so light that it leaves plenty of room for what you'll discover while writing.

This article presents the method as Dan Wells laid it out, explains why it works and how to apply it, and also shows what it can't do when you ask too much of it.

Who Dan Wells is, and where the method comes from

Dan Wells is an American novelist best known for the John Cleaver series, which begins with I Am Not a Serial Killer (2009). He also wrote the Partials series and the Mirador series, and for years he has co-hosted the Writing Excuses podcast with three other authors, where he regularly explains his working methods.

Wells doesn't claim to have invented the seven-point structure. He found it in an unexpected book, the Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator's Guide, published by Decipher in 2002 and written by several authors, including Steven S. Long, Christian Moore and Kenneth Hite. Its chapter on building episodes offered a simple breakdown into seven key moments. Wells adapted it for the novel, taught it at conferences, then devoted episode 7.41 of Writing Excuses to it, released on 7 October 2012. That episode made the method known among English-language writers, before blogs and online courses picked it up everywhere.

This origin explains a lot. The structure comes from a roleplaying game manual meant to help game masters build, in a single evening, plots their players could live through, so it was never designed for any particular genre. Hence its compactness, and its ability to serve a romance as well as a crime novel or a space opera.

The seven points, one by one

Wells describes a story as a movement from a starting state to its opposite, and the seven points are the seven steps that make that movement believable.

1. Hook

The hook sets up the starting situation: who the main character is, where they stand, what they feel and what they lack. You need to show just enough for the reader to sense the road ahead, without a prologue or an inventory. A good hook is almost always the negative image of the resolution: if Katniss Everdeen ends The Hunger Games victorious and famous, the hook shows her in a wretched shack, hunting a squirrel to feed her sister.

2. Plot Turn 1

An event pulls the character out of their ordinary world: a call to adventure, a stranger's arrival, a death, a letter, a murder in the library. In Star Wars, it's the moment Luke finds the bodies of his uncle and aunt and understands he'll never go back to the farm. This turn lands on the character rather than being caused by them, and they can no longer escape it.

3. Pinch 1

After the turn, you have to stop the character from committing only halfway. The first pinch does exactly that: it hurts, it closes a door and it brings the antagonist onto the stage. In many crime novels, it's the discovery of a second body; in a romance, the arrival of a rival; in a coming-of-age novel, the humiliation that teaches the hero the rules of their new world.

4. Midpoint

In the middle of the story, the character stops reacting to events and decides to act, so the story and the character tip over at the same moment. In The Hunger Games, it's Rue's death, after which Katniss refuses to keep playing the game imposed on her. In Star Wars, it's the moment Luke, aboard the Death Star, learns that the princess is held there and convinces Han Solo to go and rescue her.

Wells insists on this point: a story with a blurry middle gets bogged down. The hero stays passive, the author fills pages, and the reader drifts away.

5. Pinch 2

The pressure comes back, stronger. The hero has just regained control and thinks they can win, but the world proves them wrong: the mentor dies, the ally is betrayed, the Capitol changes the rules. This is the moment when all seems lost, which other methods know under other names (the "dark night of the soul" in Save the Cat, the "all is lost moment" in Hollywood screenwriting).

6. Plot Turn 2

Something changes again, and this time it's the hero who causes the change or seizes the decisive piece of information. Obi-Wan whispers to Luke to turn off his targeting computer and trust the Force, and Katniss realizes that by threatening to die together with Peeta, she can force the organizers to give in. This turn gives the hero the last missing piece, whether material, moral or strategic.

7. Resolution

The character acts, and their world changes state. The resolution answers the hook, sometimes in the same setting, where everything has become different. Wells points out that it doesn't need to be happy, as long as it's the negative image of the hook.

Why seven points rather than three or fifteen

The three-act outline has the advantage of being easy to remember, but in a 90,000-word novel, each act runs thirty thousand words, and the second becomes a vast plain where beginners get stuck. The fifteen beats of Save the Cat solve that problem, at the cost of a mental load many writers find heavy when they're diving into a first draft.

Seven points impose a rhythm, with a pivot in the middle, two balanced pinches and two turns, while leaving plenty of freedom between milestones, and that freedom is precisely what protects intuition. You drive in six posts and fix a horizon line, leaving the scenes between them to be discovered.

