storyography: the picture book biography

I’ve been debating for some time about whether (and how much) of my Critical Thesis to blog about.  I can’t imagine a large enough segment of the world to be as interested in my exploration concerning picture book biographies, but at the same time I recognized some areas where current trends indicate a need to examine them further.

So instead I think I’ll pull out specific sections that might be of interest and treat them a little less clinically than I did in my thesis.  Today, let’s take a look at the clunky word storyography.

The term storyography came up early in my research and it seemed to explain a certain phenomena specific to picture book biographies.  In a 1998 article for School Library Journal Julie Cummins proposes the word storyography as a way of differentiating whole-life biographies from those that choose to focus only on a section of the subject’s life.  More specifically, the storyography builds a narrative around an incident in a subject’s life that is story first, biography second, and not merely a simplified biography.

The important distinction between the storyographies and traditional biographies is summed up in this idea of “story first.”  This notion that the narrative arc supersedes the older thinking that a subject’s greatness comes from an accumulation of life events. Which is not to say that earlier events in a subject’s life don’t shape the individual, but their relevance to the story at hand is paramount.  In the Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature the elements of storyography are refined further as being:

in picture book format
incident-focused
possessing child appeal, or from a child’s perspective
is not part of a series
shaped by traditional story components

A book that fits the definition is Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, illustrated by Mary Azarian.  The focus of the story is on a period of Bentley’s life when he came to record snowflakes, we do not learn anything about his life that doesn’t in some way feed into the story-focused narrative.  Similarly, Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by author and illustrator Robert Andrew Parker covers Tatum’s life experiences from birth to young adulthood, and only those elements that pertain to Tatum’s development as a musician.

The idea of zooming in on a particular time in a subject’s life in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem.  This notion that a person’s achievements are somehow the culmination of a life’s work and growth appears to have come into vogue in the early part of the 20th century with the help of Freud.  Rather than saying “this is a life” biographies had evolved into “these are the underlying events that shaped this life” which, in the end, put the biographer into the role of analyst as opposed to simply a biographer.

There are two problems, however, that manifest in storyographies in ways that often go unnoticed.  The first comes from the necessity of omission; it simply isn’t possible to tell a person’s entire life story in the space of a picture book and so some material must be excluded.  The second problem, which may or may not be the result of the first, is accuracy.  Nowhere in the definition of storyography is there any mention of the accuracy of the details.  I don’t believe this is simply a case of assumption because the idea that the storyography is shaped by traditional story elements implies a conscious effort to mold the material to fit a purpose.  Accuracy, it appears, would tend to get in the way.

The bete noire here would be Amelia and Eleanor Go For A Ride by Pam Munoz Ryan, illustrated by Brian Selznick.  Ryan has chosen to tell of a visit Amelia Earhart made to the White House in 1934 where, at a dinner party, Earhart discusses the beauty of flying a plane at night.  First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, an amateur pilot, is so taken with this that she immediately decides they must take a flight over the capitol.  And they do, with the two women as pilot and co-pilot taking in the National Mall from above.  Back on the ground the two women slip away so that Roosevelt can return the favor by driving Earhart around the capitol streets at high speeds, something she was known to do.

The story here is of two head-strong women, fearless and daring, who in a single evening share each other’s passions for adventure.  If only it were true.  Or rather, if only if weren’t partially true.

In shaping the story elements Ryan omits some details that change the story radically.  While Ryan mentions that the Secret Service objected to an unscheduled flight she neglects to point out that the women actually weren’t permitted to pilot the plane.  Ryan does make note of this in the end notes but not in the text itself.  Worse, there is an illustration showing the two women in the cockpit which would lead a reader to believe they were flying the plane rather than inspecting the controls pre-flight.  Additionally, there is some question as to the veracity of the late-night drive through the capitol ever taking place at all.  In focusing on the intersection of these two lives (which Ryan admits in the end notes to having based on a photo she saw of the two women in a plane together… as passengers) Ryan has concocted a storyography that sounds good but isn’t accurate.

This idea of omitting details or reshaping the story makes it easier for the picture book biographer to approach a subject as entertainment, as a story to be told, and to the reader it takes on the veracity of truth because (as the subtitle for Amelia and Eleanor Go For A Ride attests on its title page) it is “Based on a True Story.” We have come to view that phrase as a stand-in for the word “accurate” in movies and television, and with the caveat “based on” we assume the liberties taken are minor and don’t affect the overall outcome of the story at hand.

