In Search of Structure
For John McPhee, it started with a picnic table.
Me, I’ve been staring at a 2 ft. x 3 ft. piece of cardboard, hoping to find a way to pin down the structure of the nonfiction book I'm working on. I have a thesis that emerged from my proposal for the book and was more or less confirmed by the draft. I have a synopsis I put together when I was halfway through, revising it along way. Those will go onto that cardboard. They'll help me stay on track so the draft manuscript deliver in a few months won't be a red hot mess.
I have on my hands:
chapters, yes! I’ve drafted them. This is something to be acknowledged, even celebrated.
an opening that may actually be the opening—this is important since my openings generally fall off during revision
a thin and tentative ending—and will it need to be strengthened or will some other places in the draft need strengthening so that this ending feels supported?
plenty of notes
source notes
50-odd photos that look promising
I don't want to write this thing chronologically. Even though its chronology keeps throwing itself at me, I'm pretty sure that's not how this needs to be written. I can see several themes around which my chapters are already starting to organize themselves. If I could only find a way to visualize the whole thing, all together, that visual would give me a way to hold it all in my mind at once. Then I know I’ll be ready to begin revising this draft, turning it into something that's fit to be read.
In McPhee’s article, I particularly love his description of his 1940s high school teacher, Olive McKee:
Mrs. McKee made us do three pieces of writing a week. Not every single week. Some weeks had Thanksgiving in them. But we wrote three pieces a week most weeks for three years. We could write anything we wanted to, but each composition had to be accompanied by a structural outline, which she told us to do first. It could be anything from Roman numerals I, II, III to a looping doodle with guiding arrows and stick figures. The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs. Mrs. McKee liked theatrics (she was also the school’s drama coach), and she had us read our pieces in class to the other kids. She made no attempt to stop anybody from booing, hissing, or wadding paper and throwing it at the reader, all of which the kids did. In this crucible, I learned to duck while reading.
“Some weeks had Thanksgiving in them.”
Right. I’m taking that as my cue from the universe that approximate structure will suffice for now. I'm also granting myself permission to do my structural outline after I’ve written my clumpy chapters, since, let's face it, those chapters are written already and I cannot unwrite them. Nor, I am pretty sure, could I have done this kind of structural imagining before writing a draft. I tend to want a substantial collection of sacrificial words assembled on the page first. Also, I tell myself, I am a woman in my 60s and I can make myself any kind of rules I want.
Looping doodles are feeling attractive at the moment, but let me see what will come of applying coloured markers to cardboard. Stepping away, I’m thinking, is the whole point of the exercise.
