Imaginary Social Worlds

In December of 1980, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, believing that he had some fashion of personal relationship with his victim. A few months later, in March of 1981, John Hinckely attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing his fantasy crush, Jodi Foster. Why would these […]

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The Way Narratives Go

Recently, one of my students confessed to the class that in a long-ago creative writing workshop, she had once been humiliated when her instructor had chalked on the board the structure of her short story, which was found inadequate beside a comparative chalked version of the Freytag Triangle. For those […]

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Countless Lives Inhabit Us

In two recent posts, “What’s Structure Got to Do With It?” and “The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers,” I took a look at the various ins and outs of how writers structure their work. In this post, I’d like to consider the idea of anti-structure, or at least […]

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The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers

After my last post, on the units of structure Shakespeare employed in his plays, scenes arranged as diptychs and triptychs, I thought I’d continue my thoughts on structure in writing by quoting a prose poem by the poet David Ignatow, titled “The Life They Lead”: I wonder whether two trees […]

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Yet Another Chapter One

One of my favorite novels in recent years is I, the Divine (A Novel in First Chapters), by the Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. It’s a brilliant novel in the form of a memoir, written by one Sarah Nour El-Din, and it’s an evolving memoir at that, which is where the […]

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