Tag: structure

Finding Character

george-church
Rick Friedman/ DER SPIEGEL

So now that I’ve settled on the classic “journey” structure (for the moment), I’m turning my attention to characters. Who’s going to populate this book of mine? And who’s going to keep readers turning pages?

I’ve got folks who could certainly serve: from a buttoned-down astronaut who now spends his time studying how to deploy renewable energy most effectively to a mustachioed oceanographer raised in the Himalayas who would like to use marine life to rejigger the skies. There’s even the man Stephen Colbert asked: “Are you trying to play God, sir? Because you certainly have the beard for it.” (That’d be George Church, who’s also been in the news lately for saying the resurrection of Neanderthals is imminently feasible and possibly desirable.)

The problem is I have no single character who can carry the entire saga of the Anthropocene. My only hope is that I can somehow weave these characters in and out of some over-arching narrative but I’m worried that what will actually happen is that I’ll just write a couple of scenes or set-pieces and then that’s the end of that character for the rest of the book. (Call it seven to 10 articles masquerading as a book, or “journalist’s syndrome.”)

I guess the only way to find out is to start writing…

The Enduring Mystery of “Structure”

earth
Our one (and only) spaceship

As I set out on this book writing project, the first (and by no means smallest) challenge to surmount is how in the world I’m going to structure a book about a bunch of misfits having a scientific argument. I guess when I put it like that it doesn’t sound so terrible but the danger is that I end up with eight, loosely connected profiles that don’t add up to much. And my ambitions are much larger than that.

So I think I’m going to be imposing an artificial superstructure, like a narrative overlay that can then pull the reader through the book. The idea, at present, is to tell the story of the Anthropocene from the bottom of the sea on up to the far reaches of space, with stops on land (naturally) in between. Organizing the information this way may let the reader feel the pull of what’s to come.

Or not.