This is dangerous territory for books aimed at children, especially younger children whose first exposure to a subject may be through a picture book.

Storyographies are everywhere these days.  And despite their bibliographies and the clarification of facts in the author’s notes at the end of the book, I am noticing that many either contain minor  inaccuracies or omissions that would seem crucial to understanding the subject’s lives.

Though the term storeography is clunky it does accurately convey the essence of these books, a hybrid of a story book and a biography.  In the past (and in my thesis) I thought of storyographies as a subset of biography but on further reflection I’m going to have to come down on the side of calling them a subset of fiction.  Because they are story first I think they should be treated as stories first and foremost and shelved accordingly.  If that sounds harsh consider that I have found Amelia and Eleanor Go For A Ride shelved in children’s libraries among the biographies when the crucial, central, and titular event of the book did not happen as it is depicted.

Look for yourself.  Go to a bookstore or library and check out some recent picture book biographies.  While reading these titles study the text carefully and ask what’s being left out, where did this conclusion come from, what is the source?  It is far too easy to get caught up in the story than to question it, which is what’s most troubling.

Biographies are nonfiction.  Storyographies are semi-nonfiction.  And since there’s no limbo section in the library, and because we teach children that books fall either into these two categories of either fiction or nonfiction, there is no room among the “true life” stories for those books that may be “mostly true.”

Until we can find a word that differentiates between those picture books that accurately tell a slice-of-life narrative of a subject’s life and those that are not entirely accurate, I think we need to vet these books carefully and not automatically shelve them among the biographies unless we can be certain they do not mislead the reader, intentionally or otherwise.  Simply telling the story of a real person does not and should not  automatically bestow a book with an unimpeachable air of truth.

_________________________

sources cited:

Cummins, Julie. “Storyographies: A New Genre.” School Library Journal August (1998): 42-3.

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs, illustrated by Mary Azarian . Snowflake Bentley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Parker, Robert Andrew.  Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum. New York City: Schwartz & Wade, 2008.

Ryan, Pam Munoz, illustrated by Brian Selznick. Amelia And Eleanor Go For A Ride. New York: Scholastic Press, 1999.

“Storyographies: Picture-Book Biographies.” Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. London: Continuum, 2005.

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the more of less

I couldn’t sleep last night.  My body was tired but the brain wouldn’t let go.  This has happened before, and it has happened after I have had meals with curry powder in them, and I’m half wondering if I should follow up that with some research in the hopes of developing a safe alternative to caffeine.

So I got out of bed and went to the computer.  I know I should probably be reading more right now, but my brain started turning over some stories in my mind.  Like churning the compost heap, I was hoping to find some nice fertile mulch among the buzz in my brain.  I opened up a short story I’ve been tinkering with and gave it another look-see.

The last time I pulled this story out I had decided there were elements that were just too extraneous to keep.  This was the lingering result of a previous edit where the story needed to be condensed for a workshop submission.  I thought the story was pretty tight before those initial cuts, but after pulling out six pages (of a 25 page story) I was sure it was as lean as it could be.  Then it got workshopped and those holes where I pulled things out were frayed around the edges and showed even more areas that could be cut.  I’ve been sitting on those holes for a long time and finally decided it was time to mend them.

Some more of this was cut, a few sentences to bridge sections were added to that.  Chunks of backstory were reluctantly removed because they didn’t add anything.  Cleaned up some character motivation, rounded out some secondary characters and their actions…

What’s ironic, for a story titled “The Erosion Project,” is the more I take out, the longer it gets.  It’s like a mudslide following a soaking storm where the amount of displaced earth somehow is greater than the hillside it originated from.  In the wee small hours, with wonky synapses quietly imploding like dud fireworks, I had to admit that this story was looking more and more like a novel with each cut.

For now, I’m committed to the story.  I want to reign it in as tight as I can and maybe use it as a competition piece.  Later, when this degree thing is over, I’ll bring it back out and show it to editors and agents as an outline for a book.  All those deleted scenes, all the backstory, all the odd tertiary characters can then come back out of hiding from the recesses of the hard drive and finally get their say. I can already see the first chapter, set on that one spring day when a kid named Glover invites the school out to a parking lot to show them an artful array of rat traps…

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strokes

Feverishly working over the new workshop piece, worrying every line.  Not because I want it to be perfect, but because it has to work.  Like setting up a line of dominoes that won’t correctly splay into their patterns if they aren’t placed just so.

