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I’m not great with technology. Screens are not a sensual pleasure for me. I’m a person who prefers to roll down the car window with that little handle. (I drove a 1986 Ford Escort until the paint peeled off and I sold it to a friend for $300.) When teaching, I still prefer paper manuscripts. But when 2020 hit us, I had to learn to teach from a screen like the rest of the world.

Of all the aspects of fiction, structure is one of the most difficult knots to untangle. I had no idea how to convey structure on screen, because the only way I know of to convey structure is to tie it closely to character and style. My students and I go through stories sentence by sentence, examining how character deepens through the lightest moments of action, dialogue, and observation. (Jim Shepard once casually called this “logrolling.”)

Logrolling works, but it can be a tedious process, especially for newbies, and it usually takes several weeks, if not entire semesters, for students to get the hang of it or even start to enjoy thinking about it. In fall 2020, the whole enterprise of logrolling on Zoom seemed impossible. I began to wonder if there was another way to teach structure. Did I even fully understand what structure is?

Structure is a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter. It is both a scene and a narrative. It could be argued that it is the entire structure of a story. It is also perhaps a mathematical and obtuse way of thinking about a human art. When we sit down to write a story, the very last thing we should do is plan its architecture, for in doing so we risk opening the door to Lorca’s duendethis “mysterious force that everyone feels and that no philosopher can explain.” The duende lies in the car handle. You don’t touch the structure, you work on it.

I thought about how my books found their structures and realized that I had taught myself the art of time through experimentation and failure. I began to see scenes differently, not as a structural apparatus but as a magical contradiction of time. When I sat down to write Enter the AardvarkI gave myself three days to take down a US congressman’s re-election campaign. How different would this novel have been if I had given myself a whole year? How about twenty minutes? How much time would I have invested in the scene versus the narrative? When I wrote The bestI gave myself a working day. Eight hours. We know how much we can do in a day when we use our watches. That’s how you can incorporate it into the story. What if we met Emma Bovary for just two days instead of a lifetime?

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BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS BY JESSICA ANTHONY

The problem is that you read scenes quickly. The dialogue or the power of the narrator’s imagery keeps us moving forward and turning the pages – but in a scene, time literally stands still. Time stops when the reader imagines, for example, thirty minutes of conversation at a wake. I will never forget, for example, the long courtroom scenes in Richard Wright’s Only Begotten Sonand the limits of acceptance in all aspects of a story should always be tested, but we usually rush into a scene with a purpose so we can leave it again. Especially in short stories. The old adage “show, don’t tell” falls apart when you read Murakami’s Tony Takitani. The art of storytelling is the art of telling, and telling can take us through a lifetime in six pages, as Murakami does with Shozaburo. Our kindergarten teachers were right: it’s showing and telling.

With my students on Zoom, I decided to try something new. I asked them to write an entire short story in a single scene of the present moment, and then an entire short story “over time.” I found an anthology Short stories with individual scenesedited by Margaret Bishop, and together we read a stack of stories written in a single scene and tried to figure out what a scene is. How does that past make itself felt in a single present moment? How did Grace Paley tell the entire story of a relationship in Wants? How did Weike Wang do it in Omakase? Not everyone mastered the task, but the difference was immediately noticeable. The gesture becomes enormously important in this way, since we do not have the freedom to let the characters change in those invisible hours that pass with a narrative signal like “Weeks later…”

Choosing how much time will pass in the present moment of a fiction is choosing a structure, but the door remains open. The hand is on the car handle.

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The best by Jessica Anthony is now available from Little, Brown.