Transcript: Episode 10

Hey friends, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

First off this month, I have a bit of housekeeping to cover. Up until now, I’ve been managing the newsletter for this podcast through my own website – but I’d like to experiment for a while with also hosting the monthly writing tips on Substack, just to see if that platform feels like a good fit as the podcast community grows.

If you’re currently a member of the newsletter circle, you don’t have to make any changes to the way you get those updates unless you want to. But if you do use the Substack app, I’ll be sending out an email next week with the links to switch over. And for folks who might want to join the circle – and get monthly updates and exclusive tips, tools, and bonus resources right in your inbox – there are now two links in the show notes, so you can select Substack if you’d like.

At some point, after I’ve gathered some data, I’ll be settling on just one way to deliver the newsletter content. But I promise that when the time comes you won’t have to do anything to stay subscribed, and I’ll give you a heads up before the delivery format changes.

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Mary, what is Substack, please dear god don’t make me download another app….” Even if I do end up switching my delivery platform, you won’t ever have to use the Substack app if you don’t want to. The bonus content will still go out as an email, it will just look a bit different in your inbox.

Okay! Housekeeping done.

This month, I want to talk about a core element of the writing craft: story structure.

There’s a recurring meme in writer culture about whether one is a plotter or a pantser. Plotters are defined as people who are good with story structure and who prefer to plot out their full story before they draft, usually with a detailed plot outline. Panstsers are people who don’t create a plot or structural outline and instead fly by the seat of their pants during the first draft – hence the name “pantser.”

This dichotomy can sometimes be useful to think about, especially if you’re new to writing book-length work and are considering how you want to go about it. But I find that taking this dichotomy seriously can more often than not lead to some sort of weird hang-ups.

Most of us, I think, really fall somewhere in between, and most writers benefit from being open to a bit of both. But the meme can lead to a false sense that you’re either supposed to create a detailed, scene-by-scene outline with colored timeline charts and full character biographies… or you’re supposed to just dive in and draft until you happen to find yourself with a novel. (Or a memoir, or a book or essays, or whatever.)

The plotter vs. pantser divide is closely related to another set of ideas about story structure itself and how the structure of a story relates to the content of a story.

I think writers often conceptualize story structure in one of two ways:

1. As a set of rigid, almost mechanical instructions on how to put a story together “correctly,” or
2. As a sort of organic, intuitive outgrowth of the themes, symbols, and artistic devices within the story.

You might be able to guess from those descriptions that I have personally seen the number 1 approach most often for mainstream fiction, and the number 2 approach most often for literary fiction. (I talked about a similar sort of binary back in the episode on whether stories need a message.)

I’m simplifying a bit here, in that of course plenty of genre fiction writers think about symbolism and artful literary devices. And there are plenty of literary-style stories that use a fairly standard structure of rising action, story climax, and falling action. But I think it’s useful to look at the two extremes in order to start sifting through the way we as individual writers relate to structure in our writing process.

Looking at that number 1 approach, the most extreme example would be something like a ghostwriter creating the next installment of a mainstream popular novel series, where readers are already loyal to the established style of the series. So they’re looking for a very specific kind of standardized reading experience. I’ve done editing work at this end of the scale, and in this context the story structure is in fact very rigid and is typically used to determine things like character development.

Basically, if you’re writing toward a story structure that must have a dramatic, action-based midpoint around chapter 15 and where the hero must overcome a personal obstacle to beat the villain in a showdown around chapter 25 – you need to be writing about a main character who fits into that structure.

Looking at the number 2 approach, a very extreme or maybe pure example would be writing a literary-style story where you don’t even think about structure until you’ve written a first draft – or not until pretty late in the first draft. The expectation is that you’re only going to follow the typical rising-and-falling-action arc if it turns out to fit the characters and story events that emerge during drafting. And if that arc doesn’t fit, you’ll come up with the structure based on the patterns that you start to see in the draft.

An example of this might be a final structure that divides the book into three parts, each narrated by a different character and following its own separate-but-loosely-connected plotline. The book as a whole doesn’t follow a single arc of action, but rather is held together by the way the themes of the story run through and connect each section. (I’ve got several literary novels on my shelf that follow this structure, which just goes to show that literary fiction has formulas and tropes too.)

