"Gravity" by Stephen Tuttle

I've always been interested in stories with weird structure. Structure, when the writer's conscious of it, just lights my brain on fire sometimes. I think an interesting structure stands out even more in a genre where a reader doesn't have to sit through 300 pages of something written in a way he doesn't normally process fiction. In other words, short stories are short enough that you can experiment with structure.

I think this experimentation's important, because honestly our lives are not usually structured like a traditional story. I think if we want to really examine the intricacies of life, we've got to be able to look at it from an angle other than "Sally did this, Sally did that; now the story's over." We especially need to look at it from an angle other than the oft-abused "Sally did nothing and life is meaningless" structure that Rules The Genre. We look at our lives in a million different ways -- by lists, by forms, by obituaries, et cetera. (Okay, so probably not a million.)

The traditional structure of a story is not usually the way real life is actually structured. The way we structure our stories changes the story; in many ways, it is the story. Structure is how we take the raw materials of our lives and arrange them. Story is us trying to make some sense of those same things. Conscious structure is, then, the story in some respect.

This all comes to mind after reading "Gravity" by Stephen Tuttle. I can't remember being more delighted by a story's structure. (I think Donald Barthelme probably has some stories that'd delight me as much if I went and reread them, though.) Let me know what you think.