I’m orchestrating five main characters – or rather, two main characters and their three integral close friends – but there needs to be a supporting network of secondary characters that fit as well.  Everyone needs to be up front, no surprise visits down the road. Five distinct characters, believable and funny.  It has to be funny.  Those were the first words I wrote about this story when I decided to tackle it: “First, it has to be funny.”

Not in the instructions to myself but equally challenging: third-person.  After years of writing first-person viewpoints and honing the voices of characters I have left the crutches behind and am standing on my own two wobbly feet of omniscience.  There’s no other way to tell the story, I have to be inside all these heads.  It wouldn’t be as funny, and the reader would miss so much because there’d be so much I’d either have to leave out or have the main character explain.

My ill-at-ease over the third-person POV is offset by my internal conflict over YA in general.  I have these YA stories to tell, yet at the same time feel that young adult readers should be expanding their reading beyond the marketing and into the wider world of fiction and literature, a world that doesn’t require a qualifier in front of the word adult. Third-person omniscient is the adult voice, the seasoned voice, the voice not only of a narrative authority but of the storyteller, not the story maker. It’s a suit that’s never felt comfortable to me before, always a little itchy, like stiff new wool.

And so I’ve been fussing over lines, over flow, over making my presance unobtrusive while at the same time in control. The rudder, beneath the visible surface yet guiding the visible ship. But is it headed in the right direction?

Suze thinks so.  I don’t think I’ve ever handed off so green a set of pages before, but yesterday I needed to know: is it even funny? Are the characters distinct? Does the first chapter work? I’ll grant, family cannot always be the most objective judge of a writer’s work because there’s too much at stake.  But at the very least a close first readers can buoy hopes against a hostile nation of critics.  At least someone likes it, the writer can say. But Suze didn’t like it, she really, really liked it. It was almost disarming how much she liked it. The characters are there, the humor is there, the storytelling is there.  One quibble over who is saying what in one particular place, a small fix in a single sentence, but otherwise…

So today I feel better.  I feel as if the glacial pace of writing these past few weeks paid a huge dividend.  Those hours trying to get a single paragraph down in writing were worth it. I may be setting myself up for a huge let-down in workshop come January, but I’ll have a few months to gird myself for that. Right now, in the now, I’ll take my strokes.

Feels good.

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my writing life, in commercials

How can you tell when a brown towel is clean?

Anyone remember that?  It was the selling point for an ad for laundry detergent on television back in the 70s.  It might have been for Tide or Cheer or one of those heinous collections of chemicals that pass for laundry detergent.  The idea was that if you couldn’t see the dirt or mildew on a towel how would you know it was there?  Well, by SMELL obviously, but in the commercial a family stood around holding towels and wondering Gee, how can we tell if these are clean? Because that’s what commercials do, ask the question that plants a doubt in your mind (Gee, how do I know if my green towels are clean?  What about my blue ones?), and once you have that doubt, they have you.  They (Those evil THEM) prey on your insecurity and, gee, I guess the only way to be sure those brown-blue-green towels are clean is to buy the product.

What does this have to do with anything?  I finished the first draft of my middle grade novel and I had a strange sensation of not knowing, well, if my metaphorical brown towel was clean.  (Hmm, metaphorical brown towel sounds a little nasty.)  I knew the end was in sight, I was wrapping things up, and all of a sudden I wrote a sentence, looked at it, and thought Gee, I don’t think I need to say anything else.

Another thought crossed my mind, another slogan from another commercial.  In California there was a TV ad for the state lottery.  You see a POV shot of a guy on a motorcycle charging down a pastoral road.  In voiceover you’d hear an average joe say This is weird.  There’d be a beat and he’d follow up with It’s great, but it’s weird. The idea, of course, is that with all his lottery money he could quit his job, buy a motorcycle, and then just zoom around with nothing better to do.

So I’m looking at this final sentence for maybe ten minutes. Is there something more I need to say, any loose ends (brown towel)?  Am I really finished (this is weird)?

Why, in these moments of personal triumph, does my mind flood with memories of TV commercials from long ago?

So it’s done.

