How to write an essay or memoir: Western storytelling
The 5-Act Western Structure: Part 2 of 3
I’ve been breaking down my process for essay writing and memoir writing. This is my process and not necessarily one you might find helpful. On the other hand, maybe it will shed some light for you.
In my prior post, I talked about curation, which ensures every scene is connected to the theme and/or serves multiple purposes within your narrative.
You may love a scene, but it may have to go. You can try to MAKE it fit. But if it does not, it doesn’t belong.
Once you get your core scenes, you must decide in what order you put them. Like I’ve written, there are MYRIAD ways to order scenes and write them out.
But let’s start with the Western Storytelling Structure.
3 and 5-Act Western Structure
So—I’m going to talk a little about the 3 and 5-Act Structure, because for most of us, that is where we live. Many stories fit within this framework, but some stories do not. The mistake is making a story that do not fit the 5-Act Structure, fit. The structure has a great influence on delivery, even impacting the meaning of the piece (you’ll see with my example), so this is no small decision to make.
But I often do start with 5-Act structure. (And haha: it rarely works for me, but it’s the one Western readers understand, so I find myself beginning here 80% of the time).
Anyone who has watched a Hollywood-produced movie has interfaced with the 3 and 5-Act Western structure.
Here’s a very cursory overview of the 5-Act structure.
In Poetics (335 BCE), Aristotle said a whole is composed of a beginning, middle, and end. He then split a narrative into two parts: complication and unravelling. The complication is a knot revealed or tied. And the unravelling is the resolution of the knot. Thus, the 3-act structure.
A few hundred years later, in 1863, Gustav Freytag (an anti-semitic German novelist) wrote Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art. He developed what is now known as Freytag’s Pyramid in that book. It was meant to apply to Greek and Shakespearean plays, but is relevant to most Western storytelling today.
Here is my diagram:
Exposition: set the scene (intro)
Rising action: build up the tension (things that complicate and build suspense)
Climax: the exciting bit (big showdown)
Falling action: tidying up loose ends (events after the climax)
Resolution/denouement: the end (resolved or not resolved)
In comedy, the ending is better than the outset (the resolution will be higher in mood than the exposition on a diagram). In tragedy, the protagonist is worse off (the resolution will be lower in mood than the exposition).
As a reminder, here is the list of possible scenes (ones that I curated and thought might be relevant to the theme about my father’s mythology) for an essay:
My father is dead. My last parent is gone. And I have to take inventory of what must happen to their house and everything within it.
My father used to talk to me about philosophy. The first time he tried to teach me about existentialism, he introduced me to “When a tree falls in a forest…” as an example. It did not make sense to me. Over time, I began to understand “When a tree falls in a forest” as a guise for narcissism, and the philosophy he relied upon to navigate the aftermath of the Korean War was really a psychic shift toward narcissism and thus his survival.
In Teju Cole’s Open City, the narrator, Julius, says, “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” Imagine feeling so normal that you think you can calibrate the world to yourself.
Beekeeping on the day my father died. Beekeeping is my therapy. A friend was supposed to come over to visit my apiary on the day my father died. She asked if we should cancel. But I told her of all the things I needed to do that day, I needed to visit the bees.
I’ve learned a lot from bees, one of which is that they see the world differently. They see the world via UV light; they can literally see UV light. Thus, blue and green can be seen but not red. The UV patterns on petals lead them to nectar, for example. Which led me to wonder about everything. That I have been calibrating everything to human sight. But there is more than one way to perceive. And one perception is not more accurate than the others. “The tree falls in a forest” took on a different meaning for me. It isn’t even about hearing or seeing. Even if you were there, it might not have fallen. Because the tree doesn’t see itself as falling; falling is a concept foreign to the tree.
I found a gun in the house while taking inventory of my parents’ home. It was a mythical gun. And it was now real. It was the thing that we were told would always come out if we didn’t behave. It was the threat that loomed large when my father got drunk and angry. We weren’t sure it existed. But we were scared of it.
I may pare them down more. And I may change them. Or add last minute. But these are what I’ve decided to work with.
Let’s try out my “essay” within the Western structure.