That's why the method appeals to writers torn between planning everything and discovering everything as they write, since it gives them a backbone while leaving room for surprise.

Wells's real insight: fill in the points out of order

People tend to remember the list of seven steps, while Wells's main contribution lies in how to fill it in. He advises starting with the resolution, then working back toward the hook.

The order he recommends is symmetrical:

1. The resolution: where do you want to end up?
2. The hook: its negative, where you'll start from.
3. The midpoint: the pivot, halfway between the two.
4. The two plot turns, which frame the midpoint.
5. The two pinches, which tighten the vise.

This mirrored process makes you check that the tensions answer each other before worrying about how they follow one another. If your resolution is "Julien gives up medicine and returns to his village," your hook becomes almost obvious: "Julien has just placed first in the Paris residency exam." The midpoint will have to flip his desire, and the two pinches will have to crush him under two weights of opposite nature. The plot takes shape under constraint, and that constraint saves a great deal of time.

A familiar example, and a less expected one

Star Wars and The Hunger Games serve as examples for almost everyone who teaches the method, starting with Wells himself, but the grid also fits much older novels.

Take Stendhal's The Red and the Black. In the hook, Julien Sorel, the ambitious son of a carpenter, lives in a family that rejects him. The first turn brings him into the Rênal household as a tutor, where he discovers a world that was closed to him, and his affair with Madame de Rênal forces him to flee, which is the first pinch. In the middle of the novel, admitted to the seminary and then made secretary to the Marquis de La Mole, he gives up any thought of going back and sets out to conquer Parisian society. Madame de Rênal's letter then ruins his plan to rise through marriage, which serves as the second pinch. He shoots her, and it's in prison, at the second turn, that he finally understands his own worth. In the resolution, he refuses any appeal and goes to the scaffold.

You can argue with this breakdown, and Stendhal obviously never heard of Dan Wells. That the grid fits so well still shows that it touches the very structure of stories, far beyond a writing-manual fad.

The method's limits

The main risk is turning these seven points into mechanical obligations. A few precautions are worth keeping in mind.

In a short text, one pinch is often enough. A 30,000-word novella rarely has room for two big waves of pressure, and forcing them dilutes the middle of the story.

The structure doesn't solve the question of characters. You can place your seven points perfectly around a hollow hero, and the result will stay mechanical. The middle of the story works because a character changes deeply, and if your hero doesn't really change, the pivot will stay decorative instead of moving the reader.

Novels with several points of view complicate the grid. In an ensemble novel such as George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, you can apply the grid to each character rather than to the whole, which works but multiplies the seven points by the number of narrators and costs the method the compactness Wells valued.

Symmetry remains a guide. If your second pinch is more intense than your second turn, or if your resolution comes very soon after it, that may simply be your rhythm. Wells himself notes, in episode 7.41, that proportions vary by genre.

Working the seven-point structure into your process

Depending on where you are in your project, you can use it in three ways.

If you're starting a novel, follow Wells's order: write your resolution in one sentence, then your hook as its opposite, then your midpoint. Wait until these three points hang together before dealing with the pinches.

If you're stuck in the middle of a first draft, try to locate the central pivot. If you can't name it, you've probably found your problem, because your character is still reacting to events. Look for the moment they need to take the initiative, and move it if it falls in the wrong place.

If you're revising a finished manuscript, run it through the seven points to spot the ones that are weak or missing. A first turn that arrives at 25% of the text instead of 15% often means the hook needs cutting, and a second pinch that blurs into the second turn signals a compressed passage to rewrite.

In Extypis, the story plan offers three frameworks, a simple eight-step structure, the full fifteen beats of Save the Cat and Dan Harmon's hero's circle, all of which contain milestones equivalent to Wells's seven points. If you'd rather work your structure out on separate cards, the tool lets you do that too, and you can link each milestone to the manuscript sheet where it plays out. To see how other fiction writers use these tools, their examples will teach you more than an abstract tutorial.

A diagnostic tool

No structure guarantees a good novel, and this one mainly lets you see very quickly whether a plot holds up and, when it doesn't, where it gives way. That's probably why it has outlived a forgotten roleplaying manual and still accompanies novelists more than ten years after episode 7.41 of Writing Excuses. Start by writing the ending, look for the beginning that contradicts it and place the pivot between them: the rest often comes faster than you'd think.