(no subject)

[aliseadae]

Structure. People talk about it all the time. I'm getting a vague sense of what it is but no one pins it down and defines it. I don't think you can. What do you think it is? Help me understand better. I have a vague sense of what it is but holding onto that is like holding onto a soap bubble. It keeps floating away or popping.

...I mean in writing, for those of you wondering.

ETA: I have now been informed that that thing we drew in English class that looked like this: ___/^\_ (well, roughly) is also a structure. Do keep telling me more, please.

Comments

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

Copying over what I said on IM--it's a bit like the time signature and key of different bits of a symphony, and how that adds to/creates/enhances what the symphony is doing. (And how long each piece of the symphony is, as well.) In writing it has to do with pacing and plot, what happens and when it does. And how those affect how the work reads.

Playing tricks with it is sort of... using a different structure than is usually used for that kind of story. Or using a structure from some external thing and seeing what you can do in that constraint. Like Steven Brust structuring a novel around a grocery list or--Delany gives an example once of a student of his who structured a short story's incidents after a mathematical sequence.

But people use the word to mean lots of different things. It can also mean, in a novel, if it's divided into parts, how long the chapters are and when/how they end...

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm too incompetent to explain it, but I can tell you who does know how to.

Chip Delany, in his About Writing, focuses primarily on what structure and modal forms in writing are and how they work and what they do in your brain. It's the best explanation I've ever seen.

[aliseadae]

Huh. I wonder if the library has that. Or the internet for a cheap enough price. Would I understand it or would it just confuse me further?

I haven't really ever been /taught/ anything about writing...

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

Neither have I - or most folks in SF, somehow, but we still make do. *g*

Honestly, I think it's one of the most useful, mind-expanding writing texts I've ever read; it's dense, but it makes sense in a really intuitive way. I read it one essay at a time to keep from being overwhelmed. He has a way of explaining things that sinks in really deeply, for me at least. (Maybe inter-library loan?)

[aliseadae]

Hmm. I'll keep an eye out for it.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Seconding the recommendation for About Writing, which is wall-to-wall smart and one of the few books about writing (see what he did there?) that I think is worth reading.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I now want to recommend The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, because who the characters are and who they initially seem to be are not the same thing, and the things he does with that are structurally interesting.

[aliseadae]

But what is structure? A lot of people seem to be saying things about characters not being who they initially seem to be. Also aamcnamara and I talked about Hexwood and how it is very interesting structurally.

Also (rather unrelated) I ordered Door into Fire off the internet! (Along with my textbooks).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is good to get other things with textbooks, I feel.

But I didn't mean that the characterization was the structure. I meant the pace of the revelation and the type of revelations performed in different POVs.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

It's the thing that makes it wobble.

[aliseadae]

That's the best icon.

Why haven't I seen it before?

But still, best.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Okay, so this is going to be a bit like a fish trying to explain water, but here are some things that scream "structure!" to me.

If you've ever watched an episode of House or any kind of procedural, the expected shape of the story is structure. First you get presented with the patient/victim, then the doctors/investigators get involved, then they advance an incorrect theory, then there is a big twist, and everything gets wrapped up at the end. That's structure on several levels: Both genre structure - where you get problem/mystery/solution - and TV structure, where the beats of the story are divided up into 4 sections, the first three of which end of cliffhangers due to the economic necessity of playing ads on television.

I suspect that part of what may be throwing you here is that there are lots of kinds of structure, and many of them work in parallel to each other. There are formal structures (five-act plays; three-act movies; sestinas; and haiku...), there are genre structures (the farm boy is pursued by minions of evil and engages in picaresque adventures before claiming his birthright and slaying the dark lord), and there are internal structures (leitmotifs, mirroring of character arcs, alternating POVs). Formal and genre structures are generally most interesting when authors put some sort of spin on them instead of following them slavishly; conversely, since internal structures are mostly specific to a work, it's better to follow through on their promises, as undermining them undermines *your* work, rather than cliches or well-known conventions.

...hopefully some of that makes sense.

[aliseadae]

I think it is the last of your three that I've been trying to wrap my head around. I know things like "ascending action, climax, descending action" that I was taught in high school, and TV structure makes sense. But it is that tricky stuff that I want to pin down more.

And the sort of farm-boy-goes-and-slays-a-dragon thing strikes me as more of a typical plot structure than... well I guess I call it a structure? I put the word structure in with plot but I was going to say it struck me as more of a plot structure than something nebulous but maybe some bits of structure are less nebulous than I thought.

[voey.livejournal.com]

"Farm boy goes and slays the dragon" is a Trope.

"Dragon attacks and slays villagers, then farm boy weeps over fallen family members, then farm boy takes woodcutting axe and heads into the deep dark woods while farmgirl tries to persuade him to stay, then farm boy overcomes three trials in the deep dark woods, then farm boy finds dragon, then farm boy is about to be defeated when lessons learned/treasures gained in the trials in the deep dark woods save him, then farm boy returns home triumphant." is a Structure.

Structures are made out of collections of events (and usually out of collections of tropes). A Structure is the thing in its entirety. If you change the last event to "farm boy realizes that the dragon was farm girl under a spell and kills himself in despair," you've changed only one detail but you've entirely altered the Structure.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, but also:

Dragon attacks and slays villagers in first-person perspective. We feel the fire coming out of our own nostrils, the satisfying crunch of villagers in our teeth. We do not understand the little screaming thing in the ashes as we fly away. This is a prologue.

We jump to the third-person limited farmboy perspective as he is arguing with farmgirl about the deep dark woods and the axe. Now. Given the events voey listed, did that perspective jump seem one of the very logical choices to you? If so, it's because you've encountered this structure before. It gets used in high fantasy a lot: the prologue from one more foreign and distant perspective, then the first chapter (and usually the rest of the book, unless there are interludes) from a more intimate and identifiable perspective.