Form is Function: A Lesson in Book Structure
Last week, my husband and I went to hear Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee give a talk about his new book, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. I haven’t read this book, nor have I read his New York Times bestseller, The Gene: An Intimate History nor his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biology of Cancer—though I own them all.
So why did we go out on a Thursday night in the rain to hear this guy? Because I will read his books, for one thing. Because I love living in a town where these kinds of opportunities are available to me and so much more accessible than they were when we lived in Los Angeles and every cultural event felt like a giant time suck. And because this is my life’s work: to think about writers and writing and how books are made.
How does this guy who is a professor who teaches classes and a doctor who sees patients and the head of a lab doing innovative international medical work and a father and a husband of a famous artist and an in-demand speaker make time to write books? How does he get it done? How do any of us? I like to think that there will be clues in the talk, breadcrumbs to help solve the puzzle.
And this time, I was well rewarded.
After the talk, a professor from the molecular biology department at UCSB led a Q&A. The first question the professor posed was about Dr. Mukherjee’s writing process for the book about cells. And his answer was gold.
He said (and I am absolutely paraphrasing here because there was no recording of this live event):
The key to the book is the structure. For my first books, I followed chronology – the chronology of cancer, the history of the disease. That didn’t work for the book about cells and I was lost trying to find a way into the material. I needed the form that would support the function of what I was trying to do. Then one day I landed on the idea of having each chapter be about a kind of cell and the writing fell into place. As soon as I had the structure, the writing was easy.
I sat smugly in my chair. This is why I had come.
Some of those cell types Mukherjee writes about – the descriptions that became his chapter headings – are so beautiful, even if you have no idea what they mean:
The Divided Cell
The Restless Cell
The Guardian Cell
The Tolerant Cell
The Citizen Cell
The Repairing Cell
The Selfish Cell
These chapter headings tell a story about the purpose and the point of cells and their function in the body. In other words, the very structure of this material, the container Mukherjee made to organize his ideas, is a central and foundational part of his writing. And I argue that this is true of every book in every genre.
As Daniel Handler, writing under his pen name Lemony Snicket, said, “It is never the story and always the way it is told.”
This is what my Blueprint books are all about: being intentional about the structure of your books and making key choices before you start to write. Every writer has to go through this contemplation of form and function, whether they are conscious of that contemplation or not.
What Do I Mean By Function?
Every book is making a point. That is the function of a book — whether it’s a memoir, a novel, or a nonfiction book: to convince or persuade or entertain or educate or illustrate something for the reader. Mukherjee’s book on cells is making a point about what it means to be sick and to heal and to be human.
It’s often the case that writers who are stuck are stuck because of a lack of clarity around their point and their purpose.
I just launched an intensive course on editing manuscripts (only available to Author Accelerator certified coaches at this time). One of the deep dive case studies in that course centers on Author Accelerator certified coach Suzette Mullen, whose memoir entitled The Only Way Through Is Out is coming out from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2024.
Suzette spent seven years working on her book, trying to sort out what she wanted it to be and to do. She knew the elements of the story – she had lived it, after all – but she questioned the point of the book (its function), and with each questioning, the form of it changed.
Where would the story start? Where would it end? What would be in it? Every one of those questions hinged on what point she was trying to make.
Was hers going to be a story about a middle-aged woman with a law degree and a certificate in theology and a husband and two grown sons who needed to find a new relationship to her work now that her children were grown and gone?
Or was it going to be a story about a middle-aged woman with a law degree and a certificate in theology and a husband and two grown sons who needed to find a new relationship to her sexual identity now that her children were grown and gone?
Or was it going to be a story about a middle-aged woman with a law degree and a certificate in theology and a husband and two grown sons who needed to find a new relationship to herself now that her children were grown and gone?
It took her so long to figure out the book because she was, in fact, still working to figure out her life—one of the particular challenges of memoir. When Suzette figured out her point – her purpose, the function of the story – the writing finally came together.
The Dance Between Form and Function
Sometimes, as with Mukherjee, the form of the story comes into focus first.
Sometimes, as with Suzette, the form and the function come into focus together.
No matter how it comes, you are holding your point in your mind as you imagine a structure or a shape – a container for your material. And you do all this as you are considering the idea that calls to you and your reader and what they need, and how the marketplace works. It’s a dance, an active engagement, and you move through and around these ideas to find the book you want to write.
If you are starting a new project or feeling stuck on one, change up the form. See how things look if they take a different shape. Declare a different point, and see how that impacts the form. Be active as you think about these foundational elements of your story. The path to getting un-stuck may not be through writing itself, but through thinking about the book’s form and function.
Are you a memoir writer? Join Mainely Memoir!
If you have a memoir you are ready to take action on, you can join Suzette (and my book coach, Barbara, and our friend and colleague, author Susanne Dunlap) in Biddeford, Maine in September to work on your Blueprint at Mainely Memoir, a retreat for women writers. These Author Accelerator certified coaches will help you sort out what you want to say (your point, the purpose, and the function of the story), and how you can best say it (the form or structure.). It’s appropriate for writers wherever they are in their process: just getting started, stuck in the doom loop of revision, eyeing the finish line. They will be working with my brand new book Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace, coming out in July.
