I have a lot of respect for high school English teachers. It takes superhuman persistence to try and express the value of Shakespeare to a crop of 16-year-olds who can't stop laughing at his "gay neck brace." And yet for as much as I love these brave bastions of educational might, I can't help but wonder if they're missing the point.
The sheer number of people reaching college age and beyond with no understanding of how to write can't be chalked up entirely to an era of text messaging. There's a fundamental piece to constructing a story in a way such that someone other than you can access it that has been missing from far too many classrooms for the last decade or more. With all the focus on either playwrights or professional writing, it's no wonder so few people see the glaring, chalkboard-scraping flaws in the works of modern phenoms like Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.
I know that there are still positions out there where a five-paragraph argumentative statement is a valuable salvo in the war to keep your job, but realistically most professional writing these days is done through email, with all the amorphous edges and conversational tone that medium entails. Any more advanced professional documentation, like grant proposals and research papers, require so specialized a format that they're covered in the college-level curriculum of the fields to which they apply.
Likewise, while I know that the five-act play is still not only a reality but a cultural mainstay, the range of applicable careers for its skillset falls more in line with theatre than English class. Leave the Drama majors to their vague stage directions, writers need to know how to properly describe a scene with more poetry than "go to table, pick up dagger."
The only stylistic writing I recall from four years of high school English is the one form that seems sensible to tackle in a single semester: short stories. It gives hopeful writers exposure to character building, narrative description and forming the pieces of the literary rollercoaster that is their tale of adventure. But there's a problem: short stories are weird.
If you've never written a novel, you may not quite see at first what's so different about a short story and a full-length work other than the word count. In truth, there is such a shift in form that it's hard to recognize one from the other. It's as different as reading a play: the missing pieces between the dialog constitute the majority of almost any work of fiction. Like broth in a stew, they're the essential pieces that flavor the interactions as a whole. If the broth tastes like bathwater, it doesn't matter how tasty the meat was when it went in.
In an effort to stop making myself hungry, let me change analogies: writing short stories as an introduction to novel writing is a lot like teaching someone to play the drumset by handing them a gong. It's a percussion instrument, sure, and it makes noise when you hit it with a stick, but the similarities end there. For one thing, you only have one thing to focus on, but you also have to hit it a completely different way. In reality, all learning to play the gong teaches you about a drumset is how to hit a thing to make it make noise, and you probably knew how to do that already.
The structure of a novel involves dozens or even hundreds of rises and falls between the movements of the plot, all in turn traveling along a larger curve as it crests its way to the climax. That isn't to say that short stories are easier (when you only have a gong to play with, it's a lot harder to get all the different sounds out of it that you want you audience to hear), but the two formats are so different that one doesn't suffice in teaching you how to use the other.
Short stories begin in the middle. You have enough time to introduce a handful of characters halfway through there situations, either on the cusp of or smack in the middle of the core conflict of the work. From there, it's all action (from a literary perspective) to the end, with just enough time to set up a three-part pattern before you run out of word count. If you listen to a rock song, the pattern is similar:
intro, verse, verse, bridge, key change, verse
You create a pattern with the first two verses so that the audience settles into the way things are, and tacetly assume that this is the way they always have been, or always will be. The bridge comes in sideways and knocks the main character entirely off his course. He then comes back to the verse with the proper key change to denote that the character has grown, but hasn't lost who he was in the process. With only three minutes to kill, there isn't much room for anything else.
A novel is more like a concerto. If you don't know what I mean, go to YouTube and search for "Bach." Watch for a moment and you may start to see the key difference. There isn't one pattern created, but many, and they begin to interrupt each other. Four minutes in, new patterns are still being introduced to the work as a whole, only to merge with and change the other patterns as the pieces rises towards its climax.
It's no different with parts of a novel. Several veins of plot all intersect, criss-cross, or even seem unrelated as the new elements are introduced and begin to collide, but out of it all a beautiful harmony is formed. The complexity alone becomes a thing to marvel, to say nothing of the music that goes with it. It's easy to sit back and listen to a three-movement piece in about 8 to 10 minutes and feel the full depth of the composer's intentions, yet no one once told me how similar it was to trying to craft a work of literary wonder.
Even the dreaded five-paragraph essay fits the same unified model. Five paragraphs, five acts, five movements. Literature, theatre, music. Three fields, one common vein: getting a rich emotional experience out to an audience you've never met by taking them on a pre-designed rollercoaster.
Here's a different approach: novels are a science. It doesn't matter which science you follow, there's an expression of it that fits the growth and shaping of a novel.
Physics: Novels focus on interactions. All spare matter and energy must be accounted for. It's in the small pieces that are forgotten that we often learn the most about our world, when they begin affecting things outside the range of our initial experiment. More than that, momentum tells us that even small things can be forces of great change if they get even speed behind them.
Chemistry: Even stable elements can become explosive under the right conditions. Put characters together in the wrong amounts and things start to change, drastically at times. If the elements won't react on their own, introduce heat to the reaction, add energy to the mixture, or introduce a catalyst. Keep going until something starts smoking. Just remember to clean up the lab when you're done.
Biology: Living things adapt to changes in their environment. Anything tough enough to survive new challenges will grow to shape itself around them. Evolution takes time, and you don't always get it right on the first mutation, but sooner or later life finds a way.
Atomic matter: Your character is like an electron: he's somewhere in this general cloud about 90% of the time (we think). We know he's coming around again, and that he's going to keep orbiting the same general point, but what shape that path is going to take is anybody's guess. In the end, he's just waiting for some positively charged ion to wander by so that he can set up a nice paired orbit and become a happy little atom.
I could go on, but I think I'm wandering into established turf.
Returning to my original point, English teachers might be better served educating their students on the common veins in the various curriculae. If you understand how to interpret a work of fiction from six different angles, chances are that one of them will work for you.
That, and it gives writers the excuse to dress up in lab coats for a change. Nothing says "I love my copy editor" like holding a manuscript over a Bunsen burner. Or making a Kindle live up to its name...
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