I quite enjoyed reading this! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
As a “plotter” and structure nerd, I’m already sympathetic to a structure-based approach.
In my work in design, I’ve seen that many of the most effective patters work because they fit the way human brains perceive and process information. I have a hunch that story structures that “work” do so because of this human fit. (Sort of like how an ergonomic chair better supports your lower back — the chair is designed based on human tolerances.)
I especially liked your footnote about writing practice novels:
> “I don’t hope that my students grow up to write a lot of five-paragraph essays, but I do recognize that a 5-paragraph structure is a helpful stepping stone on the way to more interesting and original ways of organizing essays. Perhaps a writer planning a long career would do well to write some early ‘practice’ novels using established patterns and structures.”
There’s a parallel here with pottery. When you are starting out, the first form you learn is the cylinder. It’s the basic shape upon which all the others — cups and vases and teapots — are formed. Or think of leaning to play scales on a musical instrument. The point isn’t the cylinders themselves or the scales any more than there is a point in writing a formulaic, paint-by-numbers plot. But, once you get that foundational form “in your fingers” so to speak, you can move on to double-walled vessels (pottery) or arpeggiations and flourishes, etc. (music).
You may do so much improvisation that the original underlying cylinder is no longer visible, but the know-how that came from mastering the basic form still informs your choices and helps you avoid building a pot that will fold in on itself and collapse.
A last, random thought that occurred to me as I was reading your piece: perhaps the best literary fiction is a bit like jazz — an acquired taste for a narrower audience with a developed palate. Can someone learn to play improvisational jazz purely by ear and feel? Absolutely. But you will still develop a broader range and have better control if you learn the theory and practice your scales as well.
As I said before, thanks for sharing with us. You’ve got me thinking!
Nate! Thank you for the thoughtful response! I agree, and think both your ‘pottery’ and ‘jazz’ references are especially apt. I think if we’re going to aspire to jazz-like, sophisticated, effortless-seeming improvisations in our writing, it would probably behoove us to have some pretty sophisticated foundational understanding of structure!
More banquets of thought, as is your norm on Stack.
"For me, the notion that a novel should have a functional structure and complete a narrative arc stands as a truth that should only be violated for a very good reason." 👍 👍
As you know, save the cat started life as a beat sheet for script writing. It's quite precise in relation to that medium.
It's probably unfortunate that so many prose fiction writers have adopted the formula, because too many books have become predictable, unsurprising.
Yes, they hit the marks, but so what?
I think it's appealing because it's easy to remember and apply to other forms of fiction. Again, not a good enough reason for being slavish to a formula.
This is why there are so many banal and forgettable novels in the world.
Although I think there are fewer of those being churned out and traditionally published these days.
Personally, I'm quite fond of books with no particular point, or nothing profound happening, and no character change over the course of the narrative (much like real life), all of which are generally deemed essential for shovelling into one or another traditional structure.
I always remember a novella about a married couple. In the first chapter the wife is scratched by a stray cat (yes, an actual cat! 😁), then worries about infection. That's pretty much the extent of action and drama. It was a delightful read, a book for grown-ups, beautifully written.
I've gotten to the point where I can guess where most genre novels are going very early on, because the telling and the crafting are so perfunctory, the beats tediously obvious. (There's no such thing as a twist when the reader saw it coming before the author. 😂)
Sure, it's easy to be an armchair critic, but I'd like to believe we're all still capable of recognizing the great, the good, and the sub-optimal.
But, when I look at the top selling fiction lists, I often think I'm deluded.
Lots of great and classic art, including Shakespeare, was intended and successful as propaganda. Propaganda is a feature in art. It may also be a bug, depending, but is surely a feature.
The rest of this post is well taken. Ironically, I think much resistance to teaching or focusing on basics of structure in literary circles is that doing so is perceived as, wait for it, propaganda! It's thought of as reductive, as truncated propagada, as a kind of limiting ideology, rather than basic, foundational to meaning and expression.
I think it's true too that thinking of plot and structure, to minds with a literary bent, can be as unpleasant as reading a play versus reading the smoother flowing prose of a novel. One shortcut to learning various structures is forcing yourself to read a variety of plays. Though mileage may vary on that route.
