How a History Teacher Taught Me the Most Important Thing About Writing
By: Jodi Compton
Tags: Writing Tips, Creativity, Writing Life, Writing

How a History Teacher Taught Me the Most Important Thing About Writing Jodi Compton Follow Dec 4 · 7 min read

Aka, ‘How I Wrote My First Novel, Part 1’

Photo by Pixabay via Pexels.com

“How I Wrote My First Novel” is a short series about, as you’d expect, the process of writing my first crime novel and getting it published. This series is meant to help aspiring novelists, especially those who work in genre, and who have publication as a goal. This is why the subtitles take the form of questions published writers are often asked. (Note: I’ve flipped the title/subtitle protocol for this piece, because the title deserved it) The series will progress in chronological order — but you can find the “prologue,” or my story in brief, here.

In my third year of high school, I had my first class with the history teacher whom I’ll just call ‘Mr. J’ (because I haven’t been able to reach him about this piece). The high school I attended was a small Christian school with an equally small faculty, so it bemuses me now that I completed half my education there without taking a course from Mr. J. But because of this, I had to wait two years to learn the thing that would change my writing life forever.

That thing was structure.

For my first two years, when faced with an essay assignment, I simply wrote down everything I knew, or thought, about the question at hand. When I was done, I stopped. My fellow students, I’m pretty sure, were all doing the same thing. Oh, we had a vague sense that your opening sentence needed to make a broad introductory statement, and at the end, you had to wrap up semi-gracefully. But there was no sense of putting together the essay as an architect might a building.

In our first week with Mr. J, though, he told us that before he could teach us history, he had to teach us how to write a five-paragraph essay. The format went like this:

Introductory/thesis paragraph. Introduce the topic/problem and end on a thesis statement (what you’ll prove).

Antithesis paragraph: Raise the common objections/counterarguments to your thesis and, in brief, neutralize them. Or, if that takes longer than a paragraph should reasonably be, explain that you’ll refute them in the paragraphs/text to come. (Sidebar: Though we were encouraged to use the ‘antithesis’ form, Mr. J did note that if there’s no powerful idea you need to neutralize, you could scrap it — simply state your thesis, then add an extra support paragraph).

Support paragraph 1: Unpack one reason your thesis is valid, with concrete evidence.

Support paragraph 2: Unpack a second reason, again with examples or quotes.

Synthesis/conclusion paragraph: Summarize what you’ve said and sign off.

The angels sing … or not

You can immediately see that this is a lot to ask of just five paragraphs. But this was high school; we needed something we could write in a single class period, as an exam. It was understood that our first essays would skim the surface of our topics. The important thing was, we were learning to write in a measured, well-thought-out way. It was a form that would serve, in particular, students who might want a career in law or politics.

To me, a novelist to be, that wasn’t the beautiful part.

The beautiful part was, the five-paragraph essays didn’t have to be five paragraphs. They could be six, or seven, or eight. You could write as many paragraphs as you had facets to examine. When I learned this, it didn’t seem earth-shaking. I didn’t jump up and yell, Oh my god, I get it now! It wasn’t until college, and its greater demands in length and complexity of writing, that I began to appreciate it.

Okay, the angels do sing

The five-paragraphs essay’s initial simplicity was like the “Do Re Mi” scene in The Sound of Music: once you understood the scales, you were on your way on to whole songs, even an opera. Likewise, you could build out a simple essay into something bigger. In a term paper, maybe you’d need a page of introduction, and then your antithesis and support material would be in segments of roughly equal length, probably with a line break and a bold subheading each. Then you’d wrap up with a page of conclusion. Point was, balance was an essential part of the form: you counter-weighted length with length. Your paper was like a ship. You couldn’t have 200 pounds in the bow and 40 tons in the stern. It wouldn’t float.

It was magic. Because once you understood that basic do-re-mi formula, you could build on it in ever-more elaborate ways. You could write anything — a senior thesis, an honors thesis, and maybe someday, a nonfiction book.

Wait … aren’t you a novelist?

Yes, I did. The frameworks in novels are admittedly harder to see. That’s by design. Story is meant to be subtler, to direct your attention delicately.

