Jim Shepard: Structure When You Least Expect It (July 2003)

Fiction writers, Jim Shepard notes, “tend to fret aloud about structure without having a very clear sense of what it is and how it operates.”  What, then, is structure in fiction?  How, if not only chronologically, can writers organize the “sprawl of experience and imagination” that goes into a short story or a novel?  Shepard considers how chronology—as well as moments of “achronology” that signal a return to something crucial—both work to structure Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”