Meta: On Structure and Stories

[alixtii]

I want to talk about structure.

By "structure," I mean the methods by which story elements are placed in relation to each other.

The most obvious type of structure is narrative structure, or plot. (Bear with me, flist. I know you know this stuff, but I want it all down for completeness' sake.) "The king died and the queen died of grief" places two story elements--in this case, actions or events--in causal relationship.

In my mind, no matter what Forster might say (this example being taken from his 1927 work Aspects of the Novel as an example of a story), "The king died and the queen died of grief" is not a story. Not because its length--it is more than possible to tell a complete story in a sentence, as I plan to show--but, still, because its structure. The "of grief" tacked on the end of the sentence does place the two events in a type of relationship, a causal relationship, but it is not the type of relationship that makes for a story. Instead, it is a chronicle, a sort of history.

A story represents a more complex type of narrative structure. At its most basic, this structure represents three elements--conflict, a crisis, and a resolution. (A quick Google search informs me that structuralist semioticians have actually detected 33 different elements. Ah, theorists, how I love you and want to become one of you.) If you want to dumb it down even further you can say that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Note that "The king died and the queen died of grief" does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At most, it has a beginning and an end, or a beginning and a middle.

"The king died, the queen grieved, and then the queen died" does have a beginning, a middle, and an end--and lo! And behold! There is a story!

"Now, wait a minute," I hear you saying. "That says the same exact thing! You just changed the wording!" And that's exactly my point. We're talking about structure, remember? The content, what is happening, is the same, but the way that content is communicated to the reader, the form, is changed. And it is the form that makes the text a story, with a conflict (the king's death), a crisis (the queen's grief), and a resolution (the queen's death).

Okay, not exactly groundbreaking stuff, and it gets much more complicated than that (most stories are longer than a sentence, obviously), but that's the fundamental basics of storytelling.

When we turn to fiction, it's usually because we want to be told a story. As Forster put it, with as much regret as anything else, "Yes -- O dear yes -- the novel tells a story." (Does anyone have the longer quote? I couldn't find it on google and all my writing books are at home.) And without a doubt, whether in the form of a short story or a novel, the story is the most commonly encountered narrative form in contemporary mainstream literature.

The thing is, it's not always necessary to tell a story when writing short fiction. Here's a short fictional work which does not tell a story:

O THOU, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st;
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, 5
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure: 10
Her audit, though delay’d, answer’d must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.

(Erm, that sonnet only has 12 lines. Interesting. Anybody know what's up with that? karabair?)

Here we have a situation which is, presumably, fictional. It has dynamic, interesting characters who interact in intriguing ways. And it's not a story, because it's not structured as a story. But no one would argue that it's not a work of art, since it's not trying to be a story--it's trying to be a sonnet. It's about something else, something different, and it's damned good at what it is. (Shakespeare is always a safe example.)

Much of the fanfic I see on LJ does not consist of stories, although I do have to say that the better writers with whom I am familiar are more likely to utilize story form at least a large portion of the time. This is not a criticism; I'm not saying that these people should be writing stories. Indeed, the way that fandom utilizes non-story forms in the production of its art is one of the things that I love about it. I love the word "fic" and how freeing it is in the absence of the demand that one must write a story.

Even more common is fic which technically has a plot--X and Y are attracted to each other, X propositions Y, X and Y have sex--but where to focus too much on the narrative structure would be to ignore the truly interesting ways the fic is functioning, because the story isn't really the point.

But none of this is a reason to ignore structure--indeed, it's a reason to talk about it all that much more, and so it's amazing to me that in the midst of all the meta we discuss structure so little. Because while it isn't necessary to structure your fic as a story, it is necessary to have some type of structure in place. A fic without structure, which isn't sure if it is a scene or a vignette or a character piece or a PWP or a story is going to be bad, and indeed next to bad prose, I'd say that flawed structure is the biggest problem I see in bad fanfiction.

But for some reason, despite structural concerns being so crucial, somehow we consistently overlook them. To borrow a somewhat Orwellian (not in the dystopian sense) image, we see things like prose and structure as a sort of windowpane to the content. If the prose dirties the window and we can't see through to look at our heroes, we get frustrated, but we don't seem to mind so much if there's one or two cracks in the window. But this ignores the fact that in the hand of a truly gifted writer, the medium is the message, and prose, structure, and content all work together. The window is itself the work of art. As evidence I'll offer everything that wisdomeagle has ever written.

There are undoubtedly a huge number of factors at work conspiring to create this fertile field for non-story fiction, and one of my purposes in writing this behemoth is to throw it out to my flist and to any other potential readers what these factors might be. But I've recently read (And wrote a paper on) the short stories of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, and this got me thinking, because there are a lot of similarities between the way that Babel structures his stories as fanfic writers do, without a clear, conventionally delineated conflict, crisis, and resolution.

