Structuralism And You

Fond greetings. Today I shall tell you everything you will ever need to know about Structuralism. Structuralism is nothing to do with architecture, let me point that out straight away. It's nothing to do with drills, or the study of council flats, or how many brick do you have before a few bricks turns into a pile of bricks, and all the other things builders probably talk about. Structuralism is the study of looking at stories, seeing common threads, and then copying those similarities in your own story so that you can fool people into thinking it's along the same lines. Good example, George Lucas and Star Wars. He took one good look at the Wizard of Oz and thought, I know, I can just make it a space opera in space. And look at him now, people swallow whatever he churns up and calls a story!

Basically, stories have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, unless you like to play around with form, then you can have two beginnings and maybe three endings, skipping the middle entirely (because what happens in the middle really?). There are certain things that define these stages of a story.

For example, at the beginning of a story, the hero of the piece goes off somewhere, usually just because he's bored and fancies himself as a bit of an adventurer. In the middle, various things happen that are more or less inconsequential to the plot, like he meets people, has sex with someone, buys a new washer, meets his evil twin brother. It doesn't really matter what happens here. Then comes the ending, where I like to think the story really begins. Here, the people he meets are killed by a death ray, he realises the person he had sex with is HIV positive, the washer is broken and he's got to take it back to the shop, and the twin brother murders him and he wakes up because it was all a dream, thus ending the story.

Structuralism defines many genres and story types. For example, Romance. Now, no-one in their right mind would actually write one of these books unless they are a grossly dull human being. However, if you were in it simply for the money, you could follow the simple structure that defines the genre. Girl meets boy, girl meets other boy, girl decides to go for boy instead of boy, and they live happily ever after. Easy. Same with horror. Girl meets boy, girl finds boy murdered, girl turns into monster, finds time travelling machine, goes back in time and murders boy. And so on. See? See how Structuralism works and is good for you? Why not pick your own genre and follow a safe pattern to immortality in the hearts of readers everywhere. Or you could just write literary fiction and die miserable.

Yours,
Matthew Rain