Moving away from these two opposed examples… I think a lot of writing falls somewhere in the middle. Like with the plotter vs. pantser dichotomy, if we get too attached to one side of the invented divide, we can end up holding ourselves back.

In my own experience, I find it a lot easier to break out of my personal attachments and hang-ups about the writing process when I’m wearing my editor hat. (Which is good, because if I couldn’t break those personal assumptions then I would be a pretty terrible editor.) When I was first training to do novel edits, I noticed that I was approaching the work in a way that I had never approached my own, even during revisions.

(And to clarify, here I’m talking about big-picture edits to the story, or developmental editing, not sentence-level changes to the wording, or copyediting.)

I think in the developmental stage, an editor’s job is fundamentally this: to tease out what questions this story is asking, and then to identify which questions are already being answered in the draft and which ones haven’t been fully developed yet.

Something I’ve also noticed through editing is that different types of story structures ask different types of questions.

No matter what story structure you’re writing within, it’s going to impose certain parameters or constraints on what you can do on the page. Going back to the example of the novel that’s being written to adhere to a strict rising-and-falling action arc – once you choose that structure, the shape and content of the story needs to fit inside it for the novel to ultimately make sense and tick on a mechanical level.

And part of the reason for this is that a rising-and-falling action arc is asking a particular series of escalating questions, based around a core question of what happens next?? (Or how will the hero win, if it’s also a hero’s journey.) That’s what the structure fundamentally encourages readers to ask as they move through the story and experience it.

There will be other questions in the story as well – the plot arc isn’t the only thing on the page. You can do interesting character development within an arc-style structure, and you can play with symbols and explore themes and write devastatingly cool sentences. But the most fundamental question you have to answer is what happens next.

Taking the example of the literary structure with the three story sections with disconnected plots, in that kind of structure the core question will be pretty different. It might be something like will these characters reconcile or why is this pattern repeating?? And as with the arc story, there will be other plot-based questions – there probably has to be some amount of what happens next. But the structure dictates that most fundamental question in this story is not going to be what happens or how does the hero win.

I just used the word “dictates” – but I think looking at structure from this angle of asking certain questions reveals how story structure actually gives us freedom within our storytelling. Structure creates constraints around the story, but it also provides the shape that we then get to build within. Structure helps us choose a shape that focuses the story into something we can actually work with and make real, something tangible we can then play with and explore. Something with a moving and breathing body.

Story structure isn’t just a set of plot points in an outline – it’s the skeleton of the story’s body. And because different types of story bodies are articulated in different ways, they also articulate different types of questions.

Looking at structure in this light, I’ve come up with a sort of working theory about story structure: The ideal structure for your story is whatever set of constraints gives you the most freedom to explore what actually matters to you.

To explain what I mean, I’m going to reference a project I recently worked on with a coaching client (who has authorized me to talk about her work here, so no worries that I’m turning clients into fodder for this podcast, or at least not without permission).

This writer has a knack for creating moving character arcs and for lyrical prose. But most of her drafts for previous novels had fallen into the “draft until you somehow have a book” camp, with mixed results. So we decided to work through an outline process together.

The first step of this was to talk about her vision for the project and settle on exactly what kind of structure to aim for with this outline. She had the beginnings of a really interesting cast of characters, and she knew what emotional and philosophical themes those character arcs could explore. She also had a very cool starting point for some kind of magic-realist or fantasy plot, but she didn’t have a lot of subsequent plot points in mind yet.

There were several different directions to potentially go in from this starting point for the story. We could have opted for a more literary structure, keeping the structural questions more tightly focused on character development and theme and less on an action-based plot.

But it became clear pretty quickly that an action-based, rising and falling arc was the best fit for her vision – because the question she was most interested in exploring was what would actually happen to these characters once the story went into motion. Or in other words, how would the main character beat the villain?

