From Sloane, With Love #4 ft. Structure
Welina, friends!
There's slow summer movement on the publishing front and I'm all manic energy. I've made decent progress on my novel and am finally picking up the half-finished Prism Stalker sequel! Hope to be done with it by the end of the year. Oh and Leslie and I have put up a few new episodes since last update, you can watch them on our youtube channel!
The other thing I decided to do within the past few weeks? Kickstart a BIPOC horror anthology. Because sometimes you need to take things into your own cold, dead hands lol. Like many other creative fields, the horror scene in the Western world has been unbearably white for a long time. Many of the current publishing gatekeepers readily admit they don’t make a concerted effort to seek out new voices and have their go-to stable of writers to fill their anthologies and magazines. Guess what? Most of these writers end up being gasp white! So I'm doing what everyone always says and making space for us myself! Keep you eyes peeled, I'm hoping to launch in August or so >:)
Also, maybe this will be annoying, but I wanted to start archiving my twitter threads here! I think it'll be interesting to look back and see what I thought about writing and art and maybe you'll find it interesting!
Illustration by Bernie Fuchs
I think narrative ‘structures’ are thought of both too literally by writers and are weighted with an almost sacred level of importance in the Western world when structure is actually both not that complicated or essential to writing
Maybe you outline, plan & force it into a ‘structure’ but i don’t know how necessary it is, if at all. It certainly doesn’t guarantee a GOOD story. It can be useful when you want to telegraph whats going to happen to an implied reader who shares your same idea of story structure
I believe that a story can shape itself organically. Like, people are naturally pattern seeking, so when you write a story, you’re already going to ‘pattern’ or ‘structure’ it. So when you then force it into a traditional structure, it makes it feel even more artificial to me...
Even the term ‘structure’ feels definite in a way that is unhelpful, overly systematized. I kind of like this term ‘engine’ but honestly, any one-word term is going to boil a very complicated concept down in a way that fruitlessly flattens it
Popular western story structures seems to me to just be a marketing tactic. You’re trying to make a familiar product for an audience! And that doesn’t mean you can’t make a good story that way, but it’s overused & not because its the Secret to Story. It’s capitalist conditioning
Like look at all these interesting story structures! Look at the asymmetries in them, the lack of protagonist or resolution, the variance in ‘beats’, etc. Inspiring! And irritating that we only ever see the same one in all of our media
For writers, I would love to see a focus on following what engages them instead of them trying to hit beats, insert filler to make sure an arc has been checked off, or force in unnatural elements just to follow the formula.
For readers, learning to be comfortable with unpredictability and having your expectations left unmet is something that needs to be trained into you. ‘I just like what I like’ well, no actually! You can cultivate your taste and expectations, it’s not a innate, immutable thing.