Suze asked me if this was the first book manuscript that I have completed.  I opened my mouth to automatically say “of course not” but then it got caught in my throat.  Is it?  I have completed screenplays, but a book? Really?  This is it?  No wonder it feels so alien that I can only relate it to TV commercials: it’s surreal and it doesn’t make sense!  It is something I’ve never done before, something I also never really prepared myself for.

Now what?

Rewrites and revisions, naturally. An overhaul of the opening and a lot of tightening of nuts and bolts.  Maybe a short rest before backtracking.  Maybe start something new to keep the energy moving forward.  The YA about the teens who make a fake documentary to get into college?  Another middle grade story about sea exploration?  No! I already have a dozen stories I’d been meaning to write.  Other characters who have been patient far too long.  Wait! I need to focus on revision, I need to work on something smaller.  A short story.  Serious or humorous?  Who read short stories?  Okay… focus.

It’s just  manuscript, just a first draft.

They’re just words on paper.

But they are mine.

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cutting v. gutting

Problems.

I overnighted the workshop piece, the short story “erosion,” last Thursday morning with the promise of a 3 PM delivery on Friday. That’s what I paid for. So why didn’t it get one state over until Tuesday? Five frickin’ days for overnight delivery? I could have walked there in less time!

But the manuscript doesn’t look right. According to the lovely ladies in the program office it doesn’t look like it’s double-spaced. There are 26 lines per page instead of the average 22 that most manuscripts come in at. It either needs to be edited or submitted to workshop missing its ending.

Crap.

Can I blame Microsoft for a moment? Their 12 point fonts actually vary quite a bit from one another. Some seem to be measured across while others are measured vertically. And can I get technical? Their rendering of some fonts includes some extra play with the x-height and leading that wouldn’t pass muster in a type foundry. As a consequence not all double-spaced lines are created equal among fonts.

It shouldn’t matter to me, I dumped Microsoft long before I got the Mac. I’m a fan of open source and find my quality of life is quite high without being slave to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Except that the rest of the professional world can’t seem to handle non-conformity. My 20 manuscript pages of NeoOffice, when opened as a Word doc, suddenly balloons to 22 pages. Actually, once I corrected the margins for the conversion I ended up with nearly 25 pages. (If I’d gone Courier instead of Times Roman it would have come in at 28 pages!)

That’s nearly five pages out of the manuscript I had to cut.  That’s after the previous edits my advisor suggested.

This is beyond tweaking. I know it’s not a perfect manuscript, and once it goes through the workshop it might get completely overhauled, but what I originally sent had already been whittled down. I wasn’t condensing sentences, I was completely eliminating story details, bits that added humor or background. I fully expect some of these areas to show up as “I think you could insert something here” comments in July.

As I said when I submitted it last, running that razor’s edge between cutting and gutting.

So I downed the sweet tea, powered up, and went ruthless. I had to find those extra bits, average one sentence a page, hack out anything that didn’t speak directly to the story. Bit by bit, nearly 1000 words vanished into the electronic ether. In fighting trim, loose around the margins, it’s still 20 pages on my end but with enough wiggle room to conform to the damn Microsoft Word box comfortably.

I hope. So far I haven’t heard that it’s still too long.

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revosion

That’s a deliberate typo, in honor of my revision work on my short story “Erosion.” I could have gone with “erision” but that actually looked more like a real word. Or a brand name.

It looks like this is going to be my workshop piece for the next semester. I thought the first draft as about five pages too long — about 2500 words — and my advisor thought it could drop down another 500 more. I don’t think in word count when I write, I usually don’t even check unless there’s a reason, but it did feel long-ish.

Because I threw in the kitchen sink. It’s a pretty broad piece of YA humor and I was interested to see what stuck. First major cuts included: the marijuana farm, the environmentalist conspiracy, wife cloning, the history of California wildfires, and the odd little one-liners that interrupted the tone.

The thing is still too long for workshopping. I need to play with margins a bit because the workshop pieces have a page maximum. It’s only a page and a half, so that’s a fraction of an inch all around. No sweat, I’ll make the page count.

Except…

I need to work on the motivation of the two main characters. That means adding words. Which means I’m going to have to go in and tighten paragraphs, shaving sentences her and there, maybe even a bit of over-cutting just to make the page count. I hate to work that way — things should be as long as they need to be — but perhaps I’ll feel differently once it’s sculpted into fighting trim.

