Novel Structure with Ted Thompson

I was at the Slice Conference this weekend and sat in on a novel structure workshop run by Ted Thompson, author of The Land of Steady Habits. Thompson had read people’s synopses, but of course not the full manuscripts, and the workshop was only an hour long. He ran it more like a quick presentation of long and short lines of tension and then a lengthy Q&A. At the end Thompson gave students a prompt they could complete on their own.

I liked this format and thought question and answer allowed for students to get their own concerns in and work out the idea of short and long lines of tension for themselves and their own work. After the Q&A part, there was some reading and discussion of the beginnings of four novels. This went slightly less well, as people hadn’t read the novels (for the most part), and the different concerns of Americanah, compared to three novels by white American writers, made for an awkward discussion. One of the ideas I found interesting was when the aims of the project as a whole became part of what Thompson was calling “the dramatic question.” For me, that’s always a question. It’s why a novel can fail when it doesn’t acknowledge the world in which it exists, when it’s too hermetically sealed.

Another thing I’ve noticed is how we tend to call anything writing-related a “workshop” these days. It’s part of the lingo, I suppose. But it brings up the question of what a workshop is compared to a lecture or seminar or whatever. I ran a similar “workshop” last year during a campus visit and since the turnout was small, we were able to discuss each writer’s individual project in light of the structural norms I presented at the beginning of the workshop. There’s always the question of what is useful in general and what is useful to specific students, individually. I also think the discussion of difference between individual projects is important, in showing that rules are most helpful when we can see the cultural context within which they exist and how that context changes or is broken down by individual goals/ambitions/positionalities/etc.

I storified Thompson’s workshop below, after tweeting it. It seemed like the students got a lot out of it.