Fortunately, thanks to Mr. J, I went to college primed to see structure, even in the English department and its readings. I’d clearly seen the difference between the “spill it all onto the page” model and the beauty of a framework that held up and showed off your work. It was patently clear that there had to be similar structures holding up fiction.

And there are.

One of the classic, and easiest to spot, structures is the “frame tale.” An example of this is when someone meets a stranger on an airplane, and this seatmate tells a great story, which is the main story. Suddenly, we’re immersed in you-are-there action and dialogue which a person couldn’t possibly remember in such detail, or relate in the course of a four- to five-hour flight. It’s understood that this is a dramatic effect. Films use frame tales, too, making most of the movie a flashback (hopefully, in 2020, without a swimmy ‘dissolve’ effect).

Equally recognizable is the epistolary novel — a story told in diary entries and letters. That is, letters of the intensely detailed, very eloquent type that few people can write. The epistolary novel was popular in the 19th Century, but fell out of fashion in the 20th, until new forms of communication made it fresh again: email, texts, DMs, and so on.

Many novels, however, don’t use such explicit types of structure. Even so, nearly every writer makes some sort of choice about form. Should there be a prologue and epilogue to bracket the story, like a milder version of a frame tale? Or should the prologue that plunges the reader into the action, near the climax, with Chapter One jumping back in time to start the reader on the path that got us there?

Or, if two characters are equally important, should they trade off as first-person narrators? This can be a great tool for telling the story of a marriage (or, for that matter, a divorce). But it comes into play in diverse genres: Sydney van Scyoc’s sci-fi classic Sunwaifs had alternating first-person narrators, to show two vastly differing views of the same situation: human colonists’ attempts to survive on a planet which seems determine to shake them off like parasites.

The Holy Grail (sort of)

Finally, and least explicit, we have the classic “three-act structure.” Let me write that differently: the Three-Act Structure. I capitalize and italicize here because some writers swear by this, saying that any good novel will naturally fall into this format as you write. If it doesn’t, this implication is, something’s wrong with your work.

I’m not quite sold, but I have to admit, many things I’ve written do naturally fall into the three-act form. Maybe it’s because of humans’ natural affinity for the number three. Certainly, after I’d written my first novel, I could see that the story divided into a Minnesota-Utah-Minnesota structure. Sarah, my protagonist, realizes that her husband is missing and begins the search for him in Minneapolis, where they live. She realizes that she has to go to Utah, where Shiloh grew up, to talk to his family, whom she’s never met. She learns some important things there about Shiloh’s past, but doesn’t actually find him. So she goes back to Minnesota, where Sarah learns the truth and the story comes to its climax.

I didn’t plan this three-act arc, but I did outline the story before I started writing. In doing so, I could see that the story divided into large chunks, with geography being important to where the divisions fell. The Utah material wasn’t just a change of scene: It’s more reflective and slower-paced. The reader feels certain that Sarah isn’t going to drop in on Shiloh’s brother or sister and find Shiloh in the living room. Instead, the Utah material is about Sarah realizing she doesn’t know everything about her almost-newlywed husband, and some of what she doesn’t know really isn’t good. It’s a part of the novel where theme and tone is key, like a pianissimo interlude in a musical piece. Then, it’s back to Minnesota, where the action picks up again.

One caveat: I know some writers don’t outline or synopsize; they just sit down and write. Some of them are very successful, too; somehow, it works for them. I understand this phenomenon nearly as poorly as I understand quantum entanglement. It seems impossible, but it undeniably happens. I don’t think these writers’ work is necessarily unstructured. I just think they have a kind of talent in which the structure forms on the page as they invent the story day-by-day. Lucky them.

The concept of a rare natural talent — a writer who doesn’t think about structure in advance at all — is an idea that Mr. J would have told me to raise and discredit at the top of this essay, in classic antithesis-paragraph style. With due respect, I chose not to do that. “Rare” does not equal “impossible.” I’d simply warn you not to assume you’re one of the rare few. I’ve found it invaluable — as you plan, as you write, and as you revise — to think about giving your story the good bones that’ll make it stand tall and catch the world’s eye.