In December of 1980, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, believing that he had some fashion of personal relationship with his victim. A few months later, in March of 1981, John Hinckely attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing his fantasy crush, Jodi Foster. Why would these […]
The Way Narratives Go
Recently, one of my students confessed to the class that in a long-ago creative writing workshop, she had once been humiliated when her instructor had chalked on the board the structure of her short story, which was found inadequate beside a comparative chalked version of the Freytag Triangle. For those […]
Countless Lives Inhabit Us
In two recent posts, “What’s Structure Got to Do With It?” and “The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers,” I took a look at the various ins and outs of how writers structure their work. In this post, I’d like to consider the idea of anti-structure, or at least […]
The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers
After my last post, on the units of structure Shakespeare employed in his plays, scenes arranged as diptychs and triptychs, I thought I’d continue my thoughts on structure in writing by quoting a prose poem by the poet David Ignatow, titled “The Life They Lead”: I wonder whether two trees […]
What’s Structure Got to Do with It?
More years ago than I like to count, when I was but a first-year graduate student in creative writing, I came upon a slim volume in a bookstore titled Shakespearean Design, by Mark Rose. I pulled it off the shelf and gave it a glance, because I was taking a […]
Yet Another Chapter One
One of my favorite novels in recent years is I, the Divine (A Novel in First Chapters), by the Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. It’s a brilliant novel in the form of a memoir, written by one Sarah Nour El-Din, and it’s an evolving memoir at that, which is where the […]
Point of Entry, Point of Departure
The longer I write, the more I’m intrigued by how a word can conceal as much if not far more than it reveals. Yet if regarded with care, any word can serve not as a wall but as a window to what it can’t further express. One of my favorite […]