Overture. A decade ago, I used to think that drumming was the best thing there was. I drummed at rituals and took classes and taught classes. But then the venue where I was part of a regular weekly drumming circle closed (now it’s a hyper-vegetarian restaurant) and the people I drummed with moved away. I sold my ashiko (a drum slightly smaller than a djembe) and most of my frame drums and gave away my other doumbek. Now I live with cats, and I believe that purring is the best thing there is.
Act I. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” and an author says yes and sends me his or her book, one of the issues we often discuss is organizing. I’m editing a dissertation at the present time, for example, and have suggested to the Ph.D. candidate that he reorganize and put all the discussion of his qualitative tests together and all the discussion of his quantitative tests together. He wants me to do this for him, but that’s way beyond my scope of work as an editor, so while I’ll help him, I suggested that he get with his committee and get their advice.
Organization is important to both fiction and nonfiction. You can use nearly any organizing model that works, from a simple list of the topics you want to hit to something grand elaborate. What I’m doing with this blog is using what I’ll call a musical theater scheme: overture, Act I, entre’acte, Act II. I like musical theater and I want to see if this organization works for a blog.
But you might want another organization scheme. When I used to teach public speaking, I taught the most common outline: Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em. Introduction, body of speech, conclusion. It always works, and in an oral presentation, the repetition is both useful and necessary. If you want to get really fancy in your book, you might try sonata form: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, coda. If it worked for Mozart and Beethoven, then maybe it can work for your memoir or novel. You might think about sonnet form: three quatrains and a couplet. The quatrains might be short related sections, chapters narrated by your characters, for example, and the couplet at the end might be your authorial voice closing the story. The model for a novel is rising action, climax, falling action, denoument. If you’re using sonnet form, then it’s your authorial voice that narrates the denoument, or resolution.
You might try baseball, too: nine innings, three strikes and you’re out and the teams change places. How would this work with the book you’ve got in mind right now? Or one of the organizing principles of fine art: symmetry, rhythm, repetition, balance, harmony. In Sunday in the Park with George, George Seurat sings about the difficulties of creating modern art in “Putting It Together,” and to introduce “Sunday,” which is one of the most beautiful songs in the entire Sondheim canon, he lists these principles: order, design, balance, composition, harmony. Although we don’t have to get entirely literal when we apply a model from another field to our writing, these are principles that I think apply to anything from setting the table for supper to getting dressed to writing a memoir or a song to playing just about any sport. (BTW, the Getty has a sketch Seurat made of his mother. From across the room, it looks like a line drawing. Up close … it’s all dots. Extraordinary.)
Entre’acte. Are cats musical? Pax, Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot, but no, cats are not particularly musical. And I’ve never seen one dance like they do in Cats. (Felines are horizontal, whereas homo sapiens are vertical.) Why, then, have I replaced drumming with purring? Maybe it’s the rhythm. Purring is rhythmical. It’s also mysterious. How does a cat purr? What’s the mechanics of purring? Drumming, when you’re really in the groove, is mysterious, and you learn to depend more on muscle memory for that beledi than to try to count it out every time—Doum DOUM tek-a-tek-a DOUM tek-a-tek, tek-a. Or whatever variation you want to try. The beledi is always 4/4, but you can add all the teks you can fit in. (They’re like quarter notes and eighth notes.)
Act II. When you’re organizing your memoir or novel or dissertation, think about rhythm. Think about the overall rhythm and balance of the full composition. This is one reason authors like to open with a prologue or foreword and close with an epilogue or afterword. Balance. Think about rhythm and order and balance within chapters. This includes logical progression. I am forever writing notes about logic and non sequiturs to my authors. Even if you’re writing about a chaotic life, your writing has to be balance, logical, make sense.
And think about the rhythms of the sentences you compose. Are all your sentences simple declarative sentences? Then you have a page of soldiers marching in rank and file. No variety, no interest, unrelenting rhythm, boring. If you’re writing dialogue, get the rhythms of people’s speech patterns right. The easiest way to learn to hear--and write--good dialogue is to sit in the mall and listen to people, not to their exact words but to hear how they put sentences together, to hear the rhythms of their talking.
I think we can all profit when we think about the ideas Stephen Sondheim put into the mouth of George Seurat. Order. Design. Balance. Composition. Harmony.