Structure:
A framework for your words
by Christopher Meeks

Underneath all good writing is a strong structure. You may not see it, but it's there.

Narrative or not? Throughout the Web, you'll notice two ways to structure your words: Tell the facts or tell the story.

• Filling the void: Stories help us understand the world and learn what it means to be human.
• What you bring to it: In the future, what tale will you tell around the dinner table?
• Dramatic structure:  Stories are about need and conflict.
• Just the facts, ma'am:   There are times when you just need to provide the facts.
• Basic essay form: No matter how you look at it, you need an introduction, three points of support, and a conclusion.

The word "structure"—to new writers especially—can sound like a quick way to make something dull. It's the teacher at school who makes you diagram sentences and create outlines. It's Dad coming into his 14-year-old's slumber party to oversee charades. It's the volleyball coach pointing at you to move somewhere when all you want to do is bean the ball. It's the lifeguard shouting, "No having fun in the pool!"

Why can't you just have an idea and write? You can. Many of the previous dozen columns, in fact, urged that there is no bad first draft. Even so, structure exists whether you see it or not. A strong framework simply allows you to more effectively communicate what you want to say. It even makes writing easier because you have a path to follow as you write. You may choose to stray off the path; that's fine, but the structure you create, the path, can help you find your way.

Narrative or not?

I'm not about to suggest that there's only one structure, only one way to write. As you surf through the Internet, you'll note many Web pages are short and brief, devoted simply to giving information.

There are two basic approaches: essay form (factual or argument) or a story (narrative) form. Both require structure.

For instance, a Web page about author Tim O'Brien simply has one introductory sentence, "Tim O'Brien is the author of the following works." And then his books are listed with a short explanation of each. Each has a link to more information. It's a practical approach. Text is minimal.

But "facts" are plentiful on the Web. What's valuable is what you bring to the facts. Your POV (Point of View).

If you click on the weirdest link about O'Brien, you will be brought to an essay by Hank Hancock who often served O'Brien coffee at Starbucks. The page is narrative. This tells you something about O'Brien you couldn't get from any other page on the Web.

While the current fashion on much of the Web is to be minimalist and straightforward, the sites that are most interesting, the ones you want to read are often just the opposite. They're personal. They tell stories you couldn't read anywhere else on the Web.

Follow your bliss

Mythologist Joseph Campbell spent years of his life gathering, reading, and understanding ancient myths from around the world. He found many commonalities, one of which he called the hero's journey. He wrote about it in the book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

He was no mere scribe keeping track of interesting tales in Dewey decimal order, but rather he was a journeyman himself, looking for how these ancient, often religious, stories still spoke certain truths. He shows in the book that stories fulfill an absolute human need. They tell us things and provide a genesis to understanding our world and what it means to be human.

As I've pondered the need for story, I've come to see the long lines at movie theaters and video stores go beyond the need to be only entertained. People are there, subconsciously, to get something more, to learn something. We are voracious for clues on how to more than just muddle through life. Good stories help us understand the chaos around us.

What you bring to it

Another author, Christopher Vogler, applies Campbell's ideas to how to write, in The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. 

Don't read his book as a simple formula to narrative. If you follow the structure exactly, you will get a predictable and drowsy tale. Rather, it's a book that will show you that rhythms in stories are much like the four seasons: While certain things always happen, it's the differences that delight.

I've brought Christopher Vogler to speak to my "Writing for a Living" class twice. The last time, in fact, he said he was starting to see that the hero's journey is all of our journeys. The same structure that applies to myth, in fact, applies to life. He said to notice that when you travel, such as he recently did to Spain, something unpredictable is bound to happen. The unpredictable experience is likely to be the "Supreme Ordeal" in myth. It's the low point of your trip. It is what will become, in future years, the tale that you tell around dinner tables. On his recent trip, for example, the low point was when he drove onto a beach following the well-worn path of other cars. When he drove slightly off the beaten path, his rented car sank into the sand, and he and his wife were hopelessly stuck.

"Surviving the ordeal becomes the reward," says Vogler. In Spain, beach-going strangers, curious about a car sunken into the sand, gathered until there were enough people to lift the car out. After that, everyone partied and got to know each other. It became a great time.