I’ve got two days. That’s plenty of time. I like it the way it is, and it can’t really get any worse.

When is it safe to start thinking about shopping a story around? I only ask because I’m worried that once I get into the workshop it might feel like it’s impossibly bad. I’m looking to inoculate myself in advance by thinking positive.

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the artifice of YA: a crisis of faith

Semesters are like manuscripts for me: the middle is the toughest part to get through. Up to my eyeballs in reading, writing, and revision, I haven’t had as much time as I would like to actually enjoy any of it.

Earlier this week I read two books for review, back to back, that sent crazy tingles up and down my spine. In both, teens were using digital cameras to make movies as projects for school; both projects were subjective documentaries; both projects were hailed by adults and peers as wildly successful, amazing accomplishments for first-time filmmakers. It speaks to the availability (the democracy, as some would have it) of the medium that teens can just jump in the fray with a vague idea and come out with a perfectly edited work that impresses adult mentors. Then again, it also speaks to a society (and especially a youth culture) brought up and weened on cheap reality program that has brought down standards of quality and diminished expectations.

What initially struck hard was the fact that my as-yet-finish YA novel, on hold until I can sort out some plotting issues, featured teens who also make films. They do this out of a twisted love of silent movies, but that isn’t what bothered me. What bothers me is the casual use of filmed media as a story telling device for YA titles, a camouflaged gimmick used to tell without telling. These “scenes” add a false sense of drama — as anything worth filming is automatically dramatic, if not documentary — where if the camera was removed the story would collapse. Indeed, the idea of “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” is about as old as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney back in the 30s and 40s, the show being nothing more than a gimmick used to allow the characters to sing and dance.

More cliches appear: The younger sibling who takes care of the older screw-up sibling, the good brother versus the bad brother; The girl who eventually realizes she’s with the bad boyfriend and takes up with the good one (usually the main character) when she realizes his heart of gold; The guy who can’t confess his feelings to the girl he likes, but eventually they hook up so it’s okay; Teens rallying against The Man, against society, against corporate greed, against artificial additives in food, against their meds, or, as Brando once said “What’ve you got?” The gym coaches are bad; The gifted kids are always more interesting than any other students; It isn’t impossible — in fact it’s almost required — that there be at least one sensitive jock who also has some hidden talent like art or music (or maybe all three!); All adults are dolts, except for the cool ones whose behavior is more adolescent than the teens, which makes them palatable; Parents are dysfunctional, or clueless, or both.

Yeah, all of those from two books.

Crap, I thought, what if YA if nothing more than the marketing of successful cliches? What if everything I thought would be good and fun and original in my stories were nothing more than the artful accumulation of genre specific cliches? All of a sudden I don’t know who I am.

You see, whenever people would ask me what I wrote I would say “young adult fiction” because that’s where I felt my heart was. True, my interests are all over the place and I have ideas that span picture book to YA with a smatering of poetry and non-fiction in the mix. My interests are varied, so the things that I write will probably be as varied. But overall I always associated with YA because… well, because of what?

Have I bought into the marketing so much that I cannot see the difference between a story featuring teens and a product pushing all the right buttons? YA has this problem of not being able to define itself because there are so many definitions floating around out there. Is it a book whose main character is a teen, or a book whose story or topic is of particular interest to a teen? By creating a separate market of books for teens are we saying “These are designed with your tastes in mind” or are we attempting to retard their jump into adult books because, as a society, we no longer hold a collective consensus on what we consider to be good national literature? Is YA little more than the PG-13 rating for books, another way for parents to relinquish their duties to monitor what kids read by creating a safe haven until they’re out of the house?

So many questions. I look at the books on the shelves that are called YA and wonder where they would have been shelved 30 years ago, before there was a YA section. Would they have even been published? Wouldn’t The Clique books or the Traveling Pants series have been mass market paperback in the grocery store back then?

If I’m writing stories intended for YA, is YA even a legitimate audience? And if so, how, what makes it different that writing literature that happens to have teens as main characters.

After all, there isn’t a “Middle Age” fiction section in the book stores and libraries, no “Elderly Fiction,” no “Fiction for Adolescent 30-Somethings.”