Meanwhile movie and TV scriptwriters are highly conscious of structure due to the heightened imposed structural demands of their mediums. Therefore good scripts or scriptwriting courses or books can be especially structurally illuminating.
Sometimes it can seem that there are as many types of structure as there are types of content, which can be confusing too.
Thank you for this comment—you’ve got me thinking. Just really fast, re: Shakespeare, in my experience when in feels like the Bard does push in a direction, he pulls back and some character expresses or embodies a fair-to-strong counter argument against that ‘push.’ So if he’s propagandizing, he’s doing so in a more artful, nuanced way. I wonder if there’s a spectrum here, or a difference between art that takes positions and propaganda posing as art. I’ve read about half the plays—which ones do you think exhibit him at his most propagandizing?
There is voluminous scholarship on this, from both Oxfordians and Stratfordians. It's not just the aesthetics and content but the timing and staging of the plays as well that were sometimes geared to very pointed propagandistic effect. I'm not much interested in Shakespeare as compared to many other writers but noted him because you did, plus his stature, so I would see the scholars for much more on the specific politics and propagandizing. Not just his plays but many of his poems too are highly propagandistic, in which he is trying to persuade the addressee to marry, for example, or to make some other point. Propagandizing doesn't necessarily hurt the art. In fact, it often enhances it and is necessary in the first place. Not to mention it serves vital social functions. I got carried away and wrote a long reply here that I won't bloat your comment section with. I may post it in "Notes" or somewhere and refer to it when I do.
Hm. I persist in being curious about this. It seems to me that art can forefront issues and positions, but propaganda, to me, suggests a level of bias, misdirection, and dishonesty that I don't associate with good 'art,' which I think of as primarily about... you know, truth and beauty. Will look forward to further notes and discussion!
I use propaganda in its original non-pejorative sense. One might even say in its original honest sense.
Also, I find it odd that a lot of literary people see fit to repeat, as if a mantra, that they don't want propaganda in their literature even though de facto propaganda is as much a feature of literature throughout the centuries as anything. And then when it's explained that they mean they don't want deceit and dishonesty in literature - I have to say it boggles the mind. Who does? Goes without saying.
But I think the effect of saying that is to bow to the prejudiced and biased propagandistic gods of capitalism and the state, and the broad establishment, in pushing for fundamentally if not marginally depoliticized literature - meaning actually only a particular censored kind of establishment ideology is allowed and no other, with some marginal variance and exceptions aside.
Well now I'm going to excerpt from my longer response here:
Should literature contain propaganda? Only the most astounding, fraudulent, reactionary-propagandized culture could lead to this discussion and question. Great literature has always been steeped in widely ranging degrees and types of propaganda and ideology, across all types and genres. There is nothing specially non-propagandistic or non-ideological about imaginative literature. It only takes one example to prove that extremely ideological or propagandistic lit can be created at the highest level - and examples are everywhere - even in popular songs from rap to folk to rock to country. But as for high lit: Blake's anti-empire poem "London" with its "mind-forged manacles." Swifts short "autofiction" "A Modest Proposal" with the suggestion that the English directly consume Irish infants, Victor Hugo's epic novel of the "wretched" people, the "underclass," Les Miserables, that got him kicked out of his home country yet led to sweeping national social reform. Also his anti-state-homicide novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man. As for "Shakespeare," in his time he was notoriously political and locked up for it - that is, if you understand the pen name of "Shakespeare" to be taken from the family crest of Edward de Vere. But even if you don't, forget his pointedly political plays for a moment and think of his poems aiming to be so pointedly persuasive - that's propaganda, that's ideology - the poems urging marriage, the poems bestowing beauty - those are lines of ideology and propaganda - whether political or not - not in any cheap caricatured sense of those terms but in the fully intellectual, political, and/or cultural sense. Of highly conscious thinking people in the world, including artists, and across all time, there is only a very narrow and extremely ideologically imbued stratum of thought that declaims literature to not be propagandistic and ideological. It is, inherently, to great and vast degrees. It is known. Simply that. One can quibble and mistake the meaning of propaganda but that's quibbling and mistakes.