I've since discovered another book that follows thoughts on living back into unpublished notes by Joseph Campbell. A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane K. Osbon explores more deeply how the human history of stories connects to us. Says Campbell, "The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." He also writes,  "In choosing your God, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of gods...The God you worship is the God you deserve."

Dramatic structure

We like to see such truths in action in our stories. As a playwright, I look for ways to create drama.

While talk of mythic elements such as "refusing the call" (when the protagonist rejects getting involved in a situation at first) in Vogler's book are interesting, I look at storytelling in another classic way:  Stories are about need and conflict. Your protagonist has to have a deep desire, and then people or events stand in the way of that desire.

In Rocky, for instance, a third-rate boxer wants a chance at the world championship, but a number of things stand in his way, including his own self-esteem. In Titanic, Jack and Rose want to love each other, but so many people, including her fiancé and her mother, impede their desires—as do the events after the ship hits an iceberg. As soon as you give your protagonist a deep need, things start to happen.

George Bernard Shaw, in his time, saw that dramatic conflict meant social conflict, and that stories needed to be "a presentation in parable between Man's will and his environment." In his story Pygmalion, which became My Fair Lady, for instance, there was the struggle of nature vs. nurture. Was grace and elegance inherited or learned? "Learned" is the answer, but the hilarious and inspiring struggle between men and women in the course of love seems to be inherited.

If your protagonist has no need, you're not likely to have a story. If no one or no event stands in his or her way, no stunning tale arises. "I want a chocolate malt; I made one; I am happy," is not much of a chronicle.

This isn't all that goes into "story," more to talk about in the future. A great book for dramatic structure, by the way, is Story, by Robert McKee.

Straightforward

There are times, of course, when you need to provide "Just the facts, ma'am."

Although it is somewhat popular these days in English composition classes to consider that everything's an argument (there's even a book title by that name), I'm more old fashioned and prefer to look at essays from a variety of approaches. I use a book in my English classes called Subjects/Strategies: A Writer's Reader, edited by Paul Eschholz and Alfred Rosa. It outlines several modes: Exemplification, Description, Narration, Process Analysis, Comparison and Contrast (always popular), Division and Classification, Definition, Cause and Effect Analysis, and Argumentation.

Basic essay form

To be brief: Whatever mode you use still requires the basic essay form. You need an introduction with a clear statement (a thesis statement) that tells the reader what your piece is about. You need a minimum of three points in separate paragraphs that support your thesis, and you need a conclusion. At minimum, your essay should be five paragraphs.

If you were to take a let-it-flow approach to writing, and you dove into an essay, wrote five paragraphs like mad, and then analyzed it, you might find your essay meanders or isn't as brilliant as you hoped. You might say to yourself, "Something is missing." What is that "something"?

This is where structure comes in. You might find you don't have a clear thesis statement, or maybe you only make two points of support, or, even, perhaps you don't reach any conclusions. By knowing structure, you know where to focus on a rewrite.

Don't misunderstand me: Structure is not everything—but it is necessary. You might have the thesis statement, the conclusion, and the points, but you're missing the rich Corinthian leather, the CD stereo, and the seats that heat at the push of a button. Your essay doesn't take you to the sun, Mars, and back. You forgot the hot breath on your neck in the back seat. In other words, the writing still needs to be vivid and active. Structure, though, helps carry readers along and makes them feel they are on a definite journey.

All in all, it's perfectly OK to write without notes or an outline and see where inspiration takes you—but then it's a good idea to analyze your structure and improve on it.

About the author

Christopher Meeks writes for and teaches creative writing at CalArts, and he also teaches at Santa Monica College and UCLA Extension. He has published four nonfiction children's books and written many short stories. His stories have been published most recently in The Santa Barbara Review, The Southern California Anthology, Rosebud, and Writers' Forum. His plays--Fiveplay, Suburban Anger, and Who Lives?-- have been produced in Los Angeles.  Who Lives? earned several grants for its production, including one from The Pilgrim Project, a group that assists plays that "ask questions of real moral significance." For seven years, he was a theater reviewer for Daily Variety, and for two years he wrote a column for Writer's Digest. His screenplay, Henry's Room, won the Donald Davis Dramatic Writing Award.

Rob Porazinski Metropolis for Artville.com