Make Each Part Affect Another

“Because I’m chicken,” David Brower says, and the section ends. In Encounters with the Archdruid, McPhee describes a raft trip on the Colorado River in which the party stops to study Upset Rapid. Brower, the conservationist, stays ashore and walks around it, and when the raft lands, Floyd Dominy, the dam builder, asks him why he did not ride through. After a half inch or so of white space the next section starts in another register entirely: a Sierra Club climbers’ guide, quoted with dates and climbing partners, listing thirty-three peaks first ascended by Brower. McPhee says he left the white space to say something about courage and lack of courage and how they can exist side by side. The two sections had been two cards, “Upset Rapid” and “Alpinist,” and he calls their juxtaposition what made that phase of the work most absorbing.

The guide neither continues the rapid’s story nor answers any question it asked. It changes what the first section meant: a reader who has just heard Brower admit to fear now meets a man who clung to rock faces by his fingernails, and the confession turns into something more complicated than cowardice.

That is one way a unit can connect to another, by altering the meaning of an earlier unit. The other is to create necessity, so that the next unit has to exist because of this one, and good units often do both. Chekhov’s gun shows necessity in its simplest form: a detail introduced early creates an obligation that a later unit has to meet (Practice 48 follows that device in detail). Thomas De Quincey described the backward kind in an 1823 essay on the knocking at the gate in Macbeth. Since boyhood he had been puzzled that the knocking after Duncan’s murder “reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity.” His explanation was that the murder suspends ordinary human concerns, and that we feel the suspension most completely at the moment it ends and ordinary life is suddenly resumed.

A memoir might set a chapter about a childhood summer before a chapter about the narrator’s divorce, with nothing joining them except the order they happen to stand in. Neither makes the other necessary, and neither changes how the other reads. A reader could swap the two chapters without noticing, and may start skimming or supply a connection the writer never made.

Necessity is not always plot. Alice Munro, introducing her Selected Stories, sets a house against a road. A story, she says, is something you wander around in, learning how the rooms and corridors relate and how the world looks from the windows, and the house has a sturdy sense of being built out of its own necessity. Parts can relate as rooms do, by position and by what you see through the windows between them. Some units earn their place by texture, by the world they build, or by the rest they allow. What the maxim asks is that every unit have a relationship to others and that you know what it is. Sometimes the honest answer is “none, on purpose,” and then it should be an answer you chose.

Practice. Take the sequence of your sections or scenes and, in thirty minutes, write one of four words for every adjacent pair. Generates if the second exists because of the first. Answers if the second resolves something the first raised. Reframes if the second changes how the first should be read. None if you can honestly find no relationship. Do every pair, not only the ones you like. The pairs marked none are your candidates. For each, decide whether to link it, move it, cut it, or keep it as a deliberate rest, and write the decision beside the pair. Brower’s “Because I’m chicken” and the guide’s thirty-three peaks would be marked reframes. Then count how many of your pairs earn a word like that.