First Sunday Q&A: Complex and Woven Structures for Books
The trend towards literary complexity is fun, fascinating, and doesn't always serve the story. What's best for yours?
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Welcome to “First Sunday” Q&A, where we dissect and discuss your most gnarly writing and publishing questions. I plan to write this the first Sunday of each month for you, as long as you wonderful people send me your questions. I have a great selection from attendees at my virtual launch last fall, and I’ll lean on these as we get going, but please feel free to post questions in the comments or email them to me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com, and I’ll spend time on them, sharing ideas, tips, and resources from my own experience. I’m happy to keep you anonymous.
My intention is to make this a safe, generous place to exchange ideas and talk about the deepest writing and publishing issues on your mind.
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Q: I’m frustrated with my writing right now, because I love reading really complex literature with incredibly complex structures. But when I try to duplicate this complexity in my own memoir writing, it fails miserably. Can you give an overview of types of book structure and how a writer with complex tastes and simpler skills can approach structure sensibly but without boring herself to death?
A: This winter, we took a field trip to a crafts fair where one of my relatives shows her work. She’s a weaver. Not just that—she also raises sheep, shears them, cards the wool, and dyes it with homemade dyes. She loves it, too—she loves the complexity of woven patterns. I couldn’t resist buying a shank of wool in a beautiful gray-puce color, a combination of wool and angora (she raises rabbits too).
I like complexity in visuals—walking into our living space, you’d face a riot of color and texture and design. My spouse is also a painter so our paintings line the walls. Furniture is eclectic, mostly inherited antiques or vintage second-hand. Some shield their eyes when they enter. Too much complexity in color, shape, design. But to me, it’s inspiring and exciting.
Such a trend exists in books as well. Books are getting more complex--not just in their storylines but also in their structures. I love reading books that make me work, just a bit, to figure out the woven layers.
Could all of this be a reflection of how our brains are changing (remember the landmark study (2010) of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr). Or maybe it’s our continued desire to reinvent literature that matches our cultural needs.
How have book structures changed in the last twenty years?
Scroll back to 1998. Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible awes readers with a story told by five (!) different narrators. Five members of the Price family contribute their own version of the voyage from Georgia to be missionaries in the Belgian Congo. Nathan, the father, is the only one whose voice isn’t primary. Instead, the circle around him, his family, is the chorus in this book. Back then, this kind of story structure was a shock to readers, at least to me.
Kingsolver was a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, deservedly, because she knew how to keep our attention during each transition between narrators—the first challenge of complex structures.
In 2008, we read Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a whole new type of book, which some called "episodic" because it straddled the line between a group of short stories and a novel. To me, it paved the way for further experimentation. Think of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries. Each offered another step, a new kind of complicated story structure.
Now we’re reading a woven plot that moves not just between multiple narrators but through different eras. (The Stone Diaries even toggles from first- to second- to third-person voice.)
These are classics; you may have read them if you’re into literary fiction, you may not. I did. I was fascinated by how they worked out structural problems on the page. Because this stuff is exciting but it’s not easy.
Fast forward again to another wave of experimental book structure. 2005’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal is set up like an encyclopedia, moving through alphabetical listings of topics. There are notes, bullet-point lists, ruminations. Some listings are one paragraph, some as long as chapters. It is entertaining and extremely random, as if you're visiting a fictional character's journal and peering in on her mind, heart, and daily life. 2008’s The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham is a bit more serious and the chapters look like real chapters, but the organization is fascinating. It explores the author's experience after her dad's suicide. Each chapter is a different way it affected her--but it is set up as an index. Chapters fall under main and subordinate headings, like an index would. An example: "Suicide: act of: attempt to imagine."
Tommy Orange’s amazing There, There, published in 2018 organizes a dozen stories by different narrators, circling around an event that greatly affects a Native American community. I was riveted by how he pulled the threads together and kept the tension while so many balls were in the air. 2019’s Evidence of V by Sheila O’Connor is of a similar complexity, a mix of memoir and fiction, prose and poetry surrounding the author’s present-day search for traces of her missing grandmother.
All these books--and many others out on the market today--are showing us where we can all go, as writers, into a new kind of literary architecture. If structure is the frame of a story, these authors are playing, often gleefully, with how this frame influences their narrative. They are making the structure a strong part of their stories.
If you’ve read this far, you may be a writer who’s intrigued by trying this. But let’s look carefully at the different kinds of structure—simple to complex—and what each requires.