Do you remember how, in high school, the kids in honors English would sometimes take an attitude about the VoTech kids? "We read Hemingway and do Ibsen in drama club, and wasn't Birdman just wonderful? What could the people who spend all day in wood shop possibly know about Art?"
Makes you want to reach back in time and smack them, doesn't it? The assumption that making something with words is somehow fundamentally different and better than making something concrete and useful with your hands? Well, remembered high school aesthetes, just think about how hard it's going to be to enthuse about Sylvia Plath when your houses fall down on your heads!
As an editor of both fiction and nonfiction, I can promise you that knowing how to build something fundamentally sound is just as important as knowing how to rub two words together to make an adverb. Word craft and subject-matter mastery are great, but if you don't have a solid structural foundation, you won't be able to keep your reader's attention.
Structure is, of course, the key to successfully communicating your message in nonfiction. Without structure, you can't explain how to change the gasket in an espresso machine, or how the rules of your new game work, or what those laboratory results tell you about your project. But structure is also a crucial underpinning for works of more creative nonfiction like memoirs. It's not enough just to tell what happened; you need to find a framework in which to tell what happened in a way that makes it interesting for the reader, a theme to tie the piece together, and a sense of progression, of building scene upon scene to create a whole greater than the parts.
Here's someone who does both things well, word craft and structure:
Dead Things by John Tormey
Structure is, of course, important to fiction as well. When we talk about plot, scene construction, and pacing, we're really talking about structure. About building the framework on which your ideas can hang.
Makes you want to reach back in time and smack them, doesn't it? The assumption that making something with words is somehow fundamentally different and better than making something concrete and useful with your hands? Well, remembered high school aesthetes, just think about how hard it's going to be to enthuse about Sylvia Plath when your houses fall down on your heads!
As an editor of both fiction and nonfiction, I can promise you that knowing how to build something fundamentally sound is just as important as knowing how to rub two words together to make an adverb. Word craft and subject-matter mastery are great, but if you don't have a solid structural foundation, you won't be able to keep your reader's attention.
Structure is, of course, the key to successfully communicating your message in nonfiction. Without structure, you can't explain how to change the gasket in an espresso machine, or how the rules of your new game work, or what those laboratory results tell you about your project. But structure is also a crucial underpinning for works of more creative nonfiction like memoirs. It's not enough just to tell what happened; you need to find a framework in which to tell what happened in a way that makes it interesting for the reader, a theme to tie the piece together, and a sense of progression, of building scene upon scene to create a whole greater than the parts.
Here's someone who does both things well, word craft and structure:
Dead Things by John Tormey
Structure is, of course, important to fiction as well. When we talk about plot, scene construction, and pacing, we're really talking about structure. About building the framework on which your ideas can hang.
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