What Gives a Story Structural Integrity?
Tensile strength is as vital in narrative prose as in engineering
In a physical construction, tensile strength determines the structure’s ability to bend or stretch without breaking. In a narrative construction, it determines the story’s integrity: its ability to expand and contract and unfold without losing either the reader or its central purpose and coherence.
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Engineering Narrative Integrity
Have you ever read a book or story that seemed to fall apart midway through? Have you ever written a book or story that seemed to collapse before you could finish writing it?
I’ve written before about the structural imperative of a strong narrative spine:
But recent frustration over a couple of unnamed books in my reading pile has led me to ponder other structural concerns that are too often overlooked.
It’s tempting for us as artists to focus on the longing and pain and beauty that we feel as we work. When our emotions are running strong, we want to believe that all we have to do is open the floodgates and get out of the way of the words pouring onto the page. Isn’t that what that magical state of flow is all about? Yes!
And yet. All art is subject to certain rules of perception, proportion, communication, and laws of physics.
I will never forget my first sculpture class as an art major at Yale. The class was taught by the legendary Erwin Hauer, a gentle creative giant, in a dank and musty basement that smelled of the mountain of clay awaiting us. In the center of the room lay our model: a yard-long bone from some huge animal. After listening to Professor Hauer extol the many surface qualities, planes, angles, and dimensions that made this bone a worthy subject of our creative attention, I expected to dig into that clay and let the inner artist in me get to work. Instead, Hauer shifted into an even more emphatic celebration of armature, the hidden framework, or skeleton, that would support the clay in our renditions of the bone and provide the underlying shape of the whole piece. The armature, coupled with the right consistency and application of clay, would provide the tensile strength for the sculpture to stand and hold together. If we didn’t get the metal wire armature right, the rest of our work would fall apart (as many of our student bones did).
What I learned that day was that art needs to be deeply engineered, as well as deeply felt. In a physical construction, tensile strength determines the structure’s ability to bend or stretch without breaking. In a narrative construction, it determines the story’s integrity: its ability to expand and contract and unfold without losing either the reader or its central purpose and coherence.
