Well, unless you are writing some kinds of literary fiction, or New Wave sci-fi and fantasy in the 1960s-70s, in which case I’d like to know where you found the time machine.
Something has to happen. Then other things happen because of that, or perhaps in parallel with that (guy has a bad break up, then the Big One hits the New Madrid fault, and …) If you go very, very far back, to when humans had finally learned to speak (and parents of toddlers thought fondly of how quiet Grandpa Austrolapithicus was …) people told stories. “Found antelope by pond. Killed with stick. Brought back.” OK, not so simple, but there’s a story there.
Eventually, stories grew more complex, with sub-stories and side plots and what have you, but the core remained – a conflict of some kind, be it man against the gods, man against man, or man against environment (and critters). Greek tragedies had a prologue, then the chorus gave the backstory of the current problem. The characters did their thing, with the chorus commenting or providing hints and warnings. Tension rose to a dramatic climax (think Oedipus returning to the stage blind.) Then the chorus explained what had happened, and gives a final moral of the drama. The Illiad was an epic, beginning in the middle of the action, then bouncing back a while, then forward once more as Achiles sulks, Agamemnon dallies, and Hector beats up the Greeks. Action then follows, with digressions and wandering side comments, because you could do that with recited epic poems.
Fast-forwarding to modern times, genre fiction still needs a plot. It can be the classic: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion. Ideally, each chapter will have a bit of that, all building toward the final climax/fight/action/admission of love and emotional release. If you use a modified Hero’s Journey, you still need to go somewhere, and you need rising and falling tension if you are going to keep the reader interested.
A lot of us fall into a basic Three-Act pattern, with the opening act presenting the problem, tension rising, then declining before Act Two, the middle of the story. Here’s more action, often a try-fail-try sequence for the protagonist, all with tension still building, information accumulating and leading to Act Three. Here we have the final climax, followed by release of tension, guy kisses girl, party after the victory, what have you.
Thrillers tend to use a variation on the rise-peak-fall that starts with a bang (literally perhaps), then ratchets tension higher and higher, racing against time until the climax, then a steady release of tension.
All of these have certain elements, including increasing and decreasing tension, a point of final conflict (the Boss Fight), then denouement. If readers tell you that nothing happens, you might need to sit down and map out the rise-fall-rise higher tensions. Or if “I got overwhelmed/overloaded/tired” you should probably consider adding more breathers for both characters and readers. Even thrillers have spaces where the protagonist takes a nap, or sneaks a smoke, or grabs a snack and thinks of what needs to happen next.
There is NO one right way to structure your plot. But you gotta have one, unless you are writing certain kinds of literary fiction.
Image Credit: Image by 652234 from Pixabay
https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/story-structure
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Plot Structure: Gotta Have One”
I’m a fan of a 4-act structure (where the final act is shorter than the others). (Others refer to this example below as “3-act”, but I don’t think of it that way. It’s more a matter of how to count milestones/tentpoles.)
Novels are big. Writing one is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s helpful to have a mold to pour them into.
Click to access StoryStructure_poster2.pdf
A lot of people describe three act structure in a novel as more like two acts+a (necessarily) much shorter climax and epilogue, so four shorter acts feels like a reasonable alternative way of describing them.
Oh, ya gotta’ have Plot/Miles and miles and miles of Plot …
I find them useful when the middle of the story is not so strong as it should be. OTOH, other stories don’t fit them neatly enough to be useful to me.