Chapter Sixty

Kathryn Craft

How Structure Supports Meaning

Janice Gable Bashman

In The Far End of Happy, Kathryn Craft novelizes her first husband’s suicide standoff with the police by confining the story to its true twelve-hour time frame. Adding a ticking clock is a well-known way to inject edge-of-the-seat tension into thrillers and suspense novels, but Kathryn co-opted the technique for her women’s fiction. The novel’s one-hour blocks add a sense of weight to each unfolding moment of that fateful day. While Kathryn expands the frame of the story with pertinent events that brought the characters to this moment in time, and while she suggests the ramifications for their futures should they not be able to face their issues, the reader senses the dividing line: Because of this day, where one man’s life hangs in the balance, these characters’ lives will never be the same. She further divides each hour between three points of view that show the impact of the standoff on the wife, the wife’s mother, and the despondent man’s mother, as each woman sifts through her memory for clues as to “how the heck she got there this day.”

Kathryn’s interest in weaving backstory threads into the ongoing narrative reveals her fascination with why people do the things they do, placing her firmly in the psychological subgenre of women’s fiction. She had already experimented with such techniques in her first novel, The Art of Falling.

In addition to her two novels from Sourcebooks, Kathryn is a contributor to the book Author in Progress, a no-holds-barred look at what it takes to get published, authored by the blogging team at the online writing community Writer Unboxed (www.writerunboxed.com). Her decade of work as a freelance developmental editor at writing-partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. A longtime leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she has served on boards for the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group, their annual Write Stuff conference, the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, and in several volunteer capacities for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads writing workshops, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers.

Here, Craft shares her insights on structuring a novel, using backstory to fuel readers’ engagement, and developing rich character arcs within a short time line.

The word structure can mean different things when referring to novel writing. How do you define it?

I see it two different ways. The most crucial decisions an author makes are in terms of storytelling structure, which really isn’t about “telling” at all. It’s about how you will raise questions in the reader’s mind about whether your character can achieve her story goal. Storytelling structure fuels the novel with backstory motivation that creates a deep desire for the protagonist, suggests the stakes should the character not succeed, and creates a yardstick by which to assess the protagonist’s progress (“Yes, this is just what he needed,” or “Oh no, things aren’t looking so good for him just now!”). With the right kind of overarching span and page-by-page tension, the desire to answer the story question will pull the reader all the way to the end of a book.

While wrestling down the myriad decisions of storytelling structure, though, we writers sometimes forget to tend to the way the larger structures of a book—what I call “macrostructures,” ([or] how it’s divided into chapters and sections and perspectives)—can contribute meaning. One of my favorite examples is the novel The Secret Life of Bees, in which Sue Monk Kidd begins each chapter with a nonfiction epigraph about bees. As the novel progresses, the astute reader can’t help but seek parallels in human and insect behavior.

How did the craft of communicating through structure first occur to you?

As with many discoveries, it happened by mistake. In early drafts, The Art of Falling opened with Penelope Sparrow’s moment-by-moment actions as she parted from a high-rise balcony and landed on a bakery truck fourteen stories below. The chapter’s tension and drama earned the chapter an award in a statewide contest, but it couldn’t fool my advance readers, who could not engage with Penelope. I finally figured out why: The question raised by this opening is “Oh my gosh, will she survive?” Well, guess what happens when the reader turns the page and sees Penelope waking in a hospital room? When the story question is answered, the story is over. I needed a structure that would raise book-length questions, not answer them.

So was that complicated to set up?

In a word, yes. I needed to create an inciting incident—that incident that changes everything in my protagonist’s life and incites her to set a story goal—that would raise questions about both the ongoing and backstory threads. I found my solution in creating a slight disconnect in perception among my characters as to what that incident really was. My secondary cast—new friends outside the dance world, the local dance critic, and Penelope’s doctors—helped me raise the first question, since they all perceive the inciting incident as being the fall. They ask Penelope outright: What happened out on that ledge? By this point the reader wants to know as well.

Penelope’s ongoing inner conflict causes her to see things differently. While her body brings her life joy and meaning, she blames its imperfections for the loss of her dream career. Now the strength and resiliency of that same body has caused her to survive what should have been a deadly fall. The aforementioned disconnect is revealed: For Penelope, the inciting incident is not the fall. If she had died, her soul would have been released from the burden of her imperfect body and free to dance with the gods. No, for Penelope, the inciting incident was surviving the fall.

The two story questions are now opened: (1) What put Penelope on the penthouse balcony, at the height of what [appeared to be] her dream career, and (2) How can she remobilize her life in a more meaningful way now that she’s hit ground zero? Those questions drive both the backstory and present storylines, which intertwine until we get the missing piece at the end. The piece Penelope’s traumatized brain has been unwilling to face, and the piece I had mistakenly, at first, opened with—what happened between the balcony and the ground. By making a personal mystery of it, and waiting until Penelope had learned some important lessons before showing what happened, I was able to sustain reader interest all the way until the end.

You use similar backstory interweaving in your second novel as well. Did you employ the same process?

In a way, but in The Far End of Happy there is no misperception about the inciting incident, which is painfully clear. In the opening my protagonist is sitting on the guest room bed, writing in her journal. Here, she presses her pen “to a cool, fresh page” and writes:

When instead of moving out Jeff shows up drunk and armed, and holes up in a building on the property, the story question is set: Will Ronnie be able to move forward if her husband is determined to stand off?

