When I walk into a house I see rooms. The only thing I know to do to rooms is to paint the walls white. My friend Rob, who is an interior designer, walks into a house and moves walls, raises the roof, and puts in a window where it was solid. Each time I visit his house in Albuquerque, it is a new shape. A building is his structure, but he plays with it. I see a wall as a wall, indestructible, forever. He removes the wall. That is the relationship an artist has to have with his medium.

　　I went with Rob to a flea market. He bought two six-foot-high abstract paintings and we brought them home. He hung them on the north wall of his living room. We stood back to look. "Just a minute," he said and disappeared. He came back with a can of whitewash and painted a thin coat across the enure canvas of both paintings. I yelled, "You can't do that!"

　　"Why not?" he called back over his shoulder. 'They're not Rembrandts." I must admit that the paintings did look better.

　　The way Rob is with building design is the way we should be with the structure of our novels, poems, essays. We should use a structure but make it our own. In other words, each time we write something, we reinvent that structure to fit ourselves and what we want to say. This is not arrogance. We honor structure, but we don't become frozen by an old one. Rob couldn't take down all the walls. The roof would have fallen in on him. But if he was working on a house with a baby room, and the new owners didn't have a baby, he could reshape that room into another space.

　　If you want to write a novel, read a lot of novels. See what structure the writers have set up for themselves. Look at the length of chapters, who tells the story, what the writers zoom in on, what they leave out. But then you have to tell your own story. What works for you? The structure Mark Twain used to write in is not necessarily the one for you. You are alive now. You can be affirmed and learn from some of Twain's moves, but you are a different person with your own story to tell.

　　Structure is a tricky and important business. I tried to write Bones eight years before I actually wrote it. Back then, I just couldn't figure out how to set it up. I seemed to be just scattering bricks, helter-skelter. It was almost as if I couldn't figure out how to put up walls, lift the roof on the house. So I quit.

　　Eight years later, I flashed on the idea of short chapters, each one a separate entity. I knew what I wanted to say—I just had to find a form to say it in. Once I had the structure, all I had to do was fill it. There is a Zen saying: Put a snake in a bamboo pole. In a sense, that is what structure is. You have all this stuff you want to express—you need to pour yourself into a form.

　　That's what keeping the hand moving is all about in writing practice. It is a structure, a form. I want to write! I want to write! What do I do? Sit down and keep the hand moving.

　　Sometimes students say, "I don't know if I want to write poems or short stories." Be patient. It will evolve. What do you feel akin to? What do you like reading? It takes time to find a true form for yourself. And even then, once you find it, you have to push your edges. You can't get too comfortable. We have to work continually to keep our snake spines straight.

　　Try this:

　　Raymond Carver said in Fires that once he had the first sentence of a short story, he made the rest of the story as he made a poem: "one line and then the next, and the next."

　　Now find a sentence you like that conies from you. Don't be picky with your mind; instead, feel the sentence's integrity with your body. It can be a simple line. "I fell in love with my life one Tuesday in August." Now go ahead and lay down

　　the next line and the next. Don't think further ahead than

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　　the next line. Don't think back. Just build that story.

　　Let the structure of the story unfold, one sentence after another. Place those sentences down, as if you were laying bricks. Keep each one true.