Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . I’m not great with technology. I find no sensory pleasure in screens. I’m a person who prefers to roll down the window of the car with that little handle. (I drove a 1986 Ford Escort until the paint flaked off, and I sold it to a friend for $300). When teaching, I still prefer paper manuscripts. But when 2020 landed on us, I had to learn how to teach over a screen like the rest of the world. Of all the aspects of fiction, structure is one of the most difficult knots to untangle. I had no idea how I was going to teach structure on a screen, because the only way I’ve known to teach structure is by intimately connecting it to character and style. My students and I walk though stories by their sentences, examining how character deepens through the lightest moments of action, dialogue, observation. (Jim Shepard once called this, in a peripheral way, “logrolling.”) Logrolling works, but can be a tedious business, especially for neophytes, and it usually takes several weeks, if not entire semesters, before students start to get the hang of it, or even just start to like thinking about it. In the fall of 2020, the entire enterprise of logrolling felt impossible on Zoom. I started to wonder if there was another way to communicate structure. Did I even fully understand what structure was? Structure is a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter. It is both scene and narrative. It is, one can argue, the entire enterprise of story. It’s also maybe sort of a mathematical and obtuse way to think about a human art. If we are sitting down to write a story, probably the very last thing we should be doing is planning out its architecture, as doing so risks closing the door to Lorca’s duende , that “mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher can explain.” The duende lies in the car handle. You don’t touch structure; you work it. I thought about […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