Keep in mind that this is a rough draft, a rough telling expanding the scenes listed above. We are testing out the narrative arc, and we are essentially testing out the “vibe.” (In Part 3, we will try out the Eastern storytelling structure.
EXPOSITION + INCITING INCIDENT
My father died. I went to take inventory of my parents’ former home. My father was a larger-than-life man; he was handsome, smart, and charismatic. But G*d had to make life fair, so my father was also short. He was this double-edged man, someone who called himself a “paradox.” Beautiful and short. Genius and mentally ill. Generous with his money, stingy with tenderness. An amazing sense of humor and a deep well of rage.
When he was drunk and angry, we automatically hid. In the early years, my mother would tell us to go hide, and in the later years, we didn’t need to be told. He threatened to kill us. He threatened to shoot us.
When sober, he still ruled with an iron fist.
He wanted us to comply without question. He molded us exactly as he wanted us to become; failure to do so meant absolute rejection. He called this “strong leadership.” I call it a dictatorship. He had become the thing he hated, but he did not know that. He left South Korea because of the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee; he was on the KCIA’s watch list, and he did not return to visit until Park Chung-hee was dead and long gone. I have written stories about fathers who are humorous and big-hearted, but also cruel and mentally ill. He read them. He did not see the resemblance.
He thought he was firm but benevolent. He thought he was an involved father (technically, yes, as he was over-involved). He told us stories about how he pulled himself up by the bootstraps and clawed his way out of poverty and into the top school in Seoul. He was a self-made man! By comparison, we had it easy.
How could we disagree?
I loved him. But I also fought him. I told him to go ahead and shoot me, mainly because I didn’t believe he had a gun. It was all bravado, I told him, like everything else. At one point, my mother got so angry at my father that we rifled through all his belongings, looking for that mythological gun, intending to throw it away.
We never found the gun. What we did instead was bash away at his prized Olympus SLR camera.
We bit our lips a week later as he took out the camera to take a photo.
“Why is this like this?” he said.
He adjusted the lens as we braced for his exasperation and inevitable anger.
“Okay, it’s fixed. I wonder why it was like that.”
Yo, that Olympus camera was unbreakable.
It took me twenty years of therapy to get him out of my head. I have forgiven him over and over for most of my life. I have saved every compliment he has given me. They comprise ten sentences.
When a father like that dies, you are relieved.
RISING TENSION
My father’s life was a mythology of his own making. We never learned the details of his youth or his young adult life. My mother and father’s courtship was so fast (two months and then they were married) that she didn’t have time to learn the details of his life.
There were no secondary sources to his sole and primary telling.
I found the key to his locked file cabinet. It was as if my father and I were of one mind; I asked myself where I would keep the keys if I were him. And I found them on my first try. I also guessed the combination locks on all of the briefcases and luggage correctly on the first try.
Here were the secondary sources on my father’s life. Would they uphold his telling, or tear his mythology down?
Unlike the rest of the house, the file cabinet was remarkably organized. My father had a master sheet in the first folder, detailing the contents of each numbered folder in his loopy handwriting: my grandmother’s (his mother’s) paperwork, their naturalization papers, birth certificates (even his own), etc., etc.
I rifled through the paperwork. Some of the papers were so old, they were yellowed at the edges. Much of the 1960s paperwork was typewritten on onion skin paper, which felt delicate—too delicate—to handle. I saw their resumes for their first jobs in the United States. I saw that my father worked for Vinnell Corporation in Vietnam. I saw their applications for citizenship.
I saw my father’s report cards. I saw Bs. He said he’d never received a B in his entire life. I saw my mother’s letter to the hospital where she worked, asking them for job opportunities for my father. My father had always told us to be prepared; anything less than several backup plans deserved punishment.
I saw my mother’s resignation letters from her hospital and my father’s from graduate school in the winter of 1972, months before I would be born.
I saw my report cards. And I saw photocopies of letters I’d sent friends while in high school. One of them literally began with the words, “I think my father is reading these letters to you…”
CLIMAX
After I went through the papers, I pulled the file cabinet drawer all the way open to ensure I had not missed anything.
There, in the back, behind the files, was a box.