This is not to say that all those great emotional arcs and themes went by the wayside. Once we knew what questions to ask to get to the story structure she wanted, she was able to weave all of that emotional nuance right into the fabric of the story – all while building something that would actually answer that primary question of what happens next, instead of getting lost in the beautiful thematic weeds.

This is how the constraints of structure can give us freedom as storytellers. Structure creates the parameters we need to actually focus on the areas we want to explore – both in terms of exploring the world of the story, and in exploring the skillsets we want to develop and flex as writers.

And this doesn’t just apply to so-called pantsers, either. Even if you’re naturally inclined to making outlines, there’s always more to play with and unlock when it comes to structure. Like I said earlier, the rising-and-falling arc is by no means the only option if you want to prioritize structure in your work.

One great resource for expanding your structure toolkit is Jane Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. This book got a fair amount of hype when it came out in 2019, and I think it’s well deserved. Alison looks at 8 structural shapes or patterns, including the action-based arc, which she calls a wave. She illustrates each shape through a handful of example stories, analyzing how they might be mapped onto that structural shape. These structures are all based in patterns from nature, and the book serves as a call to reset the Western cultural assumption that the arc or wave is the true natural form for storytelling.

I’m not going to dive into all the forms discussed in the book, because really you should just read the book if your curiosity is at all piqued by the summary I just gave. But I will just briefly list them, to give you an idea of what kinds of story shapes or story bodies Alison is talking about: waves, wavelets, meanders, spirals, radials and explosions, networks, fractals, and the evocatively-named tsunami.

This brings me to the second half of what I want to talk about today with story structure, and with how being more aware of and intentional with structure can change the way we write. As much as I liked and recommend Meander, Spiral, Explode, I do have one critique of it that made me realize something I hadn’t really fully formulated before about storytelling structure.

This book ticks so many items on my list of creative interests, at least on paper (pun sort of intended). Poetic-but-accessible prose? Check. Unusual, insightful, and inspiring craft analysis? Also check.

As I was reading, though, I gradually had to admit something to myself: I was indeed very interested in what this book has to say, but something about it was just… bugging me. I was actually starting to feel a bit anxious or even bummed out as I read, in addition to being inspired (which was a pretty weird emotional combination).

It took me a bit of thought to figure out what the source of that reaction was. But when I did, I was quickly reminded of making episode eight of this podcast a couple months back. That’s the episode on the potential pitfalls of over-emphasizing the meaning of suffering in art. Because here’s my main issue with Meander, Spiral, Explode – the majority of the example stories Alison analyzes are… how to put this politely… pretty fucking grim. And that adds what I think is a troubling subtext to Alison’s arguments about form in storytelling.

I don’t mean to say that the stories she includes are “grim” in the sense of “bad” or “lacking in artistic value.” She’s drawing directly from the modern literary canon, and these stories are considered canon for very good reasons.

And speaking more generally, there’s obviously nothing wrong with any one individual story being about difficult stuff – whether it’s difficult but ultimately hopeful, or just straight-up difficult. I don’t want to repeat myself too much from episode 8 here. But I’ll just say that I’m fully aware of the power of storytelling to tackle and transform human suffering, and the power of storytelling to stand against injustice. These are two of the many reasons I think storytelling matters in the world.

I think I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that I’m recording this episode at a moment when entangled generational lines of trauma and violence are erupting in another brutal conflict in Gaza and Israel – a conflict our government in the US has helped fund for decades. I’m not proposing that our creative work should ignore the reality of trauma in the world and in our own lives. If storytelling is a vocation (and I think that it is), then we have a calling to tell stories of trauma when they come to us.

But also, or maybe “And also”: The sheer number of example stories in Alison’s book that are, on some level, pretty fucking grim reveals just how much the standard of “good literature” has essentially transformed trauma and suffering into a creative ideal. Out of the 21 total stories that get an in-depth structural analysis in the book, only 3 do not center on some kind of acute trauma, grief, or loss. (Plus one story that’s kind of a gray area, depending on how you interpret the events of the book.)

