Word After Word

My student T. desperately wants to know about Structure. So does Art. How does they make all their pages into a story? What’s the Structure? Art emails. T. calls late at night. He’s freaking out.

 

And so many of the questions I got when I met with students and writers at

Montgomery Community College last week were about Structure. How do you put it all together?

 

I want to know about Structure, too. Sometimes I think the book I am working on has a structure. I’m scared to look though. I’m scared if I look at it, it will apart, pick up sticks.

I don’t know.

 

No one does. Structure isn’t out there. It’s in the book and you have to write the book more than one time to find it. I know. It sounds terrible. Punishing. Art is making something.  Good art is making something in order to find out how to make it better.

 

So, structure is inside destruction and this is frightening news to a large voting block inside our brains. All this work and now it’s not done? now you want me to do it over?

 

Yup. It’s the only way. In order to find the structure for your book you have to write you book and then look at it carefully. This is a cliché but you know that whole thing about the piece of marble and the sculptor takes away what isn’t part of the sculpture, viola, that’s it? Writer Alert! We have to build the chunk of marble, out of words, and then we are ready to begin.

 

I wrote the first draft of my memoir, Face First, and it was good, it got good readings at good places. An offer to publish it from a terrific press, and another. Chapters appeared in good places, one was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2006.  For me, that is like a hole in one at the hardest course on Earth. That is joy.

 

And now I’m writing it again. I did the whole thing over. I took it apart, and cut lots of marble away, marble I liked a lot  and made new marble and saw a different form altogether than the one I had started with.  In some ways, I am destroying the original book and making it worse. I’m screwing it all up. In other ways, I’m writing a much, much better book, one I like a lot. It’s different, it’s destructive, and it’s progress, all at once. This the structure secret: structure is a thing you make as you make the book.

 

You push a little. Structure pushes back.  The two of you dialogue. That’s how you find your book. 

Your book is going to take longer to write than you think. 

Things that impede Structure:

 

1. The feeling that you are doing it wrong and are bad at plot (you aren’t and you’re not)
2. The idea that structure is something outside of you, to master, later (you won’t master it, you learn it by writing your book, and writing it again, long, slow process—get over it.)
3. Thinking about your structure weaknesses instead of thinking about what’s really cool and interesting about your book.
4. Reading bad cheesy books on plot.
5. Not reading good books and noticing how the good writers do structure: however the hell they want to. AKA link together all the juicy parts and leave out everything that sucks.

 

You can simplify your Structure worries.

 

One idea: write a practice book. One that you won’t mind writing over, and then over again, and then over, fully, one more time. It’s like buying a used car and smashing it with a sledgehammer to see what that feels like (really, really good). 

 

All this is superbly hard and that’s why it’s annoying to we who write when people say: I have an idea for a book.

 

You have nothing.

 

Make something you love, wreck it, put it back together, make it and then get back to us. We’d love to hear from you!

 

Structure problems? Write your book! It will teach you how to write it right. Follow the book, don’t lead it. It knows much, much more about how it is supposed to be than you do, than any other book does; write it and write it over again.