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.