I understand the need for middle grade books, for the progression in language and as an introduction to literary themes and concepts. But once a kid hits 12 or 13 why aren’t they looking for stories that take them beyond their limited world of high school and navel gazing social drama? Why don’t they want to jump into books about the world beyond themselves, beyond characters they recognize, into stories about the non-teen world? Are they really not ready to accept that there’s a life beyond high school. Indeed, so many of them are clamoring to get out of school, why do they want to read about it?

I look at the “classics” that end up in YA sections, that get assigned as class reading in high school: Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness, Sister Carrie, The Trial, The Stranger, Siddhartha… not a one of these traditional YA books, nor would they be marketed as YA had they been written today. Are we selling YA readers short by not giving them future classics? I’m not saying one or two here and there might not slip into the canon of classic literature, but…

I guess that’s the ultimate question: Why aren’t we, as writers, as people who care about YA fiction, not more concerned with making sure that YA is more a literary genre and less a marketing gimmick?

It’s on us, I guess.

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denial is more than a river in egypt

Today while hunkered down at the library, working over an essay on character definition through omission in a book by Richard Peck, it finally hit me:

I need to start over on my middle grade novel.

Actually, a part of me has known this for a good part of the week.  Each day that I sat down and tried to write up journal entries for my main characters it was harder and harder to deny that I was lost.  It should have been easy for me to slip into the skin of my characters and free write a couple pages of what they think and how they feel.  But each day was a slog; no, worse, it was torture by my own hand.

How did this happen?  I’ve known these characters for so long, known what I wanted from them and what I wanted them to do.  I’ve plotted their story several times, tweaking bits along the way, I’ve known what they wanted and what they get (not exactly the same things), I’ve always felt this should have been a fairly straightforward thing to write.

What I thought I wanted was to see two boys become friends.  I wanted two characters with nothing initially in common to discover another side of themselves that meshed with the other.  I wanted boy being boys.  Oh, and maybe some conflict with a couple of girls to keep things interesting.

A writer, a good writer, plotting my adventure through this manuscript of mine, would have known this would be my first setback.  This is where Main Character Me suddenly recognizes the clues that have been there all along.  A week of near panic as I tried to write and couldn’t led to the realization that unless I figure out what went wrong I’ll never snap out of it.

But it’s been there all along, from the beginning.  The boys are defining their friendship, but against what?  One of them has friends who don’t even miss him when he moves, and the other boy has moved around so much he’s never known how to make friends.  Meanwhile, and this has been in my notes from conception, they are surrounded by girls who not only have the friendship thing down but one of them is pushing an olive branch (via an anonymous note) that asks if it’s possible for boys and girls to be friends with each other.

Like an idiot, I had to be as blind as my main characters before I could seen what had always been there in the text.  The story looks like it’s about boys becoming friends, but it’s heart and soul is about what it means to have and define friends, and how those choices get complicated.  The girls aren’t there to “keep things interesting,” they’re what drives conflict.

How did I not see that all these years I’ve been thinking this story through?

My advisor has had me looking at beginnings and character building in my essays.  This past packet he’s seen that my story has broken free of the reigns and that the timing is off.  He’s probably seen the problem all along and was just waiting for me to finally see it.  He knew I would too because he asked me to do a couple of exercises to help me see the characters clearer, define the story, and then go back and rewrite from the beginning.

Because I need to.  Because it needs it.  Because I now know what the story is about and can actually write to it.

It was a good 50+ page run initially, but it ran wild, overflowing it’s narrative banks like the Nile, but leaving in its wake fertile soil in which to plant and harvest anew.   There’s still a lot of good material in those pages, most of it easily recyclable.  Time will tell if I can capture it properly the second time.  At the very least I should be closer.

But, man, what a bummer.

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the grammar of fiction

This might not be all that original, and my examples may be weak, but I’m flying with this idea that forms of fiction take after the elements of grammar. To wit:

simple noun = sketch
e.g. Fool

simple subject = vignette
e.g. The Village Fool

subject + verb = short story
e.g. The Village Fool Dies

simple sentence = novella
e.g. The Day the Village Fool Died

complex sentence = novel
e.g. The Life and Death of the Village Fool

sentence beginning with a conjunction = literary novel
e.g. And Death Fools the Village

possesive noun/non-sentence = epic/classic
e.g. Dead Fool’s Village

Feel free to add your own.  And if someone else somewhere has tapped this, let me know and I’ll change it.  Not change you can Xerox, mind you…

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