Again, I used secondary characters to open the backstory thread. Since the police are coming to the situation cold and seeking context, they ask, What happened? How was your husband this morning? Has he exhibited signs of depression recently? Each of the questions leads the reader back in time, until she too wants to know how a life that once held such promise has come to this.

Other writers might have examined the protagonist’s life both before and after the suicide standoff, or started the story earlier in the marriage and ended on the day of the standoff. Why did you choose to start and end the novel on the day of the standoff and keep it confined to its one-hour blocks?

Since the novel is based on true events, I originally drafted this story as a memoir that explored how such a happy marriage had devolved, over fifteen years, into my need to divorce and my husband’s threats of suicide. Frankly, I needed that story. But the knowledge of what was to come colored everything. As I sorted through my journals in search of the most relevant scenes from my marriage, my thoughts kept snapping back to the suicide: Had my husband been in a bad mood that day, or was this a clue? Had this been manipulation, or love? I realized the daylong standoff was the perfect metaphor for exploring one partner’s deep need to keep things the same even as the other must honor her deep need for change. What better way to highlight how these twelve hours changed this family’s life forever than to devote the whole novel to it? This was easier done in fiction than in memoir, since I’d have to compress the time line of actual events to complete my protagonist’s arc in just twelve hours. But the high stakes, tough choices, and nagging shameful secrets would now be palpable in every single minute.

You further divide the one-hour blocks into chapters, each limited to one of three points of view. What difficulties did you face when structuring the novel like this, and how did you manage to make it all come together in one cohesive story that keeps the pages turning?

The multiple points of view were key to my decision to novelize. A memoir would throw the spotlight on what happened to me and what I learned. I wanted to suggest the widespread impact of suicide. I gained this meaning through the perspectives of the mother who has to watch her daughter pay such a high price for love and the mother who must face that she cannot save her son.

As to how it all came together, well, ahem, that took several rounds of trial and error. At one point I had chapters sitting all over my floor with character codes and key words scrawled at the top, arranged in twelve fanned stacks like a giant game of solitaire, so I could see how best to balance perspectives and backstory within each one-hour block.

How did you manipulate the novel’s structure so that the backstory threads, which are told in three points of view, wouldn’t pull the reader out of the story tension and make her want to set your novel down?

The secret here is to raise a question about the backstory for which the reader desires an answer. For me this often comes in the form of a little question bomb at the end of a chapter—a reveal about the past that makes the reader sit up and say, “Wait, what?” Then I’d break away for another bit of forward-moving story, ending only when a new question was raised. The reader doesn’t want to stop reading then, either, but she still wants to know the answer to that backstory question, so she’ll gladly delay moving on to circle back for more complete knowledge.

I used those same techniques in The Art of Falling, but in that book, it helped that there was a troubled romance in the backstory thread. Readers rarely mind cutting away for romance.

Giving three point-of-view characters a growth arc over a twelve-hour period sounds challenging. How did you create believable growth arcs for these women?

One way I met this challenge was to firmly root each character’s desire in the backstory and then allow the inciting incident—the start of the standoff—to intensify that desire, allowing for a longer arc. An example is the backstory of my protagonist’s mother. Beverly has unresolved issues involving suicide that she’s hidden from her daughter, Ronnie. The tension she feels in watching her daughter go through this standoff is palpable—Beverly knows the stakes all too well. This long backstory tail [makes] Beverly’s arc the most profound, because it gives us some sense of what will be needed for Ronnie to heal. It sets up the possibility for hope.

Not all arcs are equal, though. Jeff’s mother has allowed denial to define her relationship with her son for his entire life, so one small step in the right direction by day’s end will be huge for her. These backstories suggest the stakes: If these women can’t support one another in facing this [crisis] head-on, this suicide will cripple Ronnie for the rest of her life. Completing the arc in twelve hours didn’t leave me much time for a resolution, so I allowed symbolic actions to do much of the work.

What advice do you have for authors who might want to use a macrostructure to support meaning in their novels?

I suggest you pull way back and think about what you are trying to accomplish. An accurate synopsis will help you see the story all at once. In The Art of Falling, I wanted to show that Penelope’s whole life, like modern dance itself, is about effort and surrender (gravity provides the metaphor). To support this meaning I divided the novel into four sections—Fall, Recovery, Contraction, and Release—based on the philosophies of early American model dance pioneers. [I used] as epigraphs quotes from both dancers (to represent body experience) and critics (to represent societal judgment). In this way I tied the healing journey she undertakes to the source of her conflict. Dance critic John Martin’s quote for “recovery” is a metaphor for storytelling structure itself: “All movement can be considered to be a series of falls and recoveries; that is, a deliberate unbalance in order to progress, and a restoration of equilibrium for self-protection.”

Ask yourself: What is this story’s organizing principle (also known as theme, premise, or what choreographer Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit, calls a spine)? Is there a way you could reinforce it through the way you name your chapters or sections? No one who has read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time will forget that his novel begins with “Chapter 2” because his protagonist prefers prime numbers. Such structural considerations can help your project stand out in a crowded market.

Janice Gable Bashman is the Bram Stoker–nominated author of Predator and Wanted Undead or Alive. She is the publisher of The Big Thrill, the International Thriller Writers’ magazine. Visit Janice at janicegablebashman.com.