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Live Chat Today: How Do I Find a Structure For My Writing?

By Roy Peter Clark

In St. Petersburg, Fla., we have a famous landmark and tourist site called The Pier. It's an oddly shaped building sticking out into Tampa Bay, and it's about to be demolished. In my single-minded brain, demolition of The Pier has become a symbol for the way we write news.

You see, The Pier is in the shape of a huge, inverted pyramid. The Pier is so top-heavy, and its foundation so wobbly, it has outlived its usefulness.

In writing, the problem is not a particular form or structure, from the news-heavy pyramid to the love-soaked sonnet. The problem comes when a single form dominates the landscape, or when unsuitable content is crammed into it. In short, we need more than one form. We need lots of forms.

Join us for a chat Thursday, August 26, at 3 p.m. ET for a fairly unstructured conversation about the problems of structure in your writing. Ever hear of the hourglass story, or the wine glass, or the stack of blocks, or the letter Q, or the ring structure? I'll share these story blueprints and others, so you can add them to your writer's toolbox. See you there.

Twitterers can send their questions to @roypeterclark before, during and after the chat.

You can revisit this link at any time to replay the chat after the chat has ended.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on August 26, 2010 (boomark / email).