Author/Instructor Jonathan Blum: In the process of
actually writing fiction the things that you really want to write about
sort of come to the surface and they can almost be embarrassing because…
Film Courage: What story structure do you use personally?
Jonathan: Well I wanted to say from the outset that
I call certain kinds of structures external structures and others internal and I'll
explain what I mean by that. An external structure is something that you start with
before writing and it's going to help guide the storytelling for example on by page 10,
X Y and Z has to have been accomplished in the plot or by the end of chapter one a character
has to be developed in a certain way and has to arrive at a certain level of development
those are what I would call external structures so the writing is gonna in a way have to conform to
the constraints of the external structure the way I think about structure and the way I right teach
and just think about is that structure has certain elements and you can study them but
the first thing to do is write a draft back to Flannery O'Connor this this was her her idea that
the best way to learn how to write a story is to write a story we've all heard them and read
them and thought about them so try to write one to the best of your ability and then go back and look
what have I done here like what's what's going on and if you can have a teacher
that's great if you can have other readers that great but you can even do it yourself
and so you can ask certain questions about structure that can help you improve your use
of structure for example time time is an element of structure how is time handled in the Lori Moore
story that I was referring to that I read an example from earlier I believe the story takes
place on five consecutive days and then it sort of goes into the foreseeable future so the first day
one thing happens the second day another thing happens third day fourth day fifth day
and then into the future you can have a story that takes place all in one day you can have
a story that takes place over a 40-year period the important thing is is it clear when events
are taking place and does the way time is the way time you is the way time is used ordered
and presented in a way that best serves the story and I think these are the kinds of questions that
a writer can ask of himself after having written something I'll give you a couple more examples
point of view point of view is another element of fiction structure who is telling us this right
like in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth well that's probably not a first person
story because no first person was back there when God was creating the universe so that's
an omniscient storytelling voice of some kind but when Mona Simpson says in Lawns “I steal,”
that's a very different kind of voice that's like a first person voice who is in some way
confessing or at least passing along information about something that she's doing so is the
point of view established quickly and maintained consistently over the course of the writing with
many apprentice fiction writers fiction writers who are just starting to write and trying to write
stories for the first time they often don't keep the point of view straight it's sort of we're in
different characters minds at different times sometimes we're getting omniscient information
it's it gets confusing so point of view is one
do I have time for oh please okay so another one is scene scene length and scene numbers
so a question that a writer can ask himself is were the scenes long enough and developed
enough and necessary a lot of times in an early draft of an apprentice writer's work or even an
experienced writer there will either be too many scenes or not enough scenes and sometimes you can
only tell that after you write a draft and you see oh I didn't ever cover this like of course
that needs to be in the story or when when you're talking about structure you're often talking about
what what needs to go into the story and What needs to stay out what is the story about and
what is it not about like these are the kinds of choices that fiction writers have to make and some
of them you'll make as your writing a draft but many of them you'll make after you have a draft
in front of you and you're thinking about okay how can I make this as as as good as possible
a huge one for fiction is balance between background and foregrounded story the
foregrounded story is what's going on now like I'm talking to you about fictional structure
like that's what's going on now that's the now of the story that we're currently living but
before this lots of other things happen that in some way related to the moment that we're having
now so I would call those either background or backstory sometimes they even involve flashbacks
so what is the relationship in the in the short story does or a novel between what has happened
and what is happening now there are many writers like in that Lorrie Moore story FaceTime there's
almost no back story all of the back story is implied by things that the characters say
and do I mean there might be a minimal amount but not very much and Hemingway often is the same way
The Killers I don't believe there's any backstory it's all told through dialogue and dramatic action
so I think there certainly needs to be some kind of emphasis on foregrounded
story and this is something that apprentice writers also need to work on and be aware of
are they showing enough or are they relying too much on explanation summary background because
these things are much easier to write actually to dramatize the scene takes a lot more work and so
you'll you'll see apprentice writers not doing it but ultimately there has to be a really good
balance between background and foreground and usually the emphasis is on foreground one more
that could be mentioned is plot plot is a huge subject but essentially it can be boiled down
to what happened how did it happen and why did it happen and somehow the elements of the plot
