The time bomb plot structure: "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier

It's common to talk of fiction as being primarily about change. Nearly every "how-to" book or class will tell writers we need to first establish a "before," then introduce action that causes change in the status quo, leading to an eventual catharsis in the character that means his or her life will never be the same.

A typical way to do this, if we were to assume a five-act structure, is:

-Introduce the status quo in act one
-Introduce the change in act two
-Have the character resist the change and try to restore the status quo in act three
-In acts four and five, the character will realize that the status quo is gone, and she now needs to change to adapt to a new reality. There will be a catharsis near the end of act four or beginning of act five and a denouement immediately after, which show what the new reality after catharsis will look like for the character.

Generally, it's considered a weakness to wait too long to bring in the disruptive force. Creative writing instructors are often pointing out that the stories of their students may be full of incisive prose and intriguing characters, but if nothing happens, then the story is dead on arrival. So writers are encouraged to make something happen as soon as possible after establishing the "before," and to set their stories as close to the beginning of the change as they can.

Mark Jude Poirier's "How We Eat" doesn't do any of these things. Nearly the entire story is "before," where we see the present reality of Trent and Lizzie, the two grade-school children of Brenda in 1992 Arizona. And what an awful reality it is for them. On the day of the story, the two children have been pulled out of school to help their mother, Brenda, go shopping at second-hand stores. Brenda hunts for overlooked valuable items she can sell herself at a profit, while she has her kids rifle through pockets for anything of value the donors might have left. She then searches the kids' pockets and even the tops of their underwear before they get back in the car, because she doesn't trust them not to hold out on her.

"How We Eat" joins the company of other excellent tales of the child victims of bad parents.

Often, it's considered a bit sloppy to only paint a character as a bad person. Since most people have a good quality or two, putting only a character's worst into a story seems to lack objectivity. But in the memory of Trent, who is first-person recollecting this day at some point in the future, we do not see a single redeeming characteristic of Brenda. From his physical description of her ("hair like hay because she uses Miss Clairol too often") to his fear of being attacked by a serial killer ("I blame Brenda") to Brenda's pointing out that her son hasn't begun puberty yet when she checks the top of his underwear to Brenda's terrible reasons for pulling her children out of school ("We could have gone to school and Brenda could have gone thrifting by herself, but she hates being alone,") there is just so mercy for this character. She's awful. An awful mother and an awful person. Her kids should be taken from her. And because this is Trent's memory, it's okay that he himself isn't objective enough to find the good in her.

When Trent finds a measly dollar, the family stretches it, along with ten cents from the seat of the car, to split lunch at McDonald's, making this the "How We Eat" scene from the title. It's clear that nothing taking place on this day is unusual for the family. The entire day is the "before" in Trent's life.

I kept waiting for the explosive action, thinking there were hints of what it might be. Trent had a stash at home of $126 dollars he'd managed to keep hidden from his mother by stuffing it in a Ziploc bag and taping the bag inside the toilet, like he'd seen drug dealers do on TV. I thought Brenda would discover it. But that's not what happens.

Instead, the explosive event happens late in act four, leading to a very quick catharsis and resolution in a short act five. Brenda gets in a brawl at the second thrift store and needs to leave before the cops come. She hauls Trent out to the car, wet pants and all (because she has refused to help him figure out where he can go), leaving sister Lizzie behind. Trent, thinking that Lizzie will be killed by the serial killer he imagines in his head, jumps out of the car and goes back to get her. One sentence is both Trent's transformation and the action he takes based on the transformation: "This story, these images of Lizzie and the strange man, take residence in my gut and sit there like a tumor, so when we stop for a red light at Prince Road, I open the door, jump out of the car, and hurry down the dirt shoulder back towards Goodwill." From that point, there are only two more sentences in the story. We're done.

I've spent a lot of time reading fiction "how-to" books over the last few years. I'm always amazed at how much standard advice both does and does not help a writer to create a great story. On the one hand, you'll never go wrong doing things the traditional way. The O.Henry story just before "How We Eat" in the anthology, "Nights in Logar," very much follows traditional advice by starting as close to the disruptive event as possible. In fact, it starts with the event rather than before it, as the boys are already headed out to find the dog from the beginning. We get the "before" filled in for us as they're making plans to go and setting out. But "How We Eat" defies this pattern by instead dropping a time bomb quietly into the narrative and waiting until the end to set it off.

You could, of course, look at this as still being traditional. The "before" is the totality of Trent and Lizzie's shitty lives, the disruptive event is a day at the thrift stores, and acts two and three represent Trent's attempts to continue to make the status quo work, which only fails to be possible when the shittiness of the status quo gets ratcheted up in the finale. But to me, it felt like one, long crescendo to a final explosion.

That put a lot of pressure on the narrative to have a compelling status quo, one that the reader can stay with even while the disruption is being kept at bay. Poirier was very much up to the task.