the immortal life of henrietta lacks part 1

The immortal life of henrietta lacks part 1 how to#

Skloot’s first visit to Turner Station and the Henrietta Lacks Museum. He calls it the lowercase e structure, and once you learn to recognize it you see it everywhere-in so many great stories, books, movies. He’s so subtle and graceful with the structure that few readers even realize they’ve looped back around to the point where the story started because he doesn’t hit you over the head with it.

But once you really pick it apart you see he starts in the middle of the story, then he goes forward for a while, then loops back around so by the middle of the piece you’re back at the point where you started, then you continue forward. When you say to people, “Read this thing and tell me how it’s structured,” they just can’t. I always use John McPhee’s “ Travels in Georgia” because it’s such a brilliant structure. What are some key teaching pieces you used? But for me, structure can just completely make or break something.

The immortal life of henrietta lacks part 1 how to#

Structure, structure, structure that’s all she talked about.” My philosophy is, once you understand what structure is, then you can talk about characters and narrative arcs and how to fill in the story. When I started teaching I made my students do the same thing.Īny student who has ever studied with me would think, “Ugh. From that point on, I started obsessively mapping out the structures of everything I read. He would just push us and push us, and people would randomly guess things … They’d say, “It’s a profile.” He’d say, “No, that’s not a structure.”Įventually it clicked for me when he walked me line-by-line through a piece he’d written and said, See how the piece starts here, then goes back in time here, then forward in time here, but always comes back to that same story I started with, which is actually in chronological order? The story was about a veterinarian facing tough decisions about whether to euthanize various animals it did jump around in time a lot, and included sections of exposition, or facts-like the history of the field, or whatever-that weren’t part of the narrative, but when you pulled the essay apart it became clear that the structure was just a day in the life of this vet going from one patient to the next. The first day of class we read an essay in class and his first question when we were done was, “What’s the structure of this piece?” We had no idea what he meant. Every class, the first exercise we had to do with every piece we read was map out the structure. I did my MFA in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and Lee Gutkind, who was one of my professors there, taught a readings class where he constantly harped on structure. No, I came to the book already fixated on structure. I honestly think that structure is one of the most important tools in writing, yet it’s not something that people often pick apart and really get obsessed with.ĭid you carry your concern about structure into this project, or was it something you developed as you wrestled with it? You’ve been interviewed to death about this book, so I’ll limit this to two areas readers of The Open Notebook might be interested in: one is structure and the other is your decision to put yourself in the book and how you handled that.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.) Here she talks with David Dobbs about two particularly writerly issues the book raises: structure, and the use of the writer as character. She’s also been interviewed many times as well. and Europe almost constantly since then talking about the book and the many issues of race, science, and privacy it raises. Rebecca Skloot needs little introduction to most readers of The Open Notebook: Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been a bestseller since its publication in February 2010, and she has toured the U.S.

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