Structure

an Element of Fiction

“Let the material dictate the form.” William Sloane

“Contents dictate form.” Jacques Barzun

“You will have to invent the form that will best serve the subject.” Philip Gerard

“I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should almost be able to stand alone.” John Steinbeck

“Form is the aspect of the story that can be abstracted from everything else and expressed in some other medium, for instance, a graph, or some other geometric figure.” Madison Smartt Bell

“The structure of the various sections of the events must be such that the transposition or removal of any one section dislocates and changes the whole. If the presence or absence of something has no discernible effect, it is not part of the whole.” Aristotle

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” Ernest Hemingway

“Form is of primary importance, always. Ingredients of fiction from the other three groupings [plot, character, and tone] (regardless of appearances, which may often be to the contrary) are always subordinate to form, to design. Indeed, any or all of these ingredients can and do function as elements of design. We are accustomed to thinking of plot as what…