The most powerful, overlooked, difficult element of a story (or a painting)

"Great ideas are just hogwash." - Vladimir Nabokov

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To recap: Thinking about structure in a book or story means thinking not just about a cool idea or beautiful sentences but about your story’s length, time frame, plot/transformation, overall organization/order of information. I didn’t have time to get into narrative distance and perspective, but this shapes the structure too. (e.g. the difference between Woolf’s “biographer” in Orlando vs the free indirect discourse of Mrs. Dalloway.) For more, do yourself a favor and pick up:

• Blueprint for a Memoir by Jennie Nash

• Mastering Composition by Ian Roberts

Fun fact: I wrote a LOT about Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov in my graphic memoir The Keeper! (Nabokov was also a goalkeeper!)

The next zoom hangout on Big Projects for paid subscribers is April 11 (Saturday) 11am ET. We’ll be talking about Key Scenes, which are the big shapes that make up your structure/composition.

Also, over at Letters to Dead Authors and Artists, I was happy to publish this wonderful illustrated letter to the artist Joan Mitchell by Lisa Sinicki.

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Thanks for reading The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick, a Substack Featured Publication (twice!). I love writing and drawing these posts and am grateful to everyone who follows along. I’m the author of four award-winning books, editor of a book on making comics, and a professor of creative writing at Indiana University South Bend.

-Kelcey

Earlier this month I was at the AWP Writers’ Conference in Baltimore. Here I am (left, very tall) with two of my fellow panelists Jesse Lee Kercheval (middle) and Amy Kurzweil (right) after our panel on “Women in Comics.” Amy & I are holding my edited book The Field Guide to Graphic Literature (which is part of the awesome Rose Metal Press series of Field Guides for writers). I also highly recommend Jesse Lee’s French Girl and Amy’s Artificial, which I’m reading now!