Structure

An Element of Fiction

In a way Structure is what Design is all about and I could probably have covered this Element of Fiction there. Still, Structure could by right, I think, be viewed as the result of Design, so I deemed it its own Element.

Let’s open with William Sloane, “Let the material dictate the form.”

Something that Jacques Barzun agrees with, “Contents dictate form.”

As does Philip Gerard, “You will have to invent the form that will best serve the subject.”

Here is John Steinbeck’s take, “I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone.”

Madison Smartt Bell waxes philosophical about this, “Form is the aspect of the story that can be abstracted from everything else and expressed in some other medium, for instance, a graph, or some other geometric figure.”

How about this from Aristotle, “The structure of the various sections of the events must be such that the transposition or removal of any one section dislocates and changes the whole. If the presence or absence of something has no discernible effect, it is not part of the whole.”

And this gem from Ernest Hemingway, “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

Madison Smartt Bell elaborates, “Form is of primary importance, always. Ingredients of fiction from the other three groupings [plot, character, and tone] (regardless of appearances, which may often be to the contrary) are always subordinate to form, to design. Indeed, any or all of these ingredients can and do function as elements of design. We are accustomed to thinking of plot as what defines structure in a story. But elements from other categories — point of view, imagery, shifts and alterations of tone — may also be used structurally and often are. In reading and writing, you must consider (consciously or unconsciously) all of these aspects of fiction in terms of their relationship to the overall design. Even the overall meaning or theme of the narrative cannot be separated from this relationship. In a properly realized work, form and function are one and inseparable.”

William Zinsser’s take, “All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative — good old-fashioned storytelling — is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.”

As always, John Gardner has given this a lot of thought, “Fiction is made of structural units; it is not a great rush. Every story is built of a number of such units: a passage of description, a passage of dialogue, an action, another passage of description, more dialogue, and so forth. The good writer treats each unit individually, developing them one by one. When he is working on a description of Uncle Fyodor’s store, he does not think about the hold-up men who in a moment will enter it, though he keeps them in the back of his mind. He describes the store, patiently, making it come alive, infusing every smell with Uncle Fyodor’s emotion and personality; he works on the store as if it were simply an exercise, writing as if he had all eternity to finish it, and when the description is perfect — and not too long or too short in relation to its function in the story as a whole — he moves on to the next unit. Thinking this way, working unit by unit, always keeping in mind what the plan of his story requires him to do but refusing to be hurried to more important things, the writer achieves a story with no dead spots, no blurs, a story in which we find no lapses of aesthetic interest.

“No one can hope to write really well if he has not learned how to analyze fiction — how to recognize a symbol when it jumps at him, how to make out theme in a literary work, how to account for a writer’s selection and organization of fictional details.

“In music as elsewhere, structure, not texture, is primary, though it cannot stand alone. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue is about equally successful played on an organ or played by a symphony orchestra and might even be successful transposed to a new key, as Bach frequently transposed his work for some new combination of instruments. If we are annoyed when it is played on a Moog synthesizer the reason is only partly textural. The electronic sound is unsubtle in the extreme, raising wrong connotations (comic and mechanistic). But a greater part of the reason for our annoyance has to do with structure. The synthesizer kills dynamics, smashes through nuances, and equalizes the music’s progression of events so that we can feel no dramatic profluence.”

As for Ayn Rand, “There is no rule about how detailed or concise to make your outline. Train yourself to know how much you can carry in your head, and how much you need to write down in order to see the total and keep the structure of your story clear in you mind.”

John Fowles, as he so often does, disagrees, “I dislike intensely the notion that a perfect form, like a sort of god, hovers over all of us, which we either cling or pay lip-service to.”

But then goes on to soften his stance a little, “I certainly try to make the form I put things in suit their matter, but I agree totally with Forster that forcing that matter into some supposed general ideal of the form best suited to it is wrong.”

Pithy Philip Gerard suggests, “Structure creates the surface design that carries theme.”

Then goes on to add, “Structure is supposed to be so intrinsic that it becomes invisible to anyone not searching for it. The reader should simply feel a natural, almost inevitable movement toward fulfillment.”

Let’s give Steinbeck the last word, “I like a chapter to have a design of tone as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story.”

© Wolfstuff