The entire project of Meander, Spiral, Explode is to trace how these selected stories reveal a range of potential patterns for narrative form beyond the standard structure of the arc. And yet, if you zoom out to the most basic or bird’s eye view of Alison’s analysis, you can describe most of the stories she dissects with the same summary. The content of the narrative stems from a particular trauma, and the form of the narrative is arranged around that trauma. No matter what the particular form, the trauma dictates the pattern.

And there’s another potential implication here, one that I really doubt Alison intended. There’s an implication that “good writing” is fundamentally writing that’s about trauma. Maybe with some tender and tentative hope as well, but the trauma is really what makes the writing tick on the craft level. The trauma is what makes the writing interesting and “good.”

In the epilogue, she sums it up this way:

“The mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters. Some on a grand historic scale: the horrors and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, the near-extinction of the European Jews, the toxic history of whites and Native Americans. Others dealt with intimate issues of sexual identity, love, despair, guilt. And they have found patterns other than the wave to do this… a meander or net or explosion was simply the pattern the material needed.”

(end quote)

This is the hidden baseline assumption of so much literary criticism and theory about writing craft – that “core human matters” are matters of either collective suffering and oppression, or of personal tragedy. Trauma isn’t just some of what makes us human and makes our stories worth telling. It’s the core of storytelling.

(And yes: I did notice that Alison includes sexual identity and love in her list of core matters. But if one were to judge by the example texts, one could easily decide that sex and love are most often synonymous with violation and/or devastating-and-inevitable breakups.)

I’m genuinely not saying this to point a finger at Jane Alison, or to negate the book’s insights on narrative form. I did still ultimately enjoy and get a lot out of the book, and I don’t think this issue I’m seeing comes out of some flaw in Alison’s analysis or approach. I think it’s just a natural result of a general standard of art that is too much in love with its own shadow.

I mean, what high school or college student hasn’t suffered through multiple English classes where the entire syllabus consisted of books that will make you want to stick a pencil in your eye and burn your library card?

Reading that kind of story can be powerful and necessary and galvanizing. Sometimes that kind of story is even ultimately uplifting, although I don’t think they’re required to be. I don’t think writers need to shy away from weaving their trauma into their work.

But when an entire book on narrative structure doesn’t even seem to be aware that it’s basically a collection of ways to write about trauma… I think that’s a sign our cultural parameters for “good writing” have gotten a little weird.

(And this doesn’t only effect literary fiction and nonfiction. Just as one example, look at grimdark fantasy stories, stories that feature senseless brutality as a core, inescapable theme. This subgenre been consistently popular for a while now, and grimdark books are often considered to have more literary value than other genre books, because they’re considered more “realistic.”)

I’m going to circle back now to the working theory about story structure that I gave earlier – that the ideal structure for your story is whatever set of constraints gives you the most freedom to explore what actually matters to you. Looking at structure from this angle, I think a fundamental issue emerges.

If our ideas about story structure are unknowingly centered on the idea that trauma is always the core of our most powerful stories, then a huge aspect of our creative possibility is already decided for us. If story structure is really about what kinds of questions we’re asking and exploring, then any sort of static assumption about the foundations of story structure will constrain what questions we believe we’re allowed to write about.

I’m aware that this all might feel sort of over-the-top or airy-fairy. So I’m going to use myself as a concrete example here (or rather, one of my fiction projects…). This particular project is a concept for a novel that I’ve been tinkering with for literally a decade, and it’s just never developed enough traction to really get going and become a working draft.

Just in case that ten-years-with-no-finished-draft stat is triggering any sympathy panic attacks, I should clarify that I haven’t been working on this idea for like, ten years straight. More like, I’ve kept picking it up for a few months at a time, discovering once again that it just isn’t happening, and then putting it down, sometimes for a year or more.

But this story… it just won’t leave me alone. Whenever I consider what fiction I’d really like to write next, this story is always the first thing in my mind and my heart. So I’ve tried all sorts of angles and structures for it – action-based historical fantasy, meandering magic realism, literary vignettes. I’ve even considered making it sci fi, because why not, I already tried basically every other genre I like, maybe some spaceships will help.

It’s just… never worked. Nothing I’ve begun to craft has felt like the organic, necessary body for this story.

