Bickham - Scene and structure

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dwight V. Swain: writer, teacher and friend. Without him, I would have had no career as a novelist.

It's the same in fiction. Story length, author intention, traditional expectations of the audience, and all sorts of things may affect the form a story may take. But underneath most forms lies the same structure the same unchanging principles, the same creative laws.

Those are what this book is mainly about.

The short story writer is taught that a short story has "a beginning, a middle and an end," or perhaps "a situation, a complication, a climax and a denouement." The novelist may hear advice such as "paint a broader picture," or "give the characters more depth," or even "make all your chapters twenty pages long" none of it very darned helpful when you're sitting at your word processor with tiny droplets of blood oozing from your forehead. But once you understand structure, you'll see with growing clarity that short story and novel alike have many of the same basic elements of structure so that whatever your form, long or short or in the middle, you can always work with the same basics.

THE HISTORY OF STRUCTURE

This wasn't always true. The first English novelists, for example, knew they wanted a very-long-story form. They had epic poems as their only obvious guideline. Literary historians generally agree, however, that the first novels in the English language had a far simpler form and internal structure than much earlier long narrative poems such as Beowulf.

In writing for a broad, popular audience (they hoped!), the first neonovelists came up with a very simple device: the personal letter. The letter itself had no formal internal structure beyond that of [salutation] + [reporting and comment] + [signature]. A sequential series of such relatively unstructured letters became the form for the book.

The earliest English novelists like Richardson used this device well. The letter, however, always removed the reader somewhat from the action because everything had to be told obviouslysome time after the event actually took place.

Writers who took the next step in developing internal structure for the long prose narrative made it a small step: They built their novels around a series of entries in a journal or diary (Robinson Crusoe being a good example). This form allowed a bit more informal personal commentary on the action by the writer, and also worked well at the time. Again, however, the reader was being told the story after it took place, rather than seeming to experience it as it unfolded. And even a journal or diary was obviously a literary device that took a certain amount of extra imaginative effort on the part of the reader if he was to "really get into it."

The next step, also a short one, was more significant because it tried to attack the limitation problems of letter-diary-journal structure. This was the adoption of a "conversational" structure with the first-person narrator writing you, the reader, his story as if he were telling it to you in his living room, with all the asides, explanations to "dear reader" and loose associational tone that such a structure allowed. More important, in jettisoning the "documentary" approach, it freed the novelist to tell the story more as if it were happening in the story "now" rather than as something being documented after the event; in other words, it added some sense of immediacy.

It was only after all these early experiments had been tried that later novelists notably the greatest of them all, Charles Dickensbegan developing the kind of structure more familiar to modern readers: a sequence of scenes played in the story here-and-now as if they were taking place as the reader read and imagined them, and told (often first person) from the viewpoint of a character in the series of scenes as they took place.

Novels and short stories structured around letters, diaries or author conversation use time-honored devices, and you can find an occasional novel of one or another of these types that achieves success. There are, however, a number of other general forms.