Comments on: Not thinking structurally

By: Lauren

Lauren — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:21:56 +0000

Yeah, what Diana said. “Primal” was probably the wrong word. I meant unconscious. I don’t believe all cultures have identical embedded story structures.

By: rebecca

rebecca — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:07:16 +0000

that’s how i usually write everything. (even essays. which is not a good idea.) it caused me to write multiple complete drafts of stories. i’d write one, throw it out, start over. my new project has a bit more planning and a structure-ish thing going on. it’s weird and scary but also kind of nice. and soon, i will have a mac, which means i can FINALLY have scrivener. i am so bloody excited to be through with the tool of satan.

By: Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:38:11 +0000

My problem is the distinct lack of wine in my household at the moment.

Also, beef.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:55:14 +0000

Oh FORK! My bad.

By: Justine

Justine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:37:10 +0000

Patrick: You do not want to introduce weapons into proceedings we’ll just use them on you. Fight instigators are the ones who always cop it in the eye.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:32:02 +0000

LADIES!!! Please hold these forks while I draw you a Battle Circle.

Ok, now BEGIN!

*begins chant*
Two writers enter! One writer leaves! Two writers enter! One writer leaves!

By: Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:46:26 +0000

Eh, potato potahto. Personally, I consider something that is drummed into the brain cells and mental channels of every human being in the dominant culture on the planet from the moment of birth to be pretty darn primal.

Also, I’m with the folklorists. But it’s like I said before about brain wiring. Two people can see something and come away with an entirely different idea of what’s “important” about it.

By: Justine

Justine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:04:27 +0000

Diana: Sure. But that’s not what “innate” or “primal” means. I’ve suffered through too many tomes by folkorists “proving” that fairy tales and myths from all over the world are structurally the same when the only way they can do that is leave out all the untidy bits that disprove their structural analysis.

Clearly my post was clumsily written. I’m not saying that I don’t write three-act or four-act or whatever novels, that I’m somehow wholly original and immune to the dominant story structures of the culture I’ve grown up in. Au contraire! I’m just saying that, like Sherwood above, I don’t think about my novels that way as I write them.

By: Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:50:19 +0000

Yes, it’s learned, but it’s learned by the culture you belong to. You’ve been given this story structure with almost every story you’ve heard your entire life. You don’t need to be given diagrams or how tos. It all embedded in your thought processes.

By: Justine

Justine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:07:45 +0000

Lauren: I had no idea you were so woo woo. Story structure is absolutely learned and not innate. Otherwise it wouldn’t vary so much from culture to culture. The three-act structure has a history and is not shared by all cultures. There’s nothing primal or innate about it.

By: Lauren

Lauren — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:05:35 +0000

I agree with Diana that story structure is “primal.” You’re probably doing structure whether you’re concious of it or not. It’s sort of like this with language. You don’t think of the grammatical structure of your language at all, but it’s still very much there. I think it’s useful to think consciously of story structure when you know something’s wrong but you’re not sure what. At that point, an analysis of structure often reveals where you went wrong.

By: Justine

Justine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:20:16 +0000

Robin: Nah, is definitely Scrivener. It has made me write and see my writing in totally different ways.

Sherwood: You’re right, the words we use to describe our process, the metaphors and jargon do make it seem sometimes like we’re talking about different things. I wonder if what I’m really talking about isn’t structure at all, but the fact that my writer friends simply have a different set of words for describing what they’re doing.

By: Andrew Nicholson

Andrew Nicholson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:16:56 +0000

IANAN however I do think about story structure and have read all the normal how-to-write texts. The problem with planning 3 acts is the middle gets left till last and becomes a “how to get from here to there” and is *boring* – Matrix 2 springs to mind. Write the story first and it will have a start, middle and end anyway, by definition. Every story has them, doesn’t make it a good writing tool. That’s the problem with academics, can’t see the bloody obvious.

By: sherwood

sherwood — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:15:11 +0000

The more I read other writers’ descriptions of their processes the more I’m amazed at the different approaches. Of course some of these variations might be less broad than they seem due to the fact that there are all kinds of jargon, and what one writer says is a beat might not be another’s beat.

But as far as I can tell, I’m like you–I write the scenes I see in my head, busily snipping and cutting as I go. Only when it’s done–maybe even two drafts done–does the structure come into focus. Though all along I have a fuzzy sense of where I am in the story. The Shev. one, for example, I realized at the last stage had a sharply delineated act one/two/three but I certainly never planned it that way.

By: Megan Crewe

Megan Crewe — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:22:39 +0000

Interesting… I’m an outliner (I never start a novel until I have a fairly detailed outline, and whenever I’ve tried to wing it I lose my way somewhere in the middle and never make it to The End), but I don’t think very structurally–in terms of acts or beats or any of that stuff. I have an idea of where I want to begin and where I want to end and one or more important points in the middle, and then I fill in the scenes in between in a way that feels true to the characters and the story and seems to keep the tension going and all that. I don’t analyze much beyond that. So I guess I wing it with my outlines.

By: robin

robin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:16:14 +0000

much as I love scrivener (MUCH) and agree that it improves the way one writes, I suspect another big part of this may be you just internalizing the lessons learned from after-the-fact structuring of your previous three books. (ie you may, without realizing it, be moving from the idiot phase to the savant one.)

By: Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:54:17 +0000

I suspect part of this is because when I first started learning how to write novels I’d never heard of act structures or outlining so I didn’t use any of those models for writing a novel. I winged it. And thus learned how to write novels by winging it.

I disagree. Everyone learns to write novels this way, even people who really strongly believe in structure. The structure of story is a primal thing that storytellers soak up while experiencing story their whole lives. It’s just a matter of jargon.

Think of a child with a boo boo. They might only be able to point at their foot and go “this hurts” — but an adult, who understands more anatomy and has experienced similar boo-boos in their lives, can say “well, it’s not a bug bite or a burn or a twisted ankle or a bunion, and it’s not inflamed but most of the pain is around my ankle and goes away after I walk on it a bit…. must be that tendonitis acting up again.”

When I started writing I didn’t know any of the jargon of acts or whatnot, but when I read articles about it, I could go look at my work and go “oh, so that’s what an ankle is.” Since it helped me to talk about it in those terms, I started using those terms.

It’s really a case of brain wiring, I believe.

By: Maggie

Maggie — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:54:22 +0000

Your post brings to mind my favourite writing quote:

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” -E. L. Doctorow