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Joshua Doležal's avatar

Glad to be traveling this road with you, Liz. This is a great post, by the way, with lots for me to think about in terms of story craft. The cycle is a common one -- returning where you began, with the almanac structure of the year or some other seasonal theme, such as planting and harvest. The article you cite is new to me, and I appreciate the different linear arcs it represents.

But here are a few more thoughts about story structure. I don't believe there are any gendered story forms. I'm of the Willa Cather school on this -- the form matters less than the heart of what fills it. Here's what her character Carl Linstrum says at the end of "O Pioneers!": "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years."

I see this often with my clients. I have a method for mapping a book project that I believe will lead to a satisfying (and efficient) first draft. It follows some form of the traditional arc, but it requires everyone to answer the questions for themselves, about what the core conflict is and what the major turning points might be. That's harder than it seems, not because it requires anyone to contort themselves into someone's shape, IMO, but because it's hard to find the story that rings as true as those larks that keep singing the same five notes. Cather herself failed in her first attempt -- which is why she said that she had two "first" novels.

In that sense I might flip your title around -- it's not the shape of the story that matters, it's what breathes life into it. There are plenty of experimental forms that flop, too, because the author hasn't found a simple, true core. For instance, I have been hindered in my own memoir-in-progress because I felt that the core of that story was perpetually under attack. Now that I reclaimed my voice somewhat, and have a better sense of what the future holds, I feel more ready to listen for what that fatherhood story might be.

I think in this way, craft can't solve everything. Take a guitar, and three blues chords, and Howlin' Wolf is going to fill that simple form with a lot more power than a kid in a suburban basement (perhaps because the lived experience invented the form). The story and the song must ring true. Now I'd be curious about your thoughts on Cather's form in "O Pioneers!'? Cather liked to take inspiration from opera, too, from Wagner's Ring cycle, for instance.

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Rich Haswell's avatar

And then there is the episodic, which Dorothy Parker said was unrealistic, at least as applied to humans: "It's not true that life is one damned thing after another. It's the same damned thing over and over!"

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