Meander, Spiral, Explode

 
Meander, Spiral, Explode
Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison

Catapult

2019

 

 

Meander, Spiral, Explode is an examination of the techniques for pacing fiction, and a call to other authors to write narratives that fall outside the traditional rising action / climax / resolution format.

 
Alison based her list of narrative structures on Peter Stevens' book Patterns in Nature, which identifies recurring shapes that arise from organic growth. For each structure, she identifies several existing works that she thinks exemplify the technique. A few of her examples are works I'm familiar with from the creative writing classes I took as an undergrad, and at least one I've read on my own.

 
In terms of pacing, Alison notes that the text can have a 'gap' when we leap over a certain span of time with no narration, 'summary' that moves very quickly over events, 'scenes' that take place in something like real time, 'dilation' where the narrative slows down, and 'pauses' where the text continues even as the plot has stopped. She notes that varying the pace is an important form of authorial control over the way the story is told, and mention Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" as an example of writing that really shows off these different speeds.

 
The 'wave' structure of a story is the familiar dramatic arc - the rise / crescendo / collapse. 

 
'Wavelets' occur when a narrative vacillates back and forth between two themes, perhaps eventually having one win out over the other, or perhaps concluding with the tension or indecision intact. 

 
'Meanders' often tell a simple story, but pile digression on top of digression to slow the pace and reach the conclusion only indirectly. 

 
'Spirals' employ ordered repetition to show change happening within a routine.

 
'Explosions' contain some key event that everything else flies away from or orbits around. The key events is sometimes too powerful to show directly, or sometimes can only appear at the end. Alison didn't mention them, but I thought of the two key deaths in The Time Traveler's Wife as both behaving this way, as well as Snowden's secret in Catch 22.

 
When the elements of a narrative are ordered spatially, rather than over time, we can think of the story as forming 'cells' and the reader as creating a 'network' of connecting lines in their heads as they read. Alison spends a lot of time talking about WB Sebald's The Emigrants here, because it was the book that inspired her to think about non-arc narrative structures. I think her better example though is Susan Minot's short story "Lust," which is a non-chronological list of sexual encounters that moves from mostly ones that make her happy to mostly ones that leave her unfulfilled. Alison doesn't discuss it, but Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is famously 'spatial' in the way she means it, and his book Mr Palomar is an even better example of how you can still get movement via theme instead of plot, as the vignettes move from the physical to the spiritual.

 
Alison's last structure is the 'tsunami,' which she describes as a wave made of cells. Her one example is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. If I were her, I would have moved her discussion of "Lust" to this section, because I think her point about thematic movement makes more sense here, while in truly 'cellular' stories, the sense of change comes primarily from the reader's accumulated knowledge rather than from any change in the content.

 

One kind of story structure I've thought about before is one I call, in my own head, the science fictional story structure (SFnal structure, for short.) I imagine it looking like ever expanding ripples in a pond, which I suppose would make it a variation on Alison's explosion structure. 

 

The SFnal structure takes advantage of the existence of certain rules about how the fictional world works, and explores the implications of those rules, often moving from the smallest to the largest. In particular, I think this structure can be playful, by looking for anything that's vague or inconsistent in the simplest statement of the rules, and wiggling a curious finger into those cracks to try to pry them open. 

 

The way that the first season of Person of Interest keeps looking for all the possible ways the investigators could be misled by the single clue their computer gives them is an example of the SFnal structure, I think, as is the surprising reversal at the end of the film Colossal.