4 Structure

▪ Gives overall coherence to a piece

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 “
The architecture analogy is a good one. Given the purpose of a
building, the number of people who will use it, what those people
will do in it, and the area allotted it, the architect makes an overall
decision on design. Will it scrape the clouds or hug the ground?
Once all of the decisions that determine the structure and
foundation have been made, the architect brings in other people to
make it work. The engineers, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers
give it coherence—they cement it together to give it strength and
functionality. Then the architect goes another step and invites in the
interior decorators who give each floor and the total building an
aesthetic unity.
-Theodore Cheney, Writing Creative Nonfiction

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 “
The right structure will take you where you need to
go. Someone likened the magazine article to a
moving van, a conveyance with much room to hold
things which nevertheless has to be packed just
right. A conveyance with a place to go and a reason
to get there. Structuring means packing properly and
heading the article in the right direction.

-Peter Jacobi

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▪ Your subject will suggest a type of
structure.

5
Chronological Structure

▪ Arrangement of events in a linear

manner, as they occurred in time

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Convergent Narratives/
Parallel Structure

▪ Has several stories running side by side,

with occasional cross-cutting or
convergence

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Flashback Structure

▪ Beginning at some point in recent time,

and then moving back into the past
▪ Interrupts a narrative or scene, but
returns to where it was

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My father died last October.
It is a sentence at once so final and so incomplete.
At the necrological service in our old town church…
...
I do not recall his ever having spoken about his childhood…
...
She met my father when they were both young teachers…
...
I moved out of the old town, first to the university, then to raise a
family of my own.
...
The last time I saw my father was three years before he died. I had
come home for my mother’s funeral.
... 9
At the necrological service in his honor, his friends and students
spoke of his eloquence. I thought of his silence, knowing it was there
that his love is most eloquent.
...
In the end, I could only say: You cannot contain in words the fullness
of what a person means in your life, you can only hold it in your
heart.

-from Resil Mojares’s “I Never Sang for My Father” (1994)

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Collage or Mosaic Structure

▪ Pasting together of small fragments ,

which all together build up to the total
picture of what happened
▪ Captures the complexity of the event,
creates a sense of immediacy

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Structure by Function

▪ May explain how an individual or a group

work in specific fields or situations, a
process, the development of a thing,
person or system

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5
Strong, Dramatic
Beginnings
Ways to begin
● Passage of vivid description
● Scene
● Quotation
● Dialogue
● List
● Anecdote
● Question
● Striking statement
● Reference to a current event (context)
● Summary
● Fact
● Plunge right into the middle of the action (in media res)

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Early morning mist hangs low over an upland valley sheltering a
community of some thirty houses, a tightly knit patchwork of small
squarish structures of cogon thatch and galvanized iron sheet
roofings. An old man wends his way through vegetable beds tucked
here and there within the ili, or village; a dark-colored native chicken
in one hand and a pot of uncooked rice in the other. As the sun’s rays
filter out over the eastern ridge, he arrives at the ato, or council house,
where several of peers await him.

-from Alfred Yuson and Sylvia Mayuga’s “The Northern Skyland”

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Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the
Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard,
from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got
louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past
us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it.
“Oh, Toby,” my mother said, “he’s lost his brakes.”

The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that
sighed in the trees all around us.

-from Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir

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The Rue du Coq d’Or, seven in the morning. A succession of furious,
choking yells from the street. Madam Monce, who kept the little
hotel opposite mine, had come out onto the pavement to address a
lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and
her grey hair was streaming down.

Madame Monce: “Salope! Salope!” How many times have I told you
not to squash bugs on the wall paper? Do you think you’ve bought
the hotel, eh? Why can’t you throw them out the window like
everyone else? “Putaine! Salope!”

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Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were
flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel.
They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry
rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

-from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

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Sino ba talaga ang tsinoy? Why should we talk about tsinoy
parenting? I confess it did not occur to me to write about tsinoy
parenting until I have lived in China for four years. I remembered
people in my childhood, encounters with Chinese shopkeepers,
friendships through the years---growing up with people we called
“intsik”---Rita and Lina from grade school, the hardware store owner,
Ngo She, who sent us ham at Christmas, my best friend Aida...If we
look up our family trees, we’ll probably spot a Chinese mestizo
ancestor...Many of us are, in fact, tsinoys. Ika nga, we are them.

-from Ting Pantoja Manalac’s “The Tsinoy Story”

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References
Cheney, Theodore A. Writing Creative Nonfiction:
Fiction Techniques for Crafting Great Nonfiction.
Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.

Hidalgo, Cristina P. Creative Nonfiction: A Manual for

Filipino Writers, 2nd ed. Quezon City: UP Press,
2005.

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Activity
Think of a particular person/place/event/
activity/object/issue that you would want to
write about in an essay.

Draft the opening paragraph in 2 ways.

(1/2 crosswise)

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