In this essay for Screen Porch, poet, essayist and Porch Teaching Writer Amie Whittemore introduces us to a new craft book, Forms of Fiction, by Beth Lordan. Whittemore's writing was forever changed by a class with Lordan in 2008: "[I]t transformed me: as a writer and reader, and, arguably, as a human," she says. Here, she gives us a taste of what Forms of Fiction has to offer every aspiring writer who wants to deepen their craft at the level of diction, punctuation, and syntax. You'll be inspired to take a closer look at your sentences after reading this! —Ed.

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For poets, form and content are as interdependent as bone and muscle: It’s impossible to consider a poem’s words without considering the line that contains them, its structure and placement within the poem. To do so would be like trying to understand a leg by only looking at the femur or tibia and not the ligaments, muscles, and joints. There’s a reason we call a piece of writing a “body of text.”

When I took Beth Lordan’s Forms of Fiction class as part of my MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I knew the value of form in poetry, but not how it functioned in fiction. My first thoughts were of obvious elements: the use of tense, the framing of narrative perspective. The tools available to a fiction writer seemed limited, so I entered the class with a mix of trepidation and excitement—I’d been told it was a hard class. I’d been told Beth had incredibly high standards (both proved to be deliciously true).

In a sunny classroom in mid-May, 2008, Beth handed out a syllabus (which I still have, along with every assignment) that indicated we’d spend “a great deal of attention” on “formal features (point of view, narrative structure, imagistic pattern, diction, punctuation, typography, sentence structures) of the fiction we read, in an effort to identify, become familiar with, and begin using the primary tools of the craft of fiction.” After a brief discussion, she distributed an Amy Hempel story and set us to work.

We fumbled. She dismissed our initial observations by simply saying no or not quite, then wait for another student to try a fresh approach. By the end of class, we had a sense of what she wanted us to do—and we had a mere four weeks of the summer term to gain some measure of proficiency.

Over that month, we read six novels and a dozen short stories, and wrote heaps of analyses and emulations. We had to follow up each analysis of a writer’s formal choice with an emulation demonstrating that usage in our own fiction. In that time, I transformed as a writer and thinker. I saw creative possibilities in ampersands, in the elegant slant of italics, in the way fragments broke subjects from their action or verbs from their subjects.

Beth has since retired from teaching, but fortunately, her insights are now available to everyone in Forms of Fiction, released from Politics & Prose in fall 2023.

Beth’s approach requires you to quiet the part of your mind that lingers over connotations and denotations. You need to let go of what words mean and instead think about where they are located, what part of speech they represent, and how they are handled by a narrator or character in the text. The challenge is also to think about the function of commas, semicolons, parentheses, and other punctuation in terms of their effect, not simply whether they are “correctly” used (incorrect usage is just as interesting!).

In Forms of Fiction, Beth builds off that original course to consider “anything on the page that is not the meaning of the words themselves—including but not limited to syntax, punctuation, pattern, typography, shifts in tense or point of view, white space, repetition, even the relative sentence and paragraph lengths” as tools in the fiction writer’s tool kit. She references widely anthologized stories such as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to examine these techniques, making Forms of Fiction perfect for an advanced/graduate fiction class.

Beth’s approach requires you to quiet the part of your mind that lingers over connotations and denotations. You need to let go of what words mean and instead think about where they are located, what part of speech they represent, and how they are handled by a narrator or character in the text. The challenge is also to think about the function of commas, semicolons, parentheses, and other punctuation in terms of their effect, not simply whether they are “correctly” used (incorrect usage is just as interesting!). As Beth notes in her opening chapter, “an awareness of the effect of particular formal elements is often informative and useful during revision: noticing that your first draft is littered with semicolons may indicate that you are not yet willing to separate ideas, but these semicolons may also indicate that the story is deeply concerned with the juxtaposition of ideas.”  Beth pushes you to think beyond the words to the structure of written language itself—and what that structure means.

To this end, each chapter focuses on a different formal technique. For instance, Chapter Two examines the self-editing narrator in “A&P” by John Updike. Chapter Three investigates the use of lists in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Beth works through these analyses with verve and mathematical precision, yet the writing is never dry. Her astute wit and abiding patience—and satisfaction—in the process arises richly on the page. For example, in looking at Kincaid’s “Girl,” Beth first offers a summary of this brief story. Then she names its parts:

The story is a single sentence, comprising 51 independent clauses. The first two, in the voice of the mother, are pure imperatives, utterly parallel, and make use of repetition…; this establishes a pattern. This pattern varies slightly before the daughter’s first intrusion, with three negative imperatives…and two clauses with introductions before imperatives. The point here is that the imperative remains the consistent structure of the mother’s independent clauses, until she asks her first question.  

Once Beth has articulated the way a pattern works, the idea becomes "portable," a phrase Beth frequently uses to signify a technique you can employ in your own work. For instance, you might note how listing works in a story draft or try incorporating lists to see how they might articulate a character’s need for “order in the chaos of life.”

Beth continues this close reading, considering how patterns are established and broken as the daughter interrupts the mother, and concludes that by the end, “the mother is able to replace the rigidity of her first list’s form with a softer version, without abandoning the repetition and parallelism that provides order and thereby control.”

Once Beth has articulated the way a pattern works, the idea becomes "portable," a phrase Beth frequently uses to signify a technique you can employ in your own work. For instance, you might note how listing works in a story draft or try incorporating lists to see how they might articulate a character’s need for “order in the chaos of life.”

As I read Forms of Fiction, I was transported back to 2008. In some chapters, I revisited stories we discussed and dug out the file folder with my assignments, covered in Beth’s neat handwriting that offered critique just as often, if not more so, as praise. I felt the way I felt back then, spending the mornings on campus discussing fiction, then reading in my backyard all afternoon, annotating novels and stories as I counted conjunctions and lingered over split infinitives, trying to see more fully the texts she assigned. By the end of class, I felt fizzy with a renewed desire to write well: I understood my writing more deeply as well as the writing of others.

I am not one to make grand proclamations (she said, grandly). But Forms of Fiction is a book every lover of literature or aspiring (or practiced!) writer should read. The choices Beth analyzes help you see that prose is built from the smallest elements, that even the use of a comma and conjunction to connect ideas carries a different connotation than an em-dash—which connects while simultaneously disrupting the sentence. Beth will make you think about why I put some phrases in parentheses (what am I trying to hide, subdue, or withhold?) and whether my extensive use of colons and semicolons is intentional or a bad habit I’ve yet to fully shake. Or, you might wonder why I began this sentence with “or.” In other words, prose—and poetry, for that matter—will never be the same after you read this book. And you’ll be all the better for it.