Book Project Breakthrough

I had a writing breakthrough this morning while taking a shower. That’s where I usually get my best ideas – either in the shower or while I’m out walking my dog (which is why I’ve been known to take the dog out more frequently than his bladder requires, just in case inspiration strikes). The breakthrough is about the structure of the book I’m writing, currently titled: Crackerjack Bands and Hometown Bravado: the Tale of a Minnesota Music Man.

One of G. Oliver Riggs’ crackerjack bands, the St. Cloud Boys’ Band in 1930

We’ve been talking about structure in the narrative nonfiction class I’m taking online through the Loft Literary Center. It’s taught by the insightful and inspiring Ashley Shelby, author of Red River Rising: the Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. She also taught the book proposal class I took last spring.

Our assignment for last Thursday was to read about different types of book structures, identify and describe the type of structure we were using for our book, show a summarized table of contents, and explain how we might write the book under a different structure. We were talking about this assignment last night, during a weekly online class discussion, when I remembered reading a great interview a few years ago with Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple of years. I knew it would take me a while to find the copy of the interview, buried in my stacks of papers, so I was glad to discover I could find it online.

Skloot describes structure as one of the most important tools a writer has, and she goes on in the interview to explain how she came to feel this way about structure, and how she arrived at the structure for her book. You can read the interview here.

I have been working on this book project for many years, and it was this time last year that I came up with the basic structure of my book: telling the story of my great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs, and his St. Cloud Boys’ Band from the band’s formation in 1923 through World War II. This is the basic chronological structure I laid out in my assignment, while also noting that the chapters contain some flashbacks and exposition about band history and Riggs’ career that cover different time periods. The only alternative structure I could see working was one that would begin in medias res – meaning I’d open the book with a scene from much later in the chronology and then go back to the beginning.

I re-read Skloot’s interview before I went to bed last night. But it wasn’t until this morning, in the shower, that it hit me: I am trying to tell three separate but intertwining stories in my book. I knew this subconsciously, but I hadn’t thought about it in terms of structure. The chronological story is the rise and fall of the St. Cloud Boys’ Band over two decades. The other two stories are the evolution of G. Oliver Riggs as a band director; and the transition from the predominance of community bands in society to the emergence of school bands – a development that G. Oliver aided, but that also led to the decline of his most famous band.

These other two stories are woven into my chapters, but now that I’ve identified them more clearly, I can be more deliberate in how I integrate them. It’s exciting, because it will help me explain the significance of the overall story and show its depth.

What’s also exciting is that I’m going back to the Anderson Center in Red Wing this weekend on a writing retreat with my friend Myrna.

The front entrance of the Anderson Center at Tower View in Red Wing.

Myrna and I and our friend Chris went there last winter for a long weekend, and we all felt like we accomplished a lot in a short time. This weekend will be fairly unstructured, but I know that the topic of structure will be on my mind as I work on my next class assignment.