First of all, fanfiction works are deeply intertextual. This is built into the definition: every work of fanfiction references a source text or texts (however defined). Even if a fic can stand alone and be enjoyed by those who are unfamiliar with the source text, it only communicates its deepest nexus of meanings when read in relation with its souce. We're writing about someone else's characters, often in someone else's settings using someone else's scenarios, and in so doing we produce a sort of comment on the source text. In addition to this, a fanfic writer can often make assumptions about his or her audience that a mainstream writer wouldn't be able to, and thus make the story intertextual with their experiences. We insert in-jokes, references, and allusions. Our works exist in a sort of nebulous relation to other fanfiction works. Lastly, many non-narrative works are the product of ficathons, which have an even deeper notion of intertextuality and non-narrative structure--in the form of requests--than even "normal" fanfiction.

(I know that cathexys has also written about and expressed interest in the way that this intertextuality changes the forms and objectives of fanfiction as contrasted with mainstream literature.)

This intertextuality provides some powerful tools to the fanfiction writer. There is not so much need to have a full conflict, crisis, and resolution front-and-center in the fic because the work alreay exists in relation to a text with a full narrative arc. In a sense, the entire source text is already built into the structure of the fic, and the fanfic writer is then free to graft on whatever elements he or she desires. A mere description of a rock can take on so many meanings in a fanfic that the fic will be deeply emotionally and thematically satisfying, while if a mainstream writer tried to do the same we'd all be wondering why we should care about the rock--unless it is a rock already engrained into our cultural consciousness, such as Stonehenge.

Babel's stories function in much the same way. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Babel's stories are intertextual with each other, written in cycles. Something which seems random and inexplicable might take on new meaning when read with another story in the same cycle, even though structurally each story is self-contained. Babel's stories also operate intertextually in relation to Russian history, becoming a certain type of historical fanfic, so to speak. It contains references to real people, places, and events.

Secondly, many fanfiction works operate lyrically rather than narratively. This is sort of a cop-out, because by "lyrically" I mean "not utilizing a narrative structure" so basically what we have is a tautology. But I don't know a better way to describe what I mean. I guess it comes down to that good fanfiction, like Babel's stories or Shakespeare's sonnets, always has some type of structure in place, even if it isn't plot.

(Perhaps this audience would be more familiar with LeGuin's The Ones who Walk away from Omelas, which also is an example of what I mean by functioning lyrically rather than narratively, than Babel's work.)

Okay, because there is never too much navel-gazing, I want to discuss some of the ways in which a fic can utilize a non-narrative (i.e. "lyric") structure and still function in a way which seems unified and whole (or else deliberately and satisfyingly fractured, which is its own type of wholeness). When I sit down to write a fic, I ask myself--sometimes unconsciously, but more and more these days I do it consciously--whether the fic is going to be a story, and if not what type of structure I'm going to use. Note that these structures are simply the ones I use, and that even the names I am going to assign them are more or less arbitrary: for example, I'm sure there's more than one good way to structure a, say, character piece.

In my experience, while a fic doesn't need that conflict/crisis/resolution structure in order to work, it does need to put the reader through some type of journey, the way that Babel, Shakespeare, and LeGuin all do. One way to do this is to make the reader to do a large part of the work. Provide a reader with three scenes and leave it up to them to draw the parallels. Once they do, they'll have a complete-feeling reading experience because the three portions of the story will no longer seem static in relation to each other, even though narratively they are all each self-contained. I use this technique in my fic Triangle, for instance.

Another technique is to position the reader's journey inside the thoughts of a character. This is perilous; I remember wisdomeagle reporting a comment by one of her flisters that one should always avoid fic with the summary "X thinks about Y," and I can see the reasoning. But one can pull this sort of fic off, as long as there are things happening in addition to the character thinking, "objective correllatives" which reflect what is going on in the character's head back at him or her without being too obvious about it. I use this technique in my Shepherd Book ficlets, because his character lends himself to introspective angst; the best of these, in my opinion, is Conversion.

There are different techniques that work for different types of structures, and these techniques can be learned. I'm still picking up new techniques, and I'm curious what techniques other people use to structure their fics, because I want to be able to expand my own skills.

In general, no matter what structure one chooses, though, one has to think about theme more than if one were writing a story. In a story one can take care of the plot and the theme will take care of itself, but in a fic without a conventional plot the theme will ultimately be the major unifying element. One needs to stop and think what type of overall message the fic as a whole communicates, because otherwise there might not be one and the fic as a whole will just be a mess.

I wish there were more critical discussion of structure in fandom. I know that some of my fanfic are deeply structurally flawed, but no one seems to really care--they're much more interested in the content. But what does it take to make a story about a first kiss--which is 500 words and consists pretty much just of that kiss--work as a fic? How is the structure of a WIP different? After all, a liz_marcs epic is not the same beast as a wisdomeagle ficlet. They are each masters of their respective forms, the best at what they do, but take that structure away from them and watch them flounder. I have to admit that this is particularly amusing--is this perverse of me--in watching liz_marcs try to produce a fic under, say, 20,000 words. (She's done it before and done it well, but she's still fun to watch whenever she attempts it.) But my point is--well, I'm not sure what my point is, in the end, because this meta has no structure.

ETA: (Mainly for my record keeping) On Weak Endings