Part 3 — Planning and structure

Anyone who has finished a long piece of writing has also stood in front of a pile: notes, interviews, scenes, stanzas, index cards, forty pages of material that came out in the order it occurred to you. Length is rarely the difficulty. The pieces exist, and nothing says which one comes next, or why.

A paragraph has that problem, and so does a trilogy. These chapters call whatever you currently treat as one piece a unit, whether a scene, a stanza, a chapter or a step in an argument, and the questions about units are the same at every scale. What has to be decided before the next one can be written? What happens when the plan and the draft disagree? Where does the whole live while you work on a part of it? And do the units do anything to each other, or do they just sit side by side?

We treat structure as a set of questions the Work puts to its author. A plan built before the Work arrives answers some of them and a draft answers others, and a published model, from three acts to twenty-two steps, is read here as one writer’s list of questions, useful where it fits your Work. Writers place their structural decisions before drafting, during it, or after enough material exists to be studied (Chapter 4 describes all three), and you may be any of those writers on any given day. No chapter holds that one placement is more serious than another.

Fiction and nonfiction share more vocabulary here than their reputations suggest, and chapters that lean on a novel or a play usually include a version for argument, memoir, or essay. Poetry appears where a poem shows a structural principle more cleanly than prose does.

Practices 21 to 23 are about stance: how much to decide in advance, how to hold a plan, and where discovery is going to happen whether or not you schedule it. Practices 24 and 25 are diagnostic, for a sequence that feels arbitrary or a scene that refuses to move. Practices 26 to 28 are working habits for the long middle of a project, and 29 and 30 look at the whole as a reader meets it. If you cannot begin because you do not know enough, start with 21; if an outline has gone dead in your hands, with 22. A stuck scene can go straight to 25, and a draft in pieces that will not line up to 26 and 28.

Each practice ends with an exercise of twenty minutes to an hour that works on notes or a rough draft and leaves a mark on paper you can inspect.