Patterned story structure meets the coffee house book

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Upon the recommendation of Nathan Bransford, I read this post by Jennifer Crusie at Argh Ink about linear vs. patterned story structure, comparing a patterned structure to a quilt that's been pieced together.

This post comes to me at a perfect time in the creation of the coffee house book since a lot of the background "stuff" I'm doing right now deals with structure and how everything fits together with this book, as well as with the other books I have planned in this collection.

In fact, I was just explaining to Hubby last night that I can't really start writing the coffee house book until I have a rough idea of the story lines in the other books in the collection so I know what character is where, who is important when, and what story needs to be told how.

Crusie says:

So in a patterned novel or film (damn hard to pull off), you need to construct pieces that are complete in and of themselves, scene sequences that form complete stories, and then juxtapose them with other pieces to make a pattern so that at the end, the pattern is the meaning of the story. Think of the scene sequences as quilt blocks, beautiful on their own, and the story as the finished quilt in which the blocks disappear when it's finished to form a patterned whole. The blocks are beautiful, but it's the quilt as a whole that's the finished design.

That is what I want to accomplish with the coffee house book, as well as with the whole of the collection. Yes, each book in the collection has its story, and each character in each book has his or her story, but it's how those stories fit together that's the important thing.

The books I'm working on are about relationships and perceptions. They're about how people work and live together in a community, how different community members interact with each other, and what, overall, makes up a community.

I could tell the community's story in a linear structure. I could go through the characters and explain the town and talk about how people interact with each other. But it would be a boring book, that's for sure! At that point, the collection (or the novel, since that's what it would be) would focus on some story arc that links the community rather than what really links a community: the people and their relationships with each other.

As Crusie says, some stories call for a linear structure. (When I first started writing the coffee house book, I thought it needed to be a linear structure.) Those stories don't hold up in a patterned structure. And some stories call for a patterned structure. And those stories don't hold up in a linear structure.

A patterned structure is not easy. You have to know the story really well, be conscious about how the quilt is pieced together (it can't be random), and know how it all fits together. It takes a lot of background work, takes patience during writing, and takes careful editing. But in the end, it's worth it.

After all, quilts sure look beautiful when they're finished, don't they?

So You Think You're a Poet? Part Two: Structure/Line Breaks

This month my freshmen classes are reading and studying poetry. One particular bit of advice I’ve given them is to pay attention to the structure of a poem. Poets insert line breaks for a reason.

There are many poets whose poetry attests to this: Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and others. Each line break is treated with the same reverence as an image, a title, and any form of punctuation.


When I was in high school, I didn't know much about the structure of poetry. So when I wrote a poem (I use the term loosely), I broke the line when I got to the end of the page. The only indication my poems were, in fact, poems was that each line was capitalized. And, in my young writing mind, I thought I was writing poetry.

Careful consideration must be made in the decision to create a line break, or to structure a poem in a particular way. Look at this poem by E. E. Cummings. In it, he uses line breaks and structure to add to the whimsical atmosphere of a spring day in the park. Now imagine the poem as a prose poem, or having been broken at the end of a thought or sentence.

My college poetry professor told us to be sure our line breaks served a purpose in the poem. What do you want the break to accomplish? Or, for that matter, what do you want the lack of break to accomplish?

A line break, especially to readers who have not studied poetry as much, is a pause. Yes, if there's enjambment you should continue reading as if it were on the same line, but when seeing it on the page, the mind still pauses for a split-second as the eyes move to the beginning of the next line. That said, where do you want your readers to pause, even if briefly, to think about what they've just read? Consider the poem below by William Carlos Williams, which has been altered (though the words are same):

so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.

Now close your eyes for a moment and picture the image just described. Can you see it? Okay. This is the proper structure:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Close your eyes again. Now what do you see? If you're anything like me, the image was very different.

When I read the first version, I see a red wheelbarrow on the ground next to a few chickens. And the wheelbarrow is wet. In my mind, it's an entire image.

When I read the proper version, the image develops as I read. First, I see a bright red wheelbarrow, upside down on the ground. It's wet and you can see the water rivulets on the sides of it. It's large and it's all I can see. Then, my mental camera pulls back on the scene, and there are three white chickens, so bright in the sun you can barely stand to look at them, picking at the ground next to the wheelbarrow. And despite the brightness of the chickens, my mind still goes back to the wheelbarrow, fire-engine red, upside down, shiny from the water.

If Williams had structured his poem in any other way, I very much doubt I would love it as much as I do. But because he took time and consideration as he wrote to create the perfect image in the line breaks, it is my favorite poem.

When you write a poem, be careful about how you write it. Don't let it fall flat because you didn't structure it the way it should have been structured. Be aware of what you're presenting both visually and mentally with every line of your poem. All the imagery in the world couldn't save a poorly formatted poem.

And now that I've worried you, go! Write! Worry over whether or not to start a new line!

And happy scribbling!