have to be arranged and executed effectively so something happens it ramifies it has consequences
and you go from some opening action or line of dialogue or what what have you and then
you you start to ask questions about yeah what happened how did it happen and why did it happen
brings us back to motivation and some motivation is explicitly given by writers and some is not
Iago's motivations in Othello are not always clearly provided by the writer which was obviously
a choice Othello may have slept with Iago's wife certainly Iago was passed over for a promotion
and feel slighted and he feels jealous of Cassio who half daily Beauty in his life that makes Iago
ugly so Shakespeare gives us a lot to work with but ultimately why does someone behave that badly
that destructively some some motivations are better left unspecified by the writer
and I'm hoping we can go back to background and foreground for a moment sure and you spoke of in a
prior segment a story that you've written that's about a father and son and that this father is
very proud of one aspect of the sun right but maybe not so much the other and maybe it has
more to do with the father and what he wanted for his son and it wasn't maybe the same beer
drinking football watching I don't know I'm just assuming so with the background and foreground how
would you put this in the story well you could I like to do both at the same time I like to give
both what's going on now and make sure that that's clear but then also start reaching back to like
how did things get to be the way they are now and in that story the sun has already done something
problematic and so the foregrounded story is already on the table which I I almost always work
that way like I rarely give a bunch of background before I've indicated what the foregrounded story
is I just myself am much more compelled by a dramatized scene than I am from background
information although background information can be critical and and and and wonderful to write but
yeah I I usually have a problem underway I mean you have that old Greek term “In medias res” like
in the middle of things and that the Greeks sort of thought it was a good idea when telling a story
to rather than go back to the very beginning of something to just pick it up in the middle of
things and that's how it's done in that story and that's how it's done I would say that's generally
how I work are parts of the background seeping into the foreground story like you know you never
wanted my picture up the way you did with brother Bobby I really don't say it that way but yeah yeah
is it seeping in little clues are coming in I that's my favorite my favorite way to write a
story in general I mean I'm not like saying it's the best way but it there there are many many ways
to tell a good story I mean in an infinite number but like if you can sort of weave in
the back story like maybe give a paragraph here or like a few lines of dialogue that happened earlier
there and not sort of like pause the entire foregrounded story and say okay reader now
we're going to take a lengthy break to talk about like what happened earlier in your childhood I I
liked if possible I like to try to bring that backstory in to the telling of the main story
and often that can happen with dialogue where people refer to what happened in the past and
that's a way of preventing having to just take a big break and go back like if you have a character
say well but you did X and that brings the past in without having to stop the action to deal with the
past if that makes sense I just wanted to add to something I said earlier I was saying that I often
like to sort of weave in things that have happened in the past into what's happening now rather than
sort of taking a big break going into the past and then returning to the present but having
said that that is something that I I often like to do I don't always work that way I was thinking of
something that I had written in which during the first page or two it was a first person narrator
and he said he referred to a woman as the only woman he had ever loved and when I first wrote
that I thought well it might be interesting to never sort of specify her or never show
how he knew her or maybe just sort of keep it as this sort of this figure who
he can't even bear to remember because it pains him so much so instead of
dealing with that pain he just sort of thinks of her in these terms the only woman I've ever
loved but as is often the case with me and I think with other writers too
like if you put something into a story you have to deal with it like to to put something
in there like that and then just to leave it as a as a unspecified component of the story
I don't think a reader is going to accept that and I if I were the reader I don't know that I
would accept that so I ended up figuring out who the woman was that he had loved and I ended up
writing 25 or 30 this was a longer piece 25 or 30 pages about the time that they spend together so
I'm just saying that there are many many ways to write a story and you find structurally
the way that you think will serve the best interest of the story and one other thing I
also wanted to add is something that I got from a Deborah Eisenberg interview
in which she said something very interesting when you
when you sit down to fix to write fiction you might think that you want to write about X but in
the process of actually writing fiction the things that you really want to write about sort of come
to the surface and they can almost be embarrassing because you have this idea that oh yeah I'm going
to write a story about X and like you think that it's sort of this controlled idea that
and this happens to people who write with sort of external plus and so they just they write
about that because that's what they plan to write about and what she was saying is like if you're
sort of receptive to what what you actually want to be writing about it might be quite different
than what you think or plan to write about and that that has been a helpful observation to me.