Let's explore the question, "What makes a writer?" In one sense we are all, or at least most of us, are writers. We capture words on paper or in electronic form and can state that we have written something. But our use of the word writer comes with another condition; that condition is that those captured words generate an audience.
This explains why one might consider Anne Frank a writer but not the average person who keeps a diary. Yet there is a difference between Anne Frank and James Joyce. There is even a difference between Joyce as a writer of The Dead and Joyce as a writer of Finnegan's Wake. Writing therefore does not have a definitive mark, a line in the sand, that we at some point in our life cross in order to join the club. The writer is instead a person of degree.
We might form a similar statement about baseball players as we consider little leagues, high-school baseball teams, college baseball, minor leagues, and the majors. We might think about the neighborhood kids and our favorite major league baseball player in the same thought and wonder how to reconcile these. It's a matter of degree. And the measure of degree is skill.
For our writer, the fundamental skill is a mastery of structure. Writers must start and end with structure. For it is structure that ultimately delineates our writer.
As I've stated before, writing is attention to language, story, and plot. The balance of these is structure. It is the central foundation from which every element of our written work ultimately depends. Plot may be a framework, story may be a shape, and language may be a style, but all of these depend on an overall structure.
As writers we must understand this underlying structure, this foundation, because the success of our work depends on it. Like other foundations we must understand its size or scope. We must consider location; in our case here we may consider cultural position or relevancy. And we must consider the neighborhood or genre or similar works.
Like a home's foundation, structure is difficult to consider by itself. It would be impractical to build a foundation without any consideration about the house which will sit on it. Yet we cannot construct a house first and leave the foundation for last. Many writers, though, do this very thing and end up tearing down the house in order to build it back up on a more solid foundation. This wastes a writer's time and is not very productive.
We must get into the habit of writing a story once. Therefore we must delve into our trio of language, story, and plot. But which should we start with? Any are valid, but plot most closely follows from structure as a house frame follows from a foundation. Yet we may argue that frame may be dictated by a preconceived shape (story) and cosmetic (language). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that we must eliminate by decisiveness.
The popular notion is to start with a character and build a story around this character. I call this an ego-centric approach. People, we, have a tendency to understand the world by putting it into terms of ourselves. This more often generates problems than solutions, and stems from our cultural belief that a person is defined by something internal rather than external.
But at the risk of sounding a bit Marxist, a person, a character, is defined not by some internal quality or intent, but by external forces. What distinguishes this notion from a Marxist one is that from an economic perspective people are both producers and consumers, and it is a person's productive quality or actions that define him/her, not that person's consumption or material assets. In other words, a person or character is defined by what they do but not by something inside of them or something they possess.
So to start with character is to start with very little because a character has no substance until that character does something. Until action occurs, you really have no character. We need a motion of events for characters to form. We might have a great name picked out, but great names are formed not by putting letters together, but by the actions of those who possessed those names. Greatness is a product of action.
We can extend this notion from names to language itself. Great language is also a product of action. Think of every great speech, every great soliloquy, every great movie quote; these are all the products of some action behind these words.
And we can extend this notion to story. What is the story behind every great person? Every great person has a great story because we leave out the bad parts. The greatest president of the United States was Abraham Lincoln despite having done the worst possible thing any president could do, attack and kill his own countrymen and create a civil war. He's great because he has a great story and that story is a product of select actions.
Action is the realm of plot. Logically then the most efficient and effective method of story generation is to start with structure and plot. Because these two elements are closely entwined, it is understandable why these terms are often interchanged. For my purposes we will maintain a distinct difference between structure and plot.
To fully understand structure, we must understand the writers' trio of language, story, and plot and how they are held together by a foundational structure. But we must proceed methodically in steps. For now we've been exposed to the basic concept of structure that glues everything together and how plot is most often the first of the trio for the writer to tackle.
In my next How to Write post I'll tackle just that and attempt to explain the various aspects of plots, how to handle them, and how this term translates across writing genres.
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