The semester has started up again. As a college professor, my work rhythms swing wildly between my academic work and my teaching. As a college professor teaching four courses a semester (two composition, two literature), the end of August and the beginning of January are times both to dread and to anticipate. I adore my students, both English majors and non. I love their desire to learn, I love sparking in them what I call Ah-ha! moments, which I think are pretty self-explanatory. But the teaching pulls me away from my research, from my writing, from my work with romance, my first love.
But right now, in my literature courses, I’m teaching poetry. Every time I teach poetry, I bring up what Richard Gere’s Edward says to Julia Roberts’ Vivian in Pretty Woman: “People’s reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.” I GET novels, I love them, they’re part of my soul. I appreciate poetry, even though that appreciate can get pretty darned impassioned at times.
Part of teaching poetry is teaching my students how to scan a poem, something that they usually have major problems with because (a.) they have no idea HOW to do it, and (b.) they have no idea WHY to do it. So while I can teach them HOW pretty easily (I’ve got a nifty little formula for figuring out how to give words stresses or unstresses), it’s the WHY wherein the Ah-ha! moment lies, because if they don’t know why they should do it, they can’t be bothered.
So I teach them about Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? …
This is written, as is most of Shakespeare, in iambic pentameter. Which means that there should be ten syllables per line–five feet of two syllables each–with each foot starting with an unstress, ending with a stress: baDUM baDUM baDUM baDUM baDUM. But in those first four lines of the most famous soliloquy in all of English literature, there are eleven syllables. The extra syllable in each line is not a stress, making the lines strong and bold, but an unstress, dangling forlornly off the end of each line: QUEStion, SUFFer, FORTune, TROUBles. The regularity of iambic pentameter is broken by these final, dangling syllables. And, I tell my students, it is in the breakdown of the pattern that the meaning lies. Hamlet’s soliloquy is all about his INability to make up his mind (to kill himself, to avenge his father, to kill his uncle, to decide what to eat for dinner). So the very construction of the poetry itself, with the indecisive, wishy-washy extra syllable in those first four lines, reflects the meaning, the theme, of the words themselves. THIS is why we analyze poetry: to find the hidden meaning in the very construction of the text itself.
How does this translate to romance? I expound at length about this on Teach Me Tonight, but for the sake of your sanity, here I’ll just argue that it’s worth digging under the surface. When reading a book, it’s hopefully easy to fall into a story (that’s the point, right?) and not think about how much thought goes into how it’s constructed. Reading accounts of RWA and listening to authors, however, tells us how much authors think about their books, how many times they revise, how they agonize over the phrasing of one sentence to get just the right meaning. And while it’s important that we just fall into a book, we can also discover a lot ABOUT the book and its themes and message, if we focus on the deeper meanings of how its actually put together.
Have you ever noticed the actual construction of a novel when reading, or after reading it, and noticed how that reflects and emphasizes the underlying theme or meaning of the book? (Wow, that sounded way more like an essay question in an English course than I meant it to, but I’m not sure how to rephrase it!) Or, if you’re an author, what kind of thought goes in to how your book is constructed and how that construction reflects the theme of the book?
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I remember sophomore English (in high school) when we did poetry, and learned about the different forms, about rhythm and meter and rhyme schemes, and how to put all those pieces together to make different kinds of poems, and how the feel or mood of the poem changed depending on its form, whether it made you sad or thoughtful or excited or whatever else. I had my “Ah hah!” poetry moment then, and although we studied the other stuff too [cough] I’ve always preferred structured poetry.
I do some similar things when I’m writing. Especially with longer pieces, the way my chapters are structured needs to be regular or I break out in hives. If I start out with three scenes per chapter, I want them all to have three scenes, unless there’s a good reason to deviate and the deviation itself adds to the story’s structure and communicates to the reader in some way. If a chapter starts out in Character A’s POV and ends in Character B’s POV, then all of them will.
I wrote one story where we started out knowing A much better than B, and they didn’t know each other at all, so Chapter One begins in A’s POV and stays there for about 80% of its length. The last scene in B’s POV is fairly short. B’s POV takes up more and more of each chapter (although it’s always the latter chunk) as the story goes on and we get to know him better, until the last couple of chapters are almost all in his POV with the ratio reversed.
It might sound fussy to some, but this sort of balance and regularity makes the whole of the story feel coherent to me, like I’ve actually crafted it with the entire piece in mind, rather than just banging out whatever I felt like throwing onto the page that day. There’s communication going on on multiple levels, and it’ll work even if the reader doesn’t pick up on it overtly.
Angie
Great post and so true!
My stories are completed in my head. While there, they’re a huge mess no other human being can comprehend. And I don’t come by structuring a novel naturally either
. So, while creating a story is as easy as breathing, translating it for the rest of humanity is hard work for me. I have to follow a pre-written path, like the Mythic Structure or Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet (Save the Cat!) Otherwise, I’m buried and the story never comes out and I’m left frustrated. 
