posted
I've been exploring the topic of how narratives are organized, structure in one area, but much more than that. We all know about plot, which is prose's number one structure. However, plot holds different, sometimes mutually exclusive meanings for different writers and readers.
We all understand the temporal features of chronological order, sequential passage of time, though I see chronological causation as a common challenge for struggling writers. As form follows function, cause precedes effect. Effect may artfully be reported, depicted, portrayed prior to cause; however, a strong reason or rhetorical purpose (persuasive purpose) is crucial so that readers can follow a narrative's sequences. Nonlinear timelines and inverted cause and effect rearrange conventional chronological-causal organization for, largely, reorienting emphasis. An event, for example, may have stronger impact in an antichrony ordering and, hence, be reported out of chronological order for emphasis to strong dramatic and artistic effect.
In addition to plot, chronology, and causation, other fundamental narrative organizing features tension and antagonism are understood by struggling writers to lesser degrees. As causation has two identities, cause and effect, tension and antagonism do as well. Tension's emotions empathy or sympathy--caring what will happen--and suspense's curiosity about what will happen are its two identities. Antagonism's dramatic complication of opposing and at times paralleling want and problem wanting satisfaction are its two identities. Cause and effect, empathy and suspense, and want and problem are plot features that oscillate like a cylinder, back and forth driving the plot engine forward. When one feature or identity is out of order in relation to another, the cylinder misfires. The plot engine hiccups, bumps, stalls, stops.
Where chronology is linear, plot, antagonism, causation, and tension are perpendicular to time, pushmi-pullyas horizontally and vertically pulling and pushing across time. Any one of the latter may accompany time forward along part of a narrative, but they may also delay time movement, all the while driving story movement forward. The more dramatic a scene is, the more story time may slow down, like the moments of a motor vehicle wreck feel as though time's passage has been suspended. These features of time management also challenge struggling writers.
As an organizing feature, time management may address story time and narrative time. Story time is the seeming passage of time within a story. An hour passes in the story, an hour passes reading it. That is a literal, prescriptive passage of story time. Very few narratives adhere that literally to story time. However, managing time movement gives readers a sense of story time's passage. Readers are more sophisticated to a degree about time passage today, due in part to common jump transition uses, where a signficant amount of the everyday life events are jumped past in contemporary narratives. Why report a boring journey when nothing dramatic happens between departure point and destination? No reason, unless the journey is relevant and dramatic.
Narrative time, on the other hand, is the passage of word count over time that expands and suspends or foreshortens story time's passage. Narrative time may feel as though a lifetime passes between one character speaking a dialogue line before another character responds. Most of narrative time takes place in introspection mode, either of a viewpoint character or narrator expressing commentary in thoughts about the dramatic action of the moment. Narrative time may also accelerate, or foreshorten, story time. An event that takes hours, months, years to pass may be expressed narratively in a milisecond, one word. Wow! That was quick. Time flies when you're having fun.
I believe one of the reasons struggling writers struggle with narrative time management is from writing taking a disproportionate amount of time to compose a narrative compared with reading time expended. Consequently, scenes where lingering is perhaps a best practice are rushed through, jumbled causally and chronologically, underrealized, and incomplete.
Note that the average English reading rate is one hundred fifty words per minute. That is the same average as English speaking or reading aloud rate. Thus reading a writing project aloud may give a sense of narrative time's passage for general audiences. Story time perhaps as well can be gauged by reading aloud, but it's much more complex than that from how story time is more flexible than narrative time, which can be considered simply word count time. The two times, though, compared and contrasted with each other, may yield a stronger understanding of narrative time management.
In my studies and reading, I've come across many organizing principles for all composition genre, creative performance writing, as in fiction, creative nonfiction, New Journalism and traditional journalism, script writing, poetry, and argumentation, expository composition, research and report, problem, inquiry, and satisfaction, and annotated bibilography. Prose writing uses organizing principles from the other genres. However, the other organizing principles are used in prose to add depth, to strengthen and clarify meaning, to persuasively influence readers' emotional responses.
Some examples of other organizing principles: least to most dramatic, least to most detail, least to most information, nearest to farthest and farthest to nearest in time and space and personal meaning, formal to informal and informal to formal, uncertain to certain and certain to uncertain, upset to comfortable and comfortable to upset, confident to timid and timid to confident, dependent to independent, fearful to safe and safe to fearful, worried to contented, condemned to saved and saved to condemned, want and problem to satisfaction and dissatisfaction to want and problem realization: ad infinitum.
What other organizing principles do you use in writing and see when you read prose? Maybe there's an organization sticking point you'd like information about. Raise it and we'll see if the Hatrack think tank has guidances.
posted
Hmm. I never even consider any of that. As someone described it, I chase my characters around trying to record what they're up to. If they're not doing anything interesting, I don't record it.
But kinda on the same note, an extremely funny How Not To:
posted
I've seen Grant Snider's "The Story Coaster." Funny in a way. It does not depict my process or even method, nor narrative structure as I know it. Mine is more like a ziggurat than a roller coaster with only one peak, one loop-dee-loop, and several low tension and low antagonism lengthy flat runs and derivative detours.
Why did sphotos-b-atl.xx.fbcdn.net cut off the poster's title and leave out Snider's byline? Revisionist intent to make the poster about something else and to co-op intellectual property ownership perhaps?
posted
No idea, but fbcdn.net is a caching server, so it's there as part of some other site (someone else had the link to the image, but not the site using it). There's really no keeping an image once it's on the net -- someone, somewhere, will 'borrow' it, like it or not.
Glad to know where it comes from, tho -- the other comics are fun too.
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