Exposition, Development, Recapitulation: Introduction to a Form

John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room No. 2

For a decade, I wrote with a post-it pinned to the cork board over my desk that read exposition, development, recapitulation. These three words were a clearer guide to story form, for me, than a picture of a goddamn triangle, which for some reason is the go-to diagram for stories. That said, I couldn't quite explain what the words were instructing me to do. They were certainly more suggestion than instruction. Gentle nudges toward or away from certain narrative moves. Broad but distinct categories I found I could use to organize my otherwise clueless first drafts. The post-it it might still be pinned to my cork board now, if the ink and pink paper hadn't finally faded to ineligible gray. It doesn't matter the note is gone. I can still see the words exposition, development, recapitulation when I shut my eyes. I think it's finally time I try and clarify how those three words have shaped my work.

In the last few months, I've been returning to drafts of short stories I shelved while focusing on a nonfiction project. It's a good exercise for a writer, coming back to words that you once labored over after everything about them has been forgotten. I was immediately struck by how similarly structured the stories were to one another, and to the stories in my collection Repairable Men, and I think that common structure has everything to do with exposition, development, recapitulation.

Over the next few issues of John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room, I'll be examining this structure one section at a time. I intend this series to be a post-mortem of sorts, an exercise in taxonomy intended as much for my understanding as for yours. I feel I've arrived at a place in my writing when I can afford to demystify it a little, to consider how I got here as part of figuring out where I want to go next. For now, though, I think it best to say a bit about where exposition, development, recapitulation comes from, and why I find structure diagrams so utterly useless.

The words themselves come from the Sonata in classical music. It's generally agreed upon that all Sonatas, regardless of composer or era, contain these three distinct movements. Despite this, it's proven difficult to further classify or explain what makes up a Sonata. Within in this shared, simple form, whole galaxies of difference can expand and explode. I love this notion. I love this fact. I love fixed forms with prescribed rules that nevertheless find ways to be distinct, unique, rebellious. Sonnets. Villanelles. Sestinas. Haiku. The list goes on. Yet such forms rarely affix themselves to prose. Short prose in particular seems to resist all classification but word count, i.e. flash fiction must be less than one thousand words in length. In prose, instead of forms, we get methods of explanation. We get diagrams.

I hate diagrams. Freytag's pyramid—you know the one; I hesitate to give the thing oxygen—is a diagnosis, not a form. I would argue it's a misdiagnosis. Short stories don't rise or fall unless they happen to be set in an airplane. As in music, short stories swell, boom, fade, and grind. They accumulate theme and motif. They are written for solo voice, or for quartet, or chamber orchestra, depending on the effect they produce. Of course you could chart this narrative accumulation out, but you would need a chart for every story every written, and if you put them all together, I wager you would see little more in common beyond certain family resemblances.

I argue that the short story needs set forms for the art to develop. Short story writers need some degree of prescription in order to hone their craft, to become masters of form rather than remaining failed novelists. We need to become more like poets, as versed and practiced in traditions as in our own whims. By accident, I think I stumbled on a form through my repeated use of exposition, development, recapitulation* as guideposts.

That's all well and good, but the great poetic forms offer the poet more than rhyme scheme and meter. The Sonnet often deals with themes of love. Haiku, with themes of nature. The Villanelle, time and mortality. Looking back at my own work once again, I can see a small handful of themes reprised in every story. Of course, I'm on slightly shakier ground when proposing a new form follow certain themes, because these are likely my own themes, my obsessions, but a new form has to start somewhere.

Here's my proposal, a mild prescription for what I'm calling the Sonata Story:

1. The Sonata Story contains three parts of similar length: exposition, development, recapitulation.

2. The Sonata Story deals with themes of identity, inheritance, and legacy.

3. The Sonata Story focuses on a small cast of characters within a short timeframe.

In the next issue of John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room, I'll dive into Exposition, how the opening of a Sonata fixes its gaze on themes and hems in time. In a few weeks’s time, I hope to have set out in clear terms a formal prose form that other writers can play with, stretch, change, and blow up.

-John