So, try a sonnet or sonata, or find a different structure (but an original one, as you'll see) that is well suited to your story and material. Where to find this structure? I will throw out several examples below, but ultimately, you'll need to look around your library or your mind for a favorite text or object that seems to belong. Start with a couple or three ideas and whittle them down to the one that works for your project.

It could be any text in any format, from the Bible to a comic book. It could be a different sort of object, rather than a text, a tree, a star, a wave form, a bottle, a wheel. The point here is to lean on a favorite text or cultural or natural object for the larger structure that will guide you as you write.

Some inspiring examples:

Beloved by Toni Morrison has a central image at its heart: a scar in the shape of a chokecherry tree. It is the result of a brutal whipping by an overseer, it is the single act of torture that drives the central incident of the book, the infanticide of Beloved, and it structures the narrative by lending its fractal structure to Morrison's entire novel. Each element of the larger narrative is contained like a branchlet or a trunk in every section every section. Fractals are exquisite and challenging structures to use in writing, and give rise to narratives that deny conventional linearity.

In her amazing book Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison describes some less well documented narrative shapes for novels. (She does a great job of deconstructing the one people talk about most often, the five-stage structure of tragedy observed by Aristotle in the Poetics and made ubiquitous in fiction and modem drama by Gustav Freytag, with his pyramid.) Alison, a kick-ass feminist, points out that the 5-act structure is both absurdly phallocentric and extremely overused. You can glean some of the structures she dwells on from her title, but my favorite of her structural analyses is the one of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which she sees as not just a palindrome (the section structure is 12345654321, with the outer five stories divided in two and the central one told all in one) but a set of hands in the prayer position that is also used to hold a book (or the orison, a recording and projection device that figures centrally in storyline 6). She brilliantly reads his book as a kind of prayer for the peace that so eludes the characters in the text.

I, lately, have been dwelling on Moby-Dick. I have been inspired by it for the novel I'm just starting out on. I happened to choose a favorite woodcut of the ocean by Vija Celmins as the imagery for the Moby-Dick page on The 24-Hour Room, but even so, it took a while for me to realize how I read the story — as a series of narrative waves. I'm now actively tracking the wave structure that I find there and trying to create my own wave forms as I plan and draft sections of my own, very different-from-Moby-Dick new project.

PROMPT: First, go off and dig in your library and your mind for shapes to steal and bring to bear on your project! Now, spend a few minutes trying to assess their shapes shape. You are looking for a narrative shape in this text, or object, something you can distill it down to an apprehensible idea or pattern, and apply that to the project you're working on. It will form narrative guideposts that help you build your own text.

Make a chart, outline or graph of your piece, leaning on the formal analysis you just did of a text or object (or on one provided above —the Petrarchan sonnet, a sonata, a branching or wave structure, a palindrome, or even the old chestnut of Freytag's pyramid). Consider the length of the material in each part. How can you mold your story to this form? If you chose a sonnet, ask where your volta, climax, or recapitulation and coda sections fall. If a palindrome or a fractal, where are your halfway point or your branchings? Is the scale of the formal structure right for what what you're trying to achieve?

Once you've adopted a structure, don't let it enslave you. Use it loosely or strictly, as best inspires you.