Alternative Story Structures/Patterns (a.k.a how to avoid that damn triangle)
Disclaimer: these are all taken from Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode under the idea that we should draw more from patterns in nature when structuring works of fiction. Alison is a white woman, and a lot of non-western storytelling (especially utilizing different structures other than the triangle/wave) was pioneered by Authors of Color. I highly recommend you also research types of non-western nonlinear storytelling that Authors of Color have been utilizing and pioneering way before western storytellers even began to think about them. Here's a great article, and here's another one to begin your research there!
I'm gonna start each section with a quote from Meander, Spiral, Explode that I think explains them best, and then extrapolate where I can from there!
I've already discussed this one! If you wanna know my thoughts and feelings about the wave (a.k.a Evil Triangle That Might Have Some Uses, Maybe) you can check out this post here!
"Once I translated the dramatic arc to a wave, I began to think that energy in narrative might also flow in smaller waves, wavelets. Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave: I'm more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse. The same epiphanies every week..."
I love the idea of this, and her comparison to the human experience. I feel like we sort of tried to accomplish this by adding various peaks to the original triangle, but sometimes a narrative can have multiple waves. She talks a lot about how this can show up as patterning in stories as well, moving back and forth between two different energies that could be important to a character, back and forth between motivations. I don't know if that makes any sense, wavelets aren't really my style, but I know they'll resonate with someone, because what are we doing if not trying to connect to the human experience?
"A meander begins at one point and moves towards a final one, but with digressive loops. Italo Calvino says that "digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. Flight from what? From death of course!" The Meander river in Turkey gave us the word, and speaking of how an actual river flows, Peter Stevens (in Patterns in Nature) says it "winds and turns in a quiet but seemingly desperate manner to avoid the straight schuss to the bottom"... In either case, there's deliberate slowness, a delight in curving this way or that, luxuriating in diversions, carving slow labyrinths of time."
OHHHHH THE MEANDERING NARRATIVE. I do enjoy this one, it isn't my favorite, but it is very very good. I specifically love the part she mentions about the narrative being afraid to reach its end. Sometimes characters meander, they want to experience the slowness, to stop and enjoy the things that are going on around them before moving forward with the plot. If you learn how to use the meander to your advantage, people who have a tendency to under-write could seriously be helped out by trying to do this. Also, sometimes people's minds just wander. Why should a narrative not wander too? A river will always end up spilling out somewhere, after all.
"A spiraling narrative could be a helix winding downward– into a character's soul, or deep into the past– or it might wind upward, around and around to a future. Near repetitions, but moving onward. What gives a spiraling narrative a good sense of ending? Good question, for spirals could go on forever."
"I wonder if first-person retrospective narratives– especially obsessive ones– might naturally follow a vortex."
Can you tell which quote gave me my epiphany about Verity and To Make a Fool of Death? Maybe it's mixed in with the radial narrative (right below this!!) but a spiraling narrative is truly a beautiful thing. This one and the radial one are both truly very deeply character focused, which makes me happy. The idea of telling a story based around a character, or just always coming back to the central of the character, is deeply fascinating. At another point in this chapter, she compares the spiral narrative to like the spiraling of a panic attack: you start thinking, and then you think more, and the problem becomes bigger, and you just keep going and then you cannot stop. Whether your spiraling narrative is fast, slow, or somewhere in between (not even gonna go off on a tangent about combining some of the patterns like a meandering spiral), it wanders around but remains true to the central core of what STARTED the panic attack, and will always have come from that true center.
"Unlike in a spiral, the story itself– the incidents we see dramatized– barely moves forward in time. Instead, a reader might have a sense of being drawn again and again to a hot core– or, conversely, of trying to get away from that core. You might already know the end at the start and get many fractured views of things avoiding that moment. You might feel a sense of violent scatteration from a central point. Radials can be centrifugal or centripetal, but linear they are not."
