Is “structure” in the room with us right now?

If filmtok and filmstagram reels have their say, anyone even remotely interested in movies will soon memorize every line of improvised dialogue in Hollywood history, every instance of when “the director just kept on rolling,” and, presumably, the rules of filmmaking. Saying that a movie has a 3-act structure, or even that it contains a “hero’s journey” is no longer saying anything at all. If you’re over the age of 16 and have fed your algorithms even a whisper of interest in film, then you know these things. You know there are formulas best learned to be broken.

But in writing fiction, I have had a strange creature humming above my shoulder. He is my fear that I either do not know how to structure a novel-length story, or that such a structure does not even exist. “Inciting incident” this, “climax” that, I guess these are points of structure. But beyond my fiction having these and a beginning-middle-end out of necessity, the rest just feels like writing.

Of course you want all points to converge in a satisfying way. A story is not a series of events that happen one after the other, until some arbitrary stop. But if one remembers Aristotle’s advice in Poetics that “there is an important difference between an event happening because of another event or simply after it,” I kind of think that’s all you need. As long as each domino causes the fall of the next, I’m not sure it matters which one is the last, from an artistic perspective. Some novels end at the end, so to speak, while others either continue on or are cut short. Each author has a feeling for why they ended a story when they did.

Besides all that, I’m not sure if it is the novelist’s job to worry oneself about structure or pacing, unless these things feel artistically relevant to the story being told. But this arrogance of mine is exactly my fear. I do my best to write prose and scenes that deliver visceral satisfaction in themselves, so that no one see that zoomed out, my story really is just one event forming the next that forms the next and so on. I think of giants like Highsmith, Pynchon, Steinbeck or even more recently, authors like Donna Tartt. Did they have structure? If they did, it was consumed by the life they breathed into the stories they told.

Highsmith, whose sensibilities were informed by 1940s genre entertainment would come closest of the bunch to having something like structure, but when you compare her novels to their film adaptations, you can see how much more concrete a screenplay’s structure must (allegedly) be compared to literature. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a prime example. In the film, much more time is dedicated to Ripley falling in love with Dickie Greenleaf. They have more personal and emotional conversations than in the novel, and Ripley is caught spying on more than one occasion. In the end, the movie has Ripley kill Greenleaf at about the halfway point. In the book, it’s barely 1/3rd of the way through. The movie finds an emotional core that was only latent in the novel, and explicates it to become its defining tension and theme. The truth is, an accurate adaptation of Highsmith’s novel (see the new Netflix series, Ripley) must inherently be less watchable because it’s “climax” happens 30% of the way through while the rest is fallout.

Fortunately, Anthony Minghella was a tremendously gifted writer as well as director, so even with this pivotal scene only being pulled to the center of the film and no farther, he was able to make it rich enough, beautiful enough, and charming enough that the movie-goer could forgive that half it’s runtime is Matt Damon bonking people on heads in different luxury locations. The book, however, was about living inside the mind of someone lacking identity. It is a peek into a malignant darkness that I will not soon forget (review here) and its lack of a defined structure only aids in that immersion. The markers of basic structure are there (inciting incident, climax, beginning-middle-end) but the rest is pure writing, pure story.

I hope all of this is true. But if not, if structure really is a big deal and I am as clueless as I fear I am, then I hope I can at least fool those around me into forgetting that structure is important in the first place.