Ideology and propaganda are not the only features in literature and other arts but they are certainly prominent. This is why the most perniciously propagandized and toxically propagandizing people in the world ban books, including something like 23,000 cases in America since 2021, with Stephen King being the most banned author last year. Is he propagandistic? Ideological? Of course. That's literature. According to PEN "The next most banned author [last year] was Ellen Hopkins, author of young adult fiction including Crank, Burned, Impulse and Glass, who had 18 titles banned totaling 167 times." Some people ban books physically, others ban them in their own minds. Composed experience is inescapably ideological, with propagandistic features and effects. One cannot deny ideology and propaganda in literature (as far as is known). One can only engage with it or against it consciously or unconsciously, and to a wide range of degrees. When people say they don't want ideology and propaganda in story and other art they mean they don't want the kinds of ideology and propaganda they don't like, because these are inescapable features of art and intelligence. Nothing crude please! What's crude to one may be sweet music to another: Fuck the King! Power to the People! And so on. If anything we need far more ideology and propaganda these terrible days of the best most inspiring, most epically moving and culturally rocking kind. We need ever greater propaganda in lit against the book banners and many other disasters.
so many good ideas in this peter. i’d restack it 50 more times if i wouldn’t run afoul of substacks restack jail. i agree on almost all fronts. and in fact, i think some of the more popular literary fiction writers borne from substack— these so called new romantics — are probably offenders of these plotless lit fic novels that are really just philosophical screeds
I can tell I'm about to write a response post to this from the second line...
I quite enjoyed reading this! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
As a “plotter” and structure nerd, I’m already sympathetic to a structure-based approach.
In my work in design, I’ve seen that many of the most effective patters work because they fit the way human brains perceive and process information. I have a hunch that story structures that “work” do so because of this human fit. (Sort of like how an ergonomic chair better supports your lower back — the chair is designed based on human tolerances.)
I especially liked your footnote about writing practice novels:
> “I don’t hope that my students grow up to write a lot of five-paragraph essays, but I do recognize that a 5-paragraph structure is a helpful stepping stone on the way to more interesting and original ways of organizing essays. Perhaps a writer planning a long career would do well to write some early ‘practice’ novels using established patterns and structures.”
There’s a parallel here with pottery. When you are starting out, the first form you learn is the cylinder. It’s the basic shape upon which all the others — cups and vases and teapots — are formed. Or think of leaning to play scales on a musical instrument. The point isn’t the cylinders themselves or the scales any more than there is a point in writing a formulaic, paint-by-numbers plot. But, once you get that foundational form “in your fingers” so to speak, you can move on to double-walled vessels (pottery) or arpeggiations and flourishes, etc. (music).
You may do so much improvisation that the original underlying cylinder is no longer visible, but the know-how that came from mastering the basic form still informs your choices and helps you avoid building a pot that will fold in on itself and collapse.
A last, random thought that occurred to me as I was reading your piece: perhaps the best literary fiction is a bit like jazz — an acquired taste for a narrower audience with a developed palate. Can someone learn to play improvisational jazz purely by ear and feel? Absolutely. But you will still develop a broader range and have better control if you learn the theory and practice your scales as well.
As I said before, thanks for sharing with us. You’ve got me thinking!
Nate! Thank you for the thoughtful response! I agree, and think both your ‘pottery’ and ‘jazz’ references are especially apt. I think if we’re going to aspire to jazz-like, sophisticated, effortless-seeming improvisations in our writing, it would probably behoove us to have some pretty sophisticated foundational understanding of structure!
More banquets of thought, as is your norm on Stack.
"For me, the notion that a novel should have a functional structure and complete a narrative arc stands as a truth that should only be violated for a very good reason." 👍 👍
I don't usually read those books, but Screenwriting 101 by Film Crit Hulk (intro by Edgar Wright) is worth it... great if you can handle full caps.
Great piece.
Thank you!🙏
As you know, save the cat started life as a beat sheet for script writing. It's quite precise in relation to that medium.
It's probably unfortunate that so many prose fiction writers have adopted the formula, because too many books have become predictable, unsurprising.
Yes, they hit the marks, but so what?
