Tag Archives: structure

Structure: Outer Limits

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If one good thing has come from a time of mass-binging old TV shows, it’s learning how to watch shows to catch their quirks and appreciate what those quirks add to the art form of the show. I’ve been working my way through the Outer Limits for a couple of reasons. First, it’s been a while. Second, there’s only so many times a human can reasonably watch Murder, She Wrote.

The Outer Limits, for the uninitiated, was a science fiction anthology show similar to the Twilight Zone, or, because I’m watching the nineties Outer Limits, like the Outer Limits from the sixties. There are roughly twenty episodes per season, and plenty of seasons to lose my time to. After a couple of seasons, I noticed (and plenty of first run viewers noticed) that each season was ended by an episode made up of flashbacks to other episodes, cut from context, and twisted to support the character viewpoints made in the current episode.

These clip shows make wonderful use of the copious amounts of material that have come before. They run like the popular montage technique – usually when a bad guy is talking about how his evil plan came to be, or the hero talks about how he thwarted the evil plan at each step.

In writing, we aren’t supposed to delete. I was told to open a new file and just dump my lesser babies there until I could use them again. Well.

The Outer Limits clip episodes ably demonstrate how to manipulate those lost bits and pieces into new works, separated from their original destiny. They also demonstrate the recycling of old work without quite plagiarizing themselves. By giving the clips new meaning, they are adding rather than taking up space with what we’ve already seen.

There are certain themes I fall back to – community, power, corrupted bureaucracy, among others. I have written about memory in my nonfiction works, over and over. I write about food as a mode of communication. I believe that we are never finished with an idea, and there is nothing stopping us from turning it on its head to look at it from another angle.

Structure: Proving the Premise

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Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing took me on a deep dive of the theory behind the parts of the play. Before this book, I had not considered that the pieces of the play could be treated philosophically. Egri discusses the protagonists and antagonists, setting the scene and establishing normal before diving into deviations from early Greek plays up to the 1920’s or so.


One of the topics he hit that was a great lightbulb moment for me was proving the premise. The premise is set in the first scene or at least in the introduction of each character. A story always begins with normal and then asks “what if?” In the first scene, we get the premise of the play to understand the normal. This should set the base of each character. Further scenes introduce the what if, the encroachment of the strange into the normal, so that the characters themselves deal or fail to deal with the new normal. Then they bounce off of each other in completely logical (for them) manners, thus creating conflict.

The climax is not the crux of the play.

Just a reminder, in a typical 5 act play, we have some phrases like introduction, action, rising action, climax, denouement, and so forth. In our modern attention spans, the climax is the crux of the conflict. It’s the boss battle that determines the ultimate winner. If you’ve read my other pieces on conversation, the climax is where you expect the winning argument to prevail.

The most important scene (according to Egri) happens just before the climax. It’s the scene where the characters, true to their character, embark on the final, most logical chain of actions that will lead them to a terrible confrontation with the other characters and thus end the play. In order to prove the premise, you must have set the premise in the beginning.

Proving the premise determines the climax with inevitability. There is no other path. In a way, proving the premise as its own scene just prior to the climax is the climax of the emotional journey. To be really fair, if a character makes a different choice in this scene, it can determine a happy ending or a sad one. Even if the path of the careening plot appeared to be going in a different direction just before the final decision.

I’m great at hedging my bets. But if I want to make a single statement in a work of art, I must stand firm from the very first sentence.

Structure: Souza Marches

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Hear me out.


I played flute in high school, in the marching band, and was soundly terrible. That isn’t the point. The point is, the one oeuvre of music I took away was the underlying structure of the Sousa march.


Every American has heard a Sousa march, and I would wager, many non-Americans have heard them, too. John Philip Sousa was an American born composer, with a German mother, who created many iconic songs that are still blasted by the barely musical and actually musical alike. Why? Because they’re fun. They have the oom-PAH feel and the typical rising action to blaring climax journey, the scattered woodwinds and the screaming brass. Every. Single. Time.


