Interesting

This week for my thesis class we had to research and try to help things clarify the structure of what we were writing.

Just like in building, the structure to stories just tells you the bare bones of what is going on. There are a few generic, generally accepted views on structures and which ones you should use for an accessible story

and at the end of the day you can look at books and pretty well knock their structure down to a few things. We were supposed to look at the structure of our own stories, and see what other stories look similar to ours and figure out how they did it, so we could learn from them. It's the idea of if you're going to build your own sky scraper, look at the building next door that is already finished to get some tips.

In theory, this is a great idea. If you see someone writing a third person POV with an omniscient narrator targeted to the same audience as you, in a similar genre, you can pick up quite a bit about pacing, flow, and structure on how you should work your own piece. It's tricky to understand where your structure is for the first time, and so it's always a nice idea to look at some finished products and reverse engineer that down to something you can use. Great idea, until you run into my bat-shit crazy structure.

Apparently, from what I could research and find out on my own, and even with the research help of students in the class when I said I couldn't find anything (a weird thing to ever say when talking about something as broad as the subject as telling a story)- no one has ever written with this structure before.

There are structures SIMILAR to it

that have some structural similarities to what I've signed myself up for, but are missing one part or another of my flavor of insanity.

Now there's good news and bad news when dealing with this information.

The good part about this is that it's new. No one has ever been crazy/stupid enough to try something like this and make it work. It's one of those things that I can easily say that I came up with it, and it was my idea. I got inspiration from other people, but even down to the basic structure and framing of my story, was all me. This is a great thing if the story actually works. If the story makes sense and you can come out at the end knowing what I was trying to tell you, that's great! All the better if it sells more than 50 copies (I think I know enough people to get 50 copies sold just out of pure pity). It's a powerful thing to be able to walk into a creative setting and say that you've added your own creative twist on something that has existed for centuries, and it's not just a rehash of the same structure that's been around for a long time. I'm not just building another 3 bedroom two bath house here.




Bad idea? It potentially has never been done, or no one is using this structure because it's so difficult to write and so difficult for the audience to understand. It very well could be that the 20 people that I've talked to who are in love with books and words just can't think of any good examples about this because it doesn't exist because of the crazy structure. The reason that we don't have houses where the structure is made out of paper is because the structural integrity of paper isn't a smart move and doesn't work. It could very easily be that I get done with this entire process, look back at my structure and say, 'yup, there's your problem'.

It's risky. On one end I'm making something that isn't just another novel that has the same chapter and narrative structure as everything else out there, but at the other end of that balance I'm making something that has never been proven to work, and could easily not work just because I'm trying something that has never been proven to work. It's a weird balance, I'm still trying to come to terms with it after this week of studying.