Month: November 2025 (Page 6 of 6)

John McPhee is known as a master of story structure. He emphasizes that a set structure eases the process of writing a story–and reading it. To me, his process for organizing a story is less intelligible than this principle. McPhee describes writing out scenes on index cards, shuffling them around, and designating points for transitions, digressions, and section breaks. I read this more as an artefact of one writer’s brain than a guide for organizing structure, which, for me, only emerges after some writing is done. 

Based on McPhee’s description, structuring a piece is a demanding but methodical task. With practice, it seems, McPhee developed a consistent approach to organize stories. But how does one organize a story with only partial reporting done? McPhee structures stories only after gathering copious notes, recordings, documents, and memos, but does the projected structure not guide his reporting? I am stuck on this point of tension: to plan a structure, the writer must have already reported, but the writer’s idea for her structure guides the information she seeks. 

Stewart, like McPhee, sidesteps this question. Still, his chapter on structure offers practices I can and will implement in my own process. He instructs writers to get comfortable with chronology. To organize a story in a straightforward way, a writer might start by listing scenes in chronological order and associating them with settings and characters present. Stewart recommends that writers minimize shifts in chronology, setting, and POV. 

The napkin drawings of structure pair well with the principles Stewart describes. I particularly liked the organization of This American Life stories, which link scenes chronologically, interrupting them at times with a moment of reflection or realization. A balance between interiority and plot forms the skeleton of this structure. 

I suspect that structure is never as simple as these models make it out to be. If structuring stories were easy, there wouldn’t be so many guides for structure. In my experience, the process of structuring stories is always messy. My first structure has never stuck. That said, writing a lede first has always helped me guide the sequence of scenes. 

I was struck by Stewart’s note that “the enemy of chronology is analysis.” I wonder how chronology functions as an organizing principle, if at all, in analysis pieces that include narrative elements, or vice versa. Sometimes, writing guides simplify different forms of writing, as if genres didn’t often intersect.

In Jennifer Senior’s piece about the McIlvane family, I felt like she had taken me by the hand and was gently forcing me to walk through the lives of these grieving people, to unpack their grief alongside them, to watch as they descended from or clung to their mountains of grief, so that I would come away knowing the story of this one individual – Bobby – of so many individual 9/11 stories which have not been told. Throughout the beginning of the piece, Senior frequently signposted to remind the reader why the piece was important, providing us with a “why now”: “A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences,” she writes. “Every mourner has a very different story to tell.” A few pages later, she reminds us again of the significance of recording individual experiences: “In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we’ve watched, we still know practically nothing about the last movements of the individual dead. It’s strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery.” 

These asides did the trick for me – I had been loath to read another 9/11 story as just one among so many which, especially we New Yorkers, have to record and understand that day and its aftermath. Senior must have predicted this, and she promises us that this piece is worth our time, that it is precisely that we have the story of the many, that the story of the one is significant, that there are still mysteries to be unravelled. And she was right. She won my trust in that moment and had it the whole way through, and it ended up being my favorite of this week’s stories, the one I could not put down. 

It was not until I read the structure pieces, particularly Stewart’s “Follow the Story” that I realized what kept me reading Senior’s piece was less the riveting content and more the highly effective structure, which was so good from the start that I completely trusted Jennifer to continue effectively telling this story. It struck me how, in both the piece about the McIlvay’s as well as the expose of Paul Skalnik and the corruption in prisoner testimony, the authors must have known every single piece of information in their stories before they started telling it. The beauty of their writing, particularly Senior’s, is her intentionality in deciding when we as readers discover each piece of information. She withholds that she knows and loves the McIlvays until a couple of pages in, but doesn’t wait so long to tell us that it feels untruthful. She introduces us to Bob McIlvane as a sympathetic person before telling us about the conspiracy theories in which he has come to believe. I want to try this more in my own writing. Often I’m so concerned with communicating the information I have that I forget to be intentional about the order in which I present it, leaning on chronology. McPhee recommends a chronological approach married with the tucking-in of themes for a stuck writer, which I agree with; a proficient reader can draw out themes on their own, but they cannot generate chronology, that’s why they need to. But I find I rely less on the chronology of events and more on the chronology in which I found things out. And when I find things out should have no bearing on when my reader finds things out. 

One thing that frustrates me a bit about McPhee’s “On Structure” is his reliance on instinct. I currently feel like I’m “on the table,” to use his metaphor, when it comes to my journalism capstone piece for the colloquium. I just have no clue where to start, and each first sentence is worse than the last. In the McPhee piece, he suddenly remembers Fred Brown and figures everything out. There he is, off the table, ready to write. My question is: what happens if you don’t have a “Fred Brown”? Or if you do, but you can’t figure out who that person is? It’s nice that McPhee got off the table, but why doesn’t he teach us how?