Arrange Pressure, Information, and Change

In the first chapter of Volume II of Emma, Emma forms what the narrator calls an “ingenious and animating suspicion” about Jane Fairfax, the charming Mr. Dixon, and Jane’s not going to Ireland. We are given Emma’s false theory, her pleasure in it and her certainty, and nothing of Jane’s mind. In the tenth chapter of the third volume, Mrs. Weston tells Emma that Frank Churchill and Jane have been engaged since October, “formed at Weymouth, and kept a secret from every body.” Everything the reader has been told rearranges itself. The pressure built in the space between what Emma thought she knew and what was true (Practice 37 shows how a point of view opens a space like that). Go back for a second reading and the same pages say something different, because the information has changed places.

Structure, in these terms, is a controlled relation between what the reader knows, what the reader expects or fears, and what has changed. At any page, whoever is reading believes some things, expects others, and hopes or dreads a little, and structure is the sequence of changes to that state; change is a belief being replaced. Information can be released, delayed, or distorted by a point of view. Pressure rises when you promise something, threaten something, or ask a question you won’t answer for a long time. Put the same events in a different order and you have a different book.

A draft can treat a template as a structure: the writer takes a published model, which may be a good one, and fills in the slots. The model might be a three-act arrangement, John Yorke’s five-act account in Into the Woods, or one of the longer beat sheets. Each divides a story at the points where something turns, which is a useful way to ask where your turns are. Run one over the draft once it exists, as a checklist, and it can show whether a turn you meant to make actually happens where readers of the genre expect it. A planner can use the same model before drafting by asking, of each beat, what the reader knows and expects at that point. Without that question a model records events, and on our reading a book can contain every required beat in the right proportion and still feel inert, because the reader learns everything at the moment it happens and nothing is ever withheld, anticipated, or reinterpreted.

How information is distributed is a real craft decision, and the Gatsby letters record an editor and an author making one. On November 20, 1924, Maxwell Perkins, reading The Great Gatsby, wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that when Gatsby gives his biography deliberately to the narrator, the book departs from its own method, in which almost everything arrives in the regular flow of events. He suggested letting the truth of some of Gatsby’s claims come out bit by bit in the course of the actual narrative. In a letter of about February 18, 1925, finishing proofs, Fitzgerald told Perkins that among other changes he had broken up Gatsby’s long narrative in Chapter VIII.

Someone reading an argument holds a belief and a set of reservations, and in nonfiction your structure decides which reservation comes up first, which evidence arrives when, and where their position finally moves. An argument that states its thesis and then proves it in a list gives the reader no change to go through. One that raises the best objection before the reader does and then answers it builds pressure and releases it. The authors of The Craft of Research count the response to objections as one of the five elements of an argument, which is a structural claim about the reader.

Sometimes the right chart is not about knowledge. A lyric poem may arrange mood, sound and image instead, and charting what its reader knows would give a flat line and a false verdict. Work that depends on the reader’s disorientation can use the chart to confirm that it disorients on purpose.

Practice. Take ten consecutive units and, in forty minutes, make three columns. In the first, write what happens; in the second, what the reader believes or knows afterward; in the third, what the reader expects, fears, or wants to find out. Read down the second column and mark any stretch of three or more units where nothing changes, then down the third, marking where the pressure goes slack. The marks are not necessarily errors. They are the places where the reader’s experience is flat, and each one needs you to decide whether you meant it.