In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 274.
I began my writing career as a poet—an unsuccessful, unpublished poet. From the time I was young, I have always loved poetry, especially poems with rhyme and structure and meter: the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina…. Smitten with the work of Elizabeth Bishop and A. E. Stallings, I envied poets and what I saw as the orderly security of those lovely forms.
My envy resurfaced a number of years ago during one of those all-too-frequent moments when, struggling to kick-start a new piece of prose, I got stuck. I couldn’t make progress, and fiction began to strike me as annoyingly formless and open-ended. It’s so damn long, for starters, and it offers too many options. As an indecisive, hand-wringing sort of person, I wished I had fewer options. I thought somewhat longingly about writing assignments. I wanted someone to narrow things down for me and tell me what I should do.
It turned out that no one was available for that task, but—keeping in mind my love for poetic structures—I decided I could tackle it myself.
Instead of starting a work with character or plot or setting, I turned to something that felt more severe, more pleasingly draconian: form. I experimented with my own fiction and asked my students to do the same. I asked them to think about writing a work of prose within the bounds of a limiting structure: an obituary, a helpline dialogue, a wedding toast, or a series of Yelp reviews.
Some of the students complained that the exercise was too restrictive—a reasonable objection. But many others, myself included, counterintuitively found the restrictions wonderfully freeing. So many decisions were off the table! Often the form itself seemed to determine those decisions. Having limited myself to the letter of recommendation as my narrative structure, I immediately knew that my protagonist would be a professor and that the novel—to take place on a college campus—would have to occur over the course of a single academic year. I also knew that, in trying to do something new with the structure that I had chosen, I would need my protagonist to violate its norms. His letters of reference would need to be inappropriate; rather than describing the attributes of others, for example, he would advocate, selfishly, for himself. The form had told me who my character was.
I had such a good time writing that novel. After it was published, I wrote a story in the form of a board game, and another in the form of a syllabus. Now I am always on the lookout for new forms.
Some writers may thrill to the endless possibilities of the blank white page. For those who don’t: You may find that a self-imposed structure or restriction can be freeing—and also great fun.
Julie Schumacher is the author of a dozen books, including the national best-selling Dear Committee trilogy. She is a Regents Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.
image credit: Robert Coelho