This one might just be my favorite. Her example for it is truly perfect, too. She uses Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold to talk about the point of this one. The entire story revolves around the death of this one man, we know he's going to die from the beginning of the story, and everyone else knows it too. We get the reactions of people to the idea of his death, the effect his death has on others, the WHY of his murder, and so on and so forth. The entire story centers around the hot core of the death of the main character, and that is BEAUTIFUL. I don't know what else to say about this kind of narrative outside of that example, because it does exactly what the radial/explosive narrative requires of it. Vignettes that all center around a big, dramatic point. That kind of thing. I love it, I can't get enough.
"So, again, any complex narrative will be a little spatial: certainly the spiraling or radial ones we looked at are. I think the idea of spatiality becomes most clear in cellular texts made discrete parts that gain power through patterns of images or ideas rather than sequential incidents." [section removed where she's talking about three examples provided to prove her point] "In all three, no linear chronology makes the parts cohere; instead, you draw the lines."
"Translating to natural patters, I think of Peter Stevens's words about honeycombs or foam: 'chunks of space, miniature rooms, each one different from its neighbors and yet perfectly interlocked with those neighbors'."
I feel like these really speak for themselves. Think like... a short story collection, right, where all of the stories are seemingly unrelated, but you're able to connect the dots in your own mind and realize how these narratives are actually entwined in some truly beautiful ways? This method places a lot of trust on the reader, and I think that's important. As long as you have readers who have an ounce of critical thinking skills, of course. Stories like this are particularly interesting, especially when you as a writer have to decide how to subtly connect them all, or how MUCH you even want them to be connected.
"The most fractal works– meaning fractals of fractals– were stream-of-consciousness narratives, although it's not clear whether that style reveals depths of consciousness or the writer's imagination. But fractals forming the shape of a whole narrative are what interest me: Texts that start with a "seed" or blueprint that spawns several more."
and also, in reference to Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River, an example of a Fractal Narrative:
"Instead the book is polyphonic, taking the points of view of four characters and delivering them in different styles: letters, diary entries, mixtures of third person and first. Yet the stories all grow from a single seed..."
I cut off the last one, but to give some context: Phillips' Crossing the River is the point of view of four characters across time periods that are stories that are inherently related to each other, in that they all stem from the same fractured point, but the linear plot lines do not connect. That's why it's so interesting. It kind of reminds me of the butterfly effect, right, but in a narrative sense. One action that someone takes will fracture, splitting across the story and creating so many smaller, new stories that are just as integral and wouldn't have happened without that first fracture. Will it all come together and will the fracture heal and reconnect at the end? Idk, maybe, it can. It's more of an exercise in seeing what happens based off of one simple event.
She has an entire chapter at the end called "Tsunami?" where she talks about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which is like... a wave, right, a symmetrical wave, but SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT. Remember in "networks or cells" where I was talking about stories that don't seem to be connected but then there's a beautiful through line that somehow magically connects them all? And then in the wave post, when I talk about symmetry and traveling up the wave and down the wave so that the end reflects the beginning again? Cloud Atlas does all of that and more. I couldn't recommend this book enough. It's impossible to explain. It's perfectly written. I honestly don't even really consider it one of my favorite books, but I know that it has FEW rivals for how actually good it is. And, again, PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE.
If anyone wants extrapolation on any of these specifically, I'd be happy to talk about them in their own individual posts, if you've got something specific you want to know more about!! I mean fuck, I might write more about them later on just because I want to and I have feelings. All I really did here was just kinda explain them. And, once again, I encourage you to seek the perspectives of Authors of Color for this one as well. Countries that aren't North American/European have been doing this way longer than us, and those formats deserve some fucking respect.
I also of course have a few people that have asked to be tagged in my posts like this, and if you'd like to add yourself to this list, please let me know! I'll be posting a bunch of these as I go through grad school, so there's a lot to learn! @approximately20eggs @faeriegutz @moonscribbler @marigoldispeculiar