The secret to surviving the flute contribution of the Sousa march is to play the exact same part on repeat, on full blast – no matter what the rest of the band is doing. The first time, the brass establishes the main tune. You play your piece. No one can hear you. The second time, the brass plays a dissolution which feels exactly like it sounds. It’s as though the sound is unwinding itself and falling apart. In the dogfight, you (the flute) play your part. No one can hear you except for the high notes, so that you poke off the rose stem as a series of aural thorns. The third time, the brass joins in with a rising threat of imminent blare and then it’s blastoff! No one can hear you. Play your heart out, anyway.


In written form, try including the counter theme a few times. The first time, maybe it’s a conversation. Or an authority figure no one likes. The second time, maybe it’s the muddy middle with a contained sub-plot (secondary story with the exact same characters) that play out something you wanted to say about the main plot or want the reader to know about the main plot before you make your big point. The third time, maybe no one can see it. Maybe not even you. It’ll still be there.

Space: The Joy Luck Club

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I read The Joy Luck Club for pleasure, before it was assigned for pain. I mean, technically, my English teacher assigned it as summer reading and I chose the work because I’d already read it, but there is some kind of evolution that happens to a work you have read before and now MUST read.


Amy Tan’s multi-voiced novel is similar to a mosaic novel and not much like one at all. For one thing, the framing device is much of the story, for another, I didn’t know the category existed when I was twelve. Thus, the novel exists in the same space as a favored, half-forgotten childhood memory. Condensed, dreamlike, and witnessed as a passer-by rather than a participant. That is not to say that her protagonists and supporting characters are no longer intimately familiar, just that my first reading has taken place so long ago that I can no longer tell you what exactly happens or exactly how I felt at any one point in the book. I can only look back, and, without truly understanding who I was then, think of green spaces and angry children and unrelenting parents. Somewhere in there is a great joy. I have also tangled the book I knew first with the second time I knew it, reluctantly, and the movie we also had to watch, and a couple of quizzes that I absolutely loathed.


What I meant to say was that Tan’s stories within the book occupy the same time and space as one another, though they are lived generations apart. Her flashback style feels similar to approaching someone you know but can’t remember why, and then in reaching out to shake their hand, you are struck with the memory of the first meeting and that first smile. Thus there is this smile with two layers, one buoyed with the joy of seeing someone again and one of self-congratulations of that knowing epiphany right before your hands connect.


Someone will read your story. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your future self and all your audience. When you close the book, and you exhale that story world for the final time, what space will the story inhabit in your memory? The length of a bus ride? The length of one awful revelation (Memento)? The length of a dream – within a dream – within a dream (Inception)? Or a tremendous life-changing journey to a parallel world and the universe shaking revelation that physics is actually quite fun (Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard)*?

*I had a deep-seated, frothing hatred of science in general until this book. Just, in general. Even the word made me twitch. Full disclosure, I am now a scientist. Reading: the gateway drug.

Structure: China Mountain Zhang

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The first time I realized I was reading a mosaic novel, I had deliberately sought it out. It took a few trades in the online book networks to find it, but finally I held a battered copy of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh in my hands. I had no idea what I was getting into but by the end I still had no idea what I had really read. It was good. If I were to recommend it today, I would say: it was very good.


The premise of the novel supposes that China is the ruling superpower on Earth and takes a wide ranging look at how this affects Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans, space colonists, naive young people, and people who think they are too old to be naive.


A mosaic novel treats each chapter as a short story in the same world. I believe I have seen the term “loosely connected” somewhere in relation to this form, though I cannot remember where. McHugh uses the form to give us a different perspective on the world so that we sample coming of age and Outer Limit-like episodes set within the same confines. However, all characters interact with each other and each others’ consequences until what we really have is a journey of self-knowledge and acceptance.

Anything more is a spoiler, so go hunt down your own copy.


Mosaic novels exist onscreen in a very popular format if one is a horror addict like myself. The horror anthologies, of the eighties and nineties, usually use the smaller films within to affect the larger framing device characters so that the true horror is one that the audience sees coming (as is true in all good horror – we call this feeling dread).


I chose to do a mosaic novel for the 100 Day Project because I thought a. It will be really fun and b. It will be challenging and c. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Time: Short Story

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The best short stories have been the shortest. Even the short stories that take pages and pages to tell feel short in my memory, and in the way I can encapsulate their meaning to myself later when the work is not in front of me.


