Tag Archives: Wallace Stegner

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Professional Wednesday: Beginnings, Middles, and Endings, part VI — Final Thoughts

This week I close out my Professional Wednesday feature on “Beginnings, Middles, and Endings” with some general observations about narrative structure. If you are just coming to this series of posts, I would recommend you go back and read the previous entries on openings, middles (here, here, and here), and endings.

Not surprisingly, I stand by all I have written in the preceding essays. But I also think it is worth pointing out that everything I’ve written in this series of posts thus far assumes a linear approach to narrative. And for writers who are at the start of their careers, still learning their craft and/or still trying to break into the business, that is the safest approach to storytelling, if not the most exciting or innovative. The three-act narrative structure has been around for a long time. Lots of creative careers have been built on it. One could argue that the entire movie industry was founded upon it, and did quite well for a long time, thanks very much.

But for many of us, the real fun begins when we take apart that traditional narrative structure and piece it back together again in ways that are less predictable and more challenging, for creator and audience alike. There are so many fine examples of this, I hardly know where to begin. William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is the first one that comes to mind. In it, Faulkner tells the story of a tragically dysfunctional Southern family by focusing on the events of four days as experienced by four different point of view characters. Each section adds crucial details of the family’s rise and fall, until the final point of view brings all the previous elements together into a coherent whole.

One of my favorite novels of all time is Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner, which consists of two narratives, one of an older man coming to terms with the looming end of an unhappy life, and the other tracing the life of his mother, which the man reconstructs as he reads through her journals. The two narratives intertwine and feed one another in unexpected and poignant ways.

Many of you are probably familiar with Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, which interweaves several storylines, playing with chronology, coincidences, and chance encounters to create a fascinating (albeit bloody and graphically violent) fractured whole.

No doubt you can think of many other examples — together we could go on for pages and pages pointing to all the innovative narrative structures we’ve encountered, be it in novels, short stories, movies, television episodes, etc.

My point in presenting these posts was to familiarize readers of my blog with the basics of traditional, linear narrative structure. Because before we as artists start breaking the rules, we need to KNOW the rules and even master them. Miles Davis and Charlie Parker didn’t start off their musical lives creating jazz classics that sounded like nothing that had come before. They started by learning their craft and by becoming virtuosos of well-established jazz styles. THEN they innovated and changed the world.

The other thing to remember is that straying from narrative traditions doesn’t always work. The examples I have given, and those you can think of, are the ones that were successful and memorable. As many as we might think of, I’m certain they represent a minute fraction of those that have been attempted. The vast majority likely fell flat. And even those that are part of successful works are not always worth emulating.

The end of The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies) actually has two climaxes. There is the final battle with Sauron’s army which coincides with Frodo and Sam’s final ascent of Mount Doom and the fight with Gollum over the fate of the Ring. From there the book starts to wind down, with the coronation of Aragorn and leave-takings and resolutions to so many relationships. But then the hobbits return to the Shire and we have the second climax, “The Scouring of the Shire,” which sees Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin having to rally their fellow hobbits to defeat Saruman and Wormtongue. The books were successful obviously, but that is not a structural quirk I would recommend for any beginning writer or established author.

Islevale compositeWhich is another way of saying that innovation for the sake of innovation is not necessary or advised. Yes, it’s fun and challenging to write books or stories that don’t conform to simple linear narrative. I learned that with the Islevale Cycle, my time travel/epic fantasy series. And if you have ideas for playing with chronology or otherwise changing up your narrative style, by all means give it a try. But don’t feel that you have to. There are plenty of books, movies, plays, and stories out there that conform to regular old narrative form, and they do just fine. Better to write a story in the normal way and have it come out well, than to change things up just for the purpose of doing so, and thus leave your audience confused.

Keep writing!!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Ten Books You Should Read

Early in the year — even before the pandemic hit — I wrote a post in which I basically said that all writers should read. There are certain “rules” about the profession that are actually negotiable — writers don’t really HAVE to write every day; we don’t HAVE to outline our books to be successful; some people like to write to music while others need absolute silence.