I think it's appealing because it's easy to remember and apply to other forms of fiction. Again, not a good enough reason for being slavish to a formula.
This is why there are so many banal and forgettable novels in the world.
Can’t help but agree, but so many novels that don’t follow the formula (or any formula) are also banal and forgettable…
True, true.
Although I think there are fewer of those being churned out and traditionally published these days.
Personally, I'm quite fond of books with no particular point, or nothing profound happening, and no character change over the course of the narrative (much like real life), all of which are generally deemed essential for shovelling into one or another traditional structure.
I always remember a novella about a married couple. In the first chapter the wife is scratched by a stray cat (yes, an actual cat! 😁), then worries about infection. That's pretty much the extent of action and drama. It was a delightful read, a book for grown-ups, beautifully written.
I've gotten to the point where I can guess where most genre novels are going very early on, because the telling and the crafting are so perfunctory, the beats tediously obvious. (There's no such thing as a twist when the reader saw it coming before the author. 😂)
Sure, it's easy to be an armchair critic, but I'd like to believe we're all still capable of recognizing the great, the good, and the sub-optimal.
But, when I look at the top selling fiction lists, I often think I'm deluded.
Lots of great and classic art, including Shakespeare, was intended and successful as propaganda. Propaganda is a feature in art. It may also be a bug, depending, but is surely a feature.
The rest of this post is well taken. Ironically, I think much resistance to teaching or focusing on basics of structure in literary circles is that doing so is perceived as, wait for it, propaganda! It's thought of as reductive, as truncated propagada, as a kind of limiting ideology, rather than basic, foundational to meaning and expression.
I think it's true too that thinking of plot and structure, to minds with a literary bent, can be as unpleasant as reading a play versus reading the smoother flowing prose of a novel. One shortcut to learning various structures is forcing yourself to read a variety of plays. Though mileage may vary on that route.
Meanwhile movie and TV scriptwriters are highly conscious of structure due to the heightened imposed structural demands of their mediums. Therefore good scripts or scriptwriting courses or books can be especially structurally illuminating.
Sometimes it can seem that there are as many types of structure as there are types of content, which can be confusing too.
Thank you for this comment—you’ve got me thinking. Just really fast, re: Shakespeare, in my experience when in feels like the Bard does push in a direction, he pulls back and some character expresses or embodies a fair-to-strong counter argument against that ‘push.’ So if he’s propagandizing, he’s doing so in a more artful, nuanced way. I wonder if there’s a spectrum here, or a difference between art that takes positions and propaganda posing as art. I’ve read about half the plays—which ones do you think exhibit him at his most propagandizing?
There is voluminous scholarship on this, from both Oxfordians and Stratfordians. It's not just the aesthetics and content but the timing and staging of the plays as well that were sometimes geared to very pointed propagandistic effect. I'm not much interested in Shakespeare as compared to many other writers but noted him because you did, plus his stature, so I would see the scholars for much more on the specific politics and propagandizing. Not just his plays but many of his poems too are highly propagandistic, in which he is trying to persuade the addressee to marry, for example, or to make some other point. Propagandizing doesn't necessarily hurt the art. In fact, it often enhances it and is necessary in the first place. Not to mention it serves vital social functions. I got carried away and wrote a long reply here that I won't bloat your comment section with. I may post it in "Notes" or somewhere and refer to it when I do.
Hm. I persist in being curious about this. It seems to me that art can forefront issues and positions, but propaganda, to me, suggests a level of bias, misdirection, and dishonesty that I don't associate with good 'art,' which I think of as primarily about... you know, truth and beauty. Will look forward to further notes and discussion!
I use propaganda in its original non-pejorative sense. One might even say in its original honest sense.
Also, I find it odd that a lot of literary people see fit to repeat, as if a mantra, that they don't want propaganda in their literature even though de facto propaganda is as much a feature of literature throughout the centuries as anything. And then when it's explained that they mean they don't want deceit and dishonesty in literature - I have to say it boggles the mind. Who does? Goes without saying.
