« For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. Teachers bid young writers to follow the arc. If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs.
And it is an elegant shape, especially when I translate arc to its natural form, a wave.Its rise and fall traces a motion we know in heartbeats, breaking surf, the sun passing overhead. There’s power in a wave, its sense of beginning, midpoint, and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories. But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. […]
Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.”
SPIRAL: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus.
MEANDER: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens.
RADIAL or EXPLOSION: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite.
BRANCHING and other FRACTAL patterns: self-replication at lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds.
CELLULAR patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool […].
These patterns aren’t just around us; they inform our bodies, too. We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas, irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander [..]. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Why wouldn’t they form our [literary] narratives, too?
A digressive narrative meanders; at times it flows quickly and at times barely at all, often loops back on itself, yet ultimately it moves onward. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with a system of rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances, deepening into the past, perhaps, or rising into the future. A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core […]. And cellular narratives come in like parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a network of meaning. […]
In this book I’ll look at ways that writers have done all of this, finding patterns other than the arc inside their stories. This will be a museum of specimens. »
— Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
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