As a reader, I try to fall into the novels at first. I’m reading for enjoyment. Slicing and dicing a novel while first reading it isn’t enjoyment for me. It draws me out of the story.
As a writer, I add those extra layers deep readers such as yourself appreciate. I also like to leave the readers with a few unanswered questions. Nothing big but something that keeps readers thinking.
The short answer is yes, I almost always pay attention to craft elements at some point during a book, even though certain scenes may sweep me into that place of imagining. I think this is a function of me being a writer; it’s a lot harder to distance myself from how the prose was constructed.
When writing, I identify the emerging themes (I say emerging because for me the process is subconscious) and then play up those themes wherever I can; I don’t know if I do this well enough for the reader to consciously identify, but it doesn’t matter; it’s part of what I love about writing, and keeps me going during night after night of cranking out another thousand words. However, writing for me also sometimes reaches that state of imagining, where I am not consciously paying attention to what I’m doing, and I surface at the end of the scene with a gasp and remember who I am.
Every Word Matters. In the broad scope and in the syllable. Some scenes need long flowing sentances, others short and clipped. It’s an opera of phonograms.
Angie had an interesting comment. I find myself looking at my Document Map checking chapters and scene lengths. Not that I’m rigid, but knowing I normally have a hero and a heroine scene in each chapter, I question myself when things to be straying from that structure. However, there’s usually a reason. One chapter might demand more plot points in the scene. If it’s an action scene, or there’s a lot of tension, the scenes might be shorter. I don’t mind deviations, but only after I’ve looked to make sure there’s a reason for them. As a matter of fact, the chapter I just finished writing ended up being four shorter scenes. But it wouldn’t work if I stayed with each character long enough to cover both scenes in each POV. And making the chapter half the length of the rest didn’t “feel” right, either.
Sometimes, it’s “organic”. I can’t say why something doesn’t work, but I know that it needs to be fixed.
No comments on poetry. Not my favorite subject back in the day, and although there were several poets in my last crit group, I never felt I had anything to offer. Except catching a typo.
I have an undergraduate literature degree (albeit in Spanish, not English). But I don’t think you can go through that kind of curriculum, of analyzing literature and synthesizing what you’ve read, and still pick up a novel and just fall into it without noticing structure.
I find that a well written book will have an interesting structure, and rhythmn, and themes that help draw me into the story, not draw me out of them. I strongly dislike literature (frequently “literary fiction”) that focuses so strongly on the structure or the theme that it loses all sense of the story. The two have to mesh. When it does, its seamless. And even someone who hasn’t been trained to recognize those elements will still be able to appreciate them, but may simply lack the vocabulary for discussing why the novel worked so well.
As a beginning novelist, I can’t really say how well those things are working in my own writing yet. I began my first novel by just hammering out a story. And, to make matters worse, I’m a pantser, so I didn’t have anything structured or mapped out before I began (and every time I try to pre-plan, I get so overwhelmed by the mountain of details that I nearly quit writing altogether…I have to take things a piece at a time). But through the writing, and the editing, and all of the time I spent with my story and my characters running through my head, I believe I was able to thread theme and structure throughout my story. I think in a lot of ways, the structure and themes presented themselves, as if my subconscious mind was working on them despite my conscious brain’s panic over the overwhelming number of details.
I hope some day someone else will notice and appreciate that. If not in my first novel, then in my second, or my third….
As a reader I don’t want to notice form or construction on the first read, though I’m aware of it. I want a story to be so compelling that I am swept away and emerge from the fog of it a few hours later. I can still get swept into a book.
We know with romance that an HEA is gonna happen, right? As a reader I want surprises and revelations as the story goes along. A tightly constructed book reveals things like a flower blooming–one petal at a time–allowing for appreciation of each piece along the way.
As a reader, I think you shouldn’t notice the structure of a story the first time you read it (in the case of a book) or see it (in the case of a movie/tv show/etc) I find if you do notice the structure, then it is either a) extremely bad or b) extrememly pretentious and screaming “look at me! I’m a super literary person cos I’m doing *this* (whatever *this* might be).
I believe a reader should fall into the story and be completely immersed, suspending your disbelief, as those in the biz call it. As soon as you notice structure, it reinstates your disbelief and you remember it’s only a story.
So, as a writer, I agonise over every word. It has to the be the *right* word. If it’s not, the whole meaning is lost and the emotions you want to convey to the reader are lost.
Also, I think your structure is influenced by your characters. Say your character is nervous and babbles. The POV of this characer could be a lot of run-on sentances, conveying the fact that they are nervous without saying “She was nervous”. This would be in addition to any dialogue. If the character is impatient, a few choppy sentances could convey this.
I believe structure should always support the emotion underlying the scene you are describing. Ultimately, you want your reader to feel what your characters are feeling and structure definately helps with this!
I just want to thank everyone for commenting. I love reading about how authors do their thing, considering I spend my life discussing it!