But I think the effect of saying that is to bow to the prejudiced and biased propagandistic gods of capitalism and the state, and the broad establishment, in pushing for fundamentally if not marginally depoliticized literature - meaning actually only a particular censored kind of establishment ideology is allowed and no other, with some marginal variance and exceptions aside.
Well now I'm going to excerpt from my longer response here:
Should literature contain propaganda? Only the most astounding, fraudulent, reactionary-propagandized culture could lead to this discussion and question. Great literature has always been steeped in widely ranging degrees and types of propaganda and ideology, across all types and genres. There is nothing specially non-propagandistic or non-ideological about imaginative literature. It only takes one example to prove that extremely ideological or propagandistic lit can be created at the highest level - and examples are everywhere - even in popular songs from rap to folk to rock to country. But as for high lit: Blake's anti-empire poem "London" with its "mind-forged manacles." Swifts short "autofiction" "A Modest Proposal" with the suggestion that the English directly consume Irish infants, Victor Hugo's epic novel of the "wretched" people, the "underclass," Les Miserables, that got him kicked out of his home country yet led to sweeping national social reform. Also his anti-state-homicide novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man. As for "Shakespeare," in his time he was notoriously political and locked up for it - that is, if you understand the pen name of "Shakespeare" to be taken from the family crest of Edward de Vere. But even if you don't, forget his pointedly political plays for a moment and think of his poems aiming to be so pointedly persuasive - that's propaganda, that's ideology - the poems urging marriage, the poems bestowing beauty - those are lines of ideology and propaganda - whether political or not - not in any cheap caricatured sense of those terms but in the fully intellectual, political, and/or cultural sense. Of highly conscious thinking people in the world, including artists, and across all time, there is only a very narrow and extremely ideologically imbued stratum of thought that declaims literature to not be propagandistic and ideological. It is, inherently, to great and vast degrees. It is known. Simply that. One can quibble and mistake the meaning of propaganda but that's quibbling and mistakes.
Ideology and propaganda are not the only features in literature and other arts but they are certainly prominent. This is why the most perniciously propagandized and toxically propagandizing people in the world ban books, including something like 23,000 cases in America since 2021, with Stephen King being the most banned author last year. Is he propagandistic? Ideological? Of course. That's literature. According to PEN "The next most banned author [last year] was Ellen Hopkins, author of young adult fiction including Crank, Burned, Impulse and Glass, who had 18 titles banned totaling 167 times." Some people ban books physically, others ban them in their own minds. Composed experience is inescapably ideological, with propagandistic features and effects. One cannot deny ideology and propaganda in literature (as far as is known). One can only engage with it or against it consciously or unconsciously, and to a wide range of degrees. When people say they don't want ideology and propaganda in story and other art they mean they don't want the kinds of ideology and propaganda they don't like, because these are inescapable features of art and intelligence. Nothing crude please! What's crude to one may be sweet music to another: Fuck the King! Power to the People! And so on. If anything we need far more ideology and propaganda these terrible days of the best most inspiring, most epically moving and culturally rocking kind. We need ever greater propaganda in lit against the book banners and many other disasters.
You might be interested too in this "Shakespeare Wrote Propaganda!" interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Lpb2qLmQM
And for what it's worth here's the PEN info link which you may be familiar with:
https://pen.org/press-release/latest-pen-america-report-finds-disturbing-normalization-of-book-bans-in-public-schools/
Bedtime for me—going to have to look at this later!
Fuck that cat...
Emil nooooooooo!!!! Don’t read the ess— …too late :/. Say what you need to say, cousin brother. Say what you need to say…
Reply is out. I just hate that fuckin' cat man. I agree with you actually.
You and Nabokov share the same opinions on art > propaganda!
Deeply hoping it’s more than just Vladimir and me thinking this way…
so many good ideas in this peter. i’d restack it 50 more times if i wouldn’t run afoul of substacks restack jail. i agree on almost all fronts. and in fact, i think some of the more popular literary fiction writers borne from substack— these so called new romantics — are probably offenders of these plotless lit fic novels that are really just philosophical screeds
If you’ve made it this far down in the comments, it’s worth reading @emil ottoman’s response in this essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/emilottoman/p/fuck-that-cat-critique-save-the-cat?r=2ler3z&utm_medium=ios