A Brief Note On Story Structure

And why you should keep your salt shaker handy

There are plot skeletons out there, recommending the form they give to the writer, especially the new writer. There are -- quite a few actually.

These skeletons have their uses. I use one when my story is trudging along, one event after other, until it reaches the climax. There should be at least one sharp swerve during the middle of the story. Otherwise things get too monotonous.

But you have to be careful, and indeed read them with salt shaker in hand, because their authors do have a tendency to attach undue importance to them. You can discern this when they analyze a classic work of fiction and deduce that it fails for not adhering to their skeleton. And what does it fail at? Honestly, to adhere to their skeleton. They do not pick open and acknowledged failures, such as the way L. Frank Baum's Oz books petered out as he took to churning them out for the money. They pick a bildungsroman and declare whatever parts of growing up don't fit their structure were superfluous, often positive errors.

Therefore, be prepared to take things with a grain of salt -- or many grains.

Not that the need for the salt shaker is unique to story structure. Professors of literature find patterns in literature, and then criticize borderline cases, or non-cases, for not fitting. I still remember the literary critic who declared that children's literature was a conspiracy against adults and therefore a E. Nesbit book where a boy's hijinks led to a serious talk with an adult, where it is clear that the adult is in the right, is wrong. It gets worse when a literary critic describes an author as "failing to" express a view that is clearly the critic's own and not the author's at all, and worse yet when the view was not seriously considered in the writer's day. You would think it would be funny, but it tends to be simply pathetic.

I've run across several such strictures recently and think more care is needed. I recommend Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, which, among other excellent discussion of fiction, talks of the issues of how to discuss what fiction needs, and also G. K. Chesterton's Heretics, which talks about works in terms of their philosophy, and makes it clear they express it well before he argues with it on philosophical, not literary, grounds.