The usual advice is to start a short story as close to the ending as possible. It’s similar to a scene in a novel and though a short story may have multiple scenes, it should begin as close to the eureka moment of the epiphany as possible. Or, depending on genre, the uh-oh moment.


Neil Gaiman’s postcard story fills the same space in my mind as Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” – though one of these took a decade and a TV show to understand. If you’re having issues with O’Connor’s short story, watch Netflix’s Longmire series. Also read the books, they’re great, but watch the show. Just, the whole thing. The explanation happens during the investigation into a murder of a main character but that’s all I’ll say about it.


Ted Chiang’s short stories, including the short that became the movie The Arrival, may take entire evenings to read. When I think back to any particular one, though, what I remember most is the revelation.


As with any consideration of time and structure choice – whether you should be writing a novel, short story, or poem – remember that all of these has a epiphany. You don’t get to pick the epiphany, the reader does that, and it won’t be the same one for everybody. But some epiphanies can happen in an instant, and some need a running start to get there.

Structure: Skin Game

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Caution: Massive spoilers

I’ve been following Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files since Summer Knight, which I read on my Nintendo DS. I now own the entire series in physical form, most of the collection in audiobook, and a handful of favorites in ebook. I’m a fan is what I’m saying.


Skin Game has a tremendously simple structure which is the linear narrative with a satisfying amount of action A plot and emotional B plot. We longtime fans get a couple of shout-outs to previous events and reveal around the overarching series mystery. That ending, though.


Those of you who live in a linear timeline like myself, can understand the world as a bit of a sin curve or sometimes a rollercoaster without a loop-de-loop. In fiction, we aren’t bound by the gravity of our daily lives. That means the writer gets to stick in a loop-de-loop and, done right, really stick the landing. You’ll get an ending with wow factor. Or you’ll get an ending with WTF factor.


In our linear experience of time, you might see a betrayal or character reveal as coming out of nowhere. Ever have some loved one swear they’ll go to the store for that one item and it’ll be a quick – I swear, super quick – ten minute trip? And two hours later they walk back in empty-handed. This is the linear rollercoaster.


In reality, if we’re paying attention, our loved one says something two days prior about a friend coming back to town. Maybe they’ll get together. We know our loved one is super helpful, right? So our loved one goes to the store, sees their friend, and helps him with all his shopping and they catch up as they wander aisle-by-aisle and then they’re walking out and your loved one gets in the car and drives home so happy that he saw his old bud. What makes the line turn into a loop is foreshadowing prior to the incident, time and events happening before what was foreshadowed is revealed, and then a quick return to our present timeline.


In writing terms, turning your linear timeline into a loop-de-loop requires foreshadowing and the all-time favorite, a well-executed callback.


Skin Game pulls off one of these with two references to time and while the reader might be a little suspicious, enough word count passes that the reveal jumps up at what we expected to be nearly the end of a climactic sequence. See that? We were innocently hurtling back to the ground, the author reveals that crucial piece of information that was previously alluded to, and we launch back into the air. Without that foreshadowing in the beginning, we get the WTF ending.


For the wow ending in Skin Game, the main character references a time jump within the first few chapters. A little while later, a well-loved side character also mentions the time jump which the main character brushes off. At the end, we get to see the events within the missing time which greatly impact a careening ending.

Titles: Annie Proulx’s Short Stories

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Annie Proulx’s short stories make a fantastic use of space in an important way. She completely understands the limitations of the form and uses all available space to work for her, as the writer, and you, as the reader. The titles feed into the story, so that she either gives a hint as to what she wants to you read out of it, or simply kicks off the first part of your mindset before you launch into the meat of the story.


In publishing, works go through a laundry list of titles to ensure that the work is catchy, appealing to the right audience, and dissimilar from either a recent work or a famous one. The short story collection can be titled from a list; the magazine has its own title to appeal to a predetermined audience. In the short story itself, all ink on the page must perform a function.


Pick a short work you’ve titled. Cover the title. Uncover it. I can’t decide. What you can ask yourself is this: Am I repeating myself? Or is the title saying something new that isn’t stated within the work?


Sometimes we want to repeat ourselves. Sometimes we want to clarify. Sometimes we’re just desperate to call it something and be done. That’s okay, too. But you have all this real estate above your name to work for you.