The Ploughman’s Lunch
First in a series about getting down to basics…just like a ploughman’s lunch.
Ploughman’s lunch, a British cold meal typically served in pubs, consisting of bread, cheese, and assorted accompaniments. It supposedly resembles what a ploughman might have eaten on a midday break in the fields.
An editor once told me that determining structure is probably the most important consideration when writing a book. When I started writing and learned to read fiction like a writer, I became moderately obsessed with understanding how structure is leveraged.
Many writing resources––craft books, Substacks, blogs, and pods wax on about POV and shoring up psychic distance, the need for more interiority, emotionality, action, hitting the beats, etc., etc., but rarely do I hear an overt discussion about structure—albeit one of my fave pods does hammer the point about whether or not the writer is starting in the right place—and that’s a nod to structure. However, all of these elements contribute to or depend on having the right structure.
I’m sure many reading this will think it’s simple—start at the left (the beginning) and move to the right (the end). What could be easier than writing linearly through time...it’s easy (said me never).
My superpower is overthinking, and finding the right structure nags at me. So, to feed the beast, I took a deep dive into Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall to examine how she framed the story. This isn’t a book review—I’ll leave that to the crowd on Goodreads; instead, here’s what I learned.
Apples Never Fall is a story about a prodigious tennis family in Australia: four adult kids, a mom, and a dad, all with varying degrees of stardom on the court. This isn’t a story about tennis; it’s a family story, but things get interesting when a stranger comes to town…
The book starts with a prologue, which I know is a controversial subject, but it’s Liane Moriarty, so, hey, I won’t push back on that approach.
In Chapter 1, we’re thrust into media res or put in the midst of a crucial situation—in this case, posing the question of Where is Mom, which is the mystery driving the story forward.
From there, through 71 chapters and 480 pages in the paperback edition, it’s roughly a 50/50 split between chapters labeled “now” and chapters indicating a time in the recent past until the past and present stories coalesce. What’s intriguing is that the relatively short “now” chapters are from the point of view of the police and randoms who associate with the family members but aren’t the family members' accounts of events. The “then” chapters are primarily from the point of view of Joy, the mother, although we hear from each of the four children and the husband, Stan.
I found this approach to be a testament to the author's skill, providing an artful and seamless foundation for a propulsive story.