The Grasshopper #9: Structure in Fiction and Non-fiction
As a writer I think about structure a lot. How things like pacing, introducing the unexpected, and varying intensity can be used to keep a reader engaged. It’s really the sign of an experienced writer when things move along and the reader suddenly finds themselves at a satisfying ending.
But structure in nonfiction is a very different thing from structure in fiction. Nonfiction structure tends to be more conscious whereas fiction structure often is serendipitous, following a path new to both the writer and the reader.
Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient is brilliantly structured. It follows a cast of seemingly unrelated characters across a vast landscape inevitably altered by war and death. I wondered how much of this framework was planned.
Then I found an interview with the writer where he was asked this very question. And his answer was that none of it was planned. In fact all he had as inspiration was an internal image of a man in a wrecked Italian castle, covered with bandages and being tended to by a nurse in the aftermath of WWII.
Everything else surfaced as he wrote.
In nonfiction writing this would almost never work because we are dealing with facts and experiences that actually took place. But the nonfiction writer is still creating, or more accurately, recreating, a world and still needs to draw the reader into it.
Shifting gears from pure storytelling (making things up) to recounting or organizing a factual story can be very challenging, possibly being the reason many novelists only write fiction and vice-versa. I do both and have come to believe that each informs the other in ways I would not have experienced had I only focused on one or the other.
“I usually start with very little when I begin writing a novel, perhaps one image: a patient in a bed talking to a nurse, perhaps. I don’t know who the patient is; I don’t know who the nurse is; or a boy walking across a field eating a stalk of celery—something as simple as that. Then I have a time period, and I have this image, and that’s how my books begin. I don’t have this great scheme of a plot or an intent or an idea for the novel. I kind of investigate this little keyhole of an image, and then the book grows out of that. I start asking myself: who is the nurse, who is the patient, why is he burnt? And so the book starts building up from this, almost backwards, trying to find out the context of these people, what’s the room like, what’s outside the room, etc., and that’s how a novel gets built for me.”
From an interview with Michael Ondaatje in Gulf Coast magazine
Fictive Structure, Conscious or Intuitive?
Pantsers and plotters
Fiction writers are basically divided into two types, those who carefully plot (plotters), and those who wing it (pantsers, as in ‘flying by the seat of their pants’). Obviously, based on the quote above, Ondaatje is a pantser.
Plotters tend to be writers who work on procedural styles like murder mysteries or thrillers, where you need to bring the loose ends together at some point to solve a puzzle of some kind or another. Other plotter styles can include romance novels, which often follow a pretty rigid pattern, actually defined by the Romance Writers of America, which seems to have assigned itself the role of story cop for what constitutes a romance novel and what does not.
As draconian as that might sound, romance readers have set expectations and varying from those expectations may turn off many. Like many genre readers they seldom stray from their favorite type of story.
I am completely unqualified to discuss plotting a story ahead, so I am not going to pretend I know anything about it. I rarely read that kind of story, not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it’s just not my thing.
But if pantsers just wing it, what can you say about structure? Actually, a lot. Just because a writer simply follows the story where it wants to go does not mean it has no structure. It just means they are letting it build itself, often based on the writer’s reading and ability to let their subconscious do its thing.
The result is often a structure that is complex and follows an unexpected path to a conclusion. So, what can a pantser learn about structure that is useful? Well, the obvious thing is pacing. Does the story move right along or does it go into dead ends or side trips and have to be steered back on track?
This often means a lot of structure is imposed during rewrites and editing, often by mercilessly chopping off those unneeded appendages, lovely as they may seem. Merciless is the operative word here.
I learned this when I put a cell phone on a table in an early scene of a book. When I thought it was finished I passed the manuscript to some friends to read and get feedback. The first thing one said in her notes was ‘why was the cellphone there?’. Honestly, I may have intended to use it at some point but I forgot about it or didn’t need it.
That cellphone stopped that reader and bothered them later on because it was an unresolved thing. It interrupted their flow in the story. Continuity is another thing you have to watch. Are scenes progressing towards some end and do they contribute or distract?
A novel like The English Patient is a master class in continuity because it moves around in time and across the experiences of seemingly unrelated characters, yet you always know the story is going to somehow string them together elegantly.
So, can you learn this stuff? The answer I think is yes, but not in a conventional classroom linear sense. There are two things that are essential. The first is reading and reading critically. I think I learned what I know about writing by rereading novels that sucked me in because the second or third time you start to understand how the writer’s mind, at the time they were writing, was working.
The second critical learning stage is mentioned above, rewriting and editing. It is very difficult for a beginner writer to delete and rewrite something, especially if they are proud of it. It is unfortunate that publishers these days expect tightly edited manuscripts, done by a pro, before they consider them. The onus is on the writer to find and pay a good editor. And yet, when you are a relative beginner, you likely have no idea where to start finding or judging a freelance editor.
But if you can swing it, a good editor will show you the structure of your own book and you will be a better writer as a result.
“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”
Ernest Hemingway
“‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end; then stop.’”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Nonfiction is a Lot of Things, Each With Their Own Structural Challenges
This is why so many authors stick to a speciality, like history or bios
My first six books were how-to books on business and design topics. This is a clearly defined kind of writing designed to teach processes logically. When you pitch a book like this you provide the publisher with an extensive proposal that includes a detailed outline.
The advice I got on how to structure my first proposal recommended that there be one page for each chapter in the finished book and that each of those pages offer one sentence per finished page in the book.
By the time you finished this you had completed a lot of the work involved. Assuming the book was accepted, completing it basically meant filling in the blanks. The outline showed the editor two important things. First, that you understood the topic and second, that you could organize it logically.
That is kind of the super basic category of nonfiction structure. But when you get into history, biography, current events, or opinion you’re in an entirely different ballgame. Like novels, you will probably be doing most of the research and writing before your first sale. Once you've done that first book you may be able to pitch ideas with less preparation.
So, what does selling a book have to do with structure? Actually everything because a publisher needs to know you will actually finish the book if they pay you an advance. And that it will be interesting (unless you are writing an academic thing which will probably not be very interesting to anyone but a select few).
I write a lot of short, observational pieces about current events. The format is similar to the opinion columnists you read in the WaPost or The Times. There is a structure to this where you formulate an idea or observation and then make a case for it. Basically you are trying to implant an idea in the reader based on your view.
When I think about structure I’m drawing on a core writing experience, one younger authors may not completely understand. This is why so many simply copy formats from others. This is fine as a learning experience. In those first how-to books I wrote, I was doing exactly that.
Imitation works because it feels familiar to a reader.
When you start experimenting with structure you may chase away some readers or attract more sophisticated ones. At that point you are dealing with voice, pacing, the telling detail, the unexpected leap, and other devices that make a story interesting.
But stories all have a basic structure, beginning, middle, and end. If you find yourself struggling with a piece, take a look at these basic elements and steer the story back to that formula.
“The catalog entries now had lengthy analytical essays and illuminating reproductions of other pictures, whether they related or not: a minimalist Agnes Martin might be accompanied by an illustration of the Mona Lisa, whose best connection to the picture in question might come under a TV game show category, ‘things that are rectangular.’”
Steve Martin, author, in An Object of Beauty