The reading thing, however, as I said at the time, is about as close to an ironclad rule as I can think of. If we want to learn the tropes of whatever genre we write in, we have to read. If we want to learn the craft of storytelling, and continue to hone that skill over a lifetime, we have to read. If we want to be informed and culturally literate citizens of the world, we have to read.

But what should we read? As an author with many friends in the business, I find that making recommendations can be tricky. I don’t wish to insult any of my colleagues with sins of omission. But there are certain books that I have read and not only enjoyed, but learned from. That’s what I’m after in this post. The following books have taught me something about narrative, about conveying story and emotion, about crafting prose. There are some unusual, even quirky, choices here. That comes with the prerogative of writing on my own blog. I hope you find this list helpful, informative, even inspirational.

In no particular order…

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin. Okay, for starters, it’s just a great book and the start of a remarkable series, a deserving winner of the Hugo (which was actually awarded to all three books in the Broken Earth Trilogy). Her plotting is fabulous, her use of point of view innovative and striking. Jemisin has since been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. So, yeah, she basically rocks.

Slow River, by Nicola Griffith. This is an older novel, the 1996 winner of both the Nebula Award and the Lambda Literary Award. It’s a great story, and it makes use of point of view and voice so beautifully that I have used it for teaching on several occasions. Basically she uses three different voices for a single character, each representing different moments in her life. Brilliant.

The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Kay is probably my favorite fantasy writer, and in recent years he has become a good friend, so I’m bending my own rule here, including the work of someone I know well. But I was a fanboy way before we became friends, so… He does a lot of things very well in all his books, but the world building in this particular book is breathtaking. He borrows extensively from history — he does in most of his books — but he also constructs his worlds with the care and skill of a watchmaker.

A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. The entire Earthsea Trilogy is one of my all-time favorite works of fiction, but this first volume especially is masterful. It’s a relatively short work, and originally received less attention than it deserved because it was classified, somewhat patronizingly, as “children’s literature.” The worldbuilding is gorgeous, the storytelling simultaneously spare and rich, the prose understated but flawless. Even if you’ve read it, give it another look

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner. The first of a couple of non-genre novels. Stegner was not only a terrific writer, but also a passionate, outspoken environmentalist and a chronicler, through his fiction, of the development of the American West. In 1972, Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is a master class in narrative. He basically tells two stories at once, one set in the present, one in the past. He blends them beautifully. And his prose is golden.

Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver. Another exquisitely written novel of the American West. Kingsolver weaves together multiple narratives and employs several different points of view to tell her tale. It’s moving, sad, uplifting. Actually, writing about it makes me want to read it again…

Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman. William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride, and then adapted the novel for the screen. He wrote the scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. He wrote Marathon Man, and then adapted it to the screen. And he wrote or adapted scripts for about twenty other movies you’ve heard of. In 1983, he published Adventures, which is part tell-all, part how-to. You don’t have to be an aspiring screen writer to learn from it. It is a treatise on creativity and the business of creation. It’s also entertaining as hell.

Five Seasons, by Roger Angell. Okay, this is, admittedly, a VERY quirky choice, but bear with me. Roger Angell, who recently turned 100 years old, is quite possibly the greatest baseball writer who has ever lived. He wrote regularly for The New Yorker from the 1960s through the first decade of this millennium. He has several collections of baseball essays, and Five Seasons is my personal favorite. But if you’re a baseball fan, you can’t go wrong with any of them — The Summer Game, Late Innings, Season Ticket, Once More Around the Park, Game Time. They’re all amazing. His descriptions of the game and the people he encounters are strikingly original and incredibly evocative. Even if you DON’T like baseball, you could learn from his work.

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Back to genre stuff for a moment. The Windup Girl won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2010, and it deserved them, along with every other honor it received. Terrific storytelling, powerful prose, mind-bending world building. This is the whole package.

Any collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction. Another quirky choice. Hawthorne is, I believe, one of the more underrated of American writers. He was writing speculative fiction a century before anyone knew what the hell that was. His stories are haunting, strange, and memorable. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” might be my favorite short story. By anyone. Ever.

And with that, I’ll end.

Except to say, as I did back in February, that to be a writer is, by necessity, to be a reader as well. That is one of the joys what we do.

So keep writing, and keep reading.