As I was thinking about my reaction to Meander, Spiral, Explode, I had a little epiphany. Always before, no matter what specific structure I was playing with, no matter what style of plot, the core of the structure was always the same. I was always writing with pain and struggle as the anchor, the thing that pulled the characters together into a moving and spinning constellation.

When I was attempting a standard historical fantasy, I was looking for ways that my characters’ pain and struggle could draw them into an epic confrontation with a powerful enemy, which would then allow them to level up and demonstrate heroism. (Or, in other words, I was writing an arc or wave structure where the wave was powered by pain and struggle.)

When I was doing magic realism, I was looking for ways magic could be a symbolic parallel for my characters’ pain, erupting into their daily world and causing a slew of disruptions. (An explosion or radial structure, with pain at the epicenter.)

When I was doing literary vignettes, I was looking for ways to repeat certain harmonized flavors of pain within snippets of each character’s point of view. (A spiral or meander structure, moving in constant response to suffering.)

I was always fundamentally approaching this story by asking the same kinds of questions (and honestly, I’ve been asking these questions in pretty much all of the fiction I’ve written): What is this character’s deepest pain? Where did it come from? Why does it persist? How does it intersect and interact with other people’s pain? What will happen because of that?

These are completely valid storytelling questions. Sometimes they are exactly the keys needed to unlock the story, to feel out the contours of its structural body.

But now I’m realizing that maybe this novel I’ve tried to start so many times is actually not interested in those questions. Or at least, maybe it’s interested in other questions more – maybe it wants a gleaming sun or a buried seed as its center of gravity, and not a black hole or a violent explosion or a rip tide.

I don’t think I’m going to discover some totally new narrative structure when I once again return to this story. And who knows – maybe the content of the story won’t actually change that much. Maybe all that pain and struggle will still be part of it. But I can’t wait to see what shape and body it might take if I stop building it around the assumption that the pain is always the core human matter.

Right now I’m sort of feeling like it may turn out to be a spiraling structure after all, which I’ve definitely tried before. But a story that spirals around hope or connection is different than a story that spirals around trauma, even if the raw events of the plotline are roughly the same. It’s different to imagine, it’s different to write, and it’s different to read. It moves and breathes differently on the page.

Jane Alison does actually mention this right at the end of Meander, Spiral, Explode, in a chapter on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. When that novel came out, a lot of the attention around it was focused on its unconventional structure and the way it exuberant mixes wildly different genres – it tells six completely different stories, nested inside one another.

Alison makes a compelling case that the structure of that novel is built around a kind of hopeful prayer at the literal center, despite the fact that a lot of awful things happen to the characters in Cloud Atlas. And Alison argues that this is really what makes the book compelling, what makes it “literature,” more so than the inventive structure alone. The real power of the story is that it’s, quote, “shyly earnest, moral… and moving.” And I’d tend to agree with her.

I checked out some reviews of Meander, Spiral, Explode before I started working on this episode, just to see if I found anyone talking about the prevalence of trauma stories in the example texts. I didn’t see that in any of the reviews I read. But I did find one that firmly pooh-poohed the idea that David Mitchel might have intended Cloud Atlas to be “earnest and moving.” Because what serious and skilled storyteller would want their work to be earnest, hopeful, and moving? I mean… eww.

At least for my part, I am officially coming out against any sort of barometer for literary merit that automatically puts “hopeful and moving” below “makes me want to rend my garments and/or stick a pencil in my eye.” I don’t think either reaction should be automatically valued more than the other. I think what matters is how deeply we connect with a story, how it shapes us or witnesses us, and the possibilities it brings alive – not how much pain that story does or doesn’t contain.

So I’m going to wrap things up here with a bit of a closing pep talk. Even though I just spent like fifteen minutes straight talking about de-centering trauma in narrative structure… if you’re currently working on something that is structured around trauma, that work is brave and necessary and amazing. And if you’re not writing about trauma, that’s also brave and necessary and amazing.

My goal with the ideas I share in this space is never to say “this one thing that I happened to be thinking this month is totally correct and applicable all of the time.” So if what I talked about today doesn’t mesh with the story you’re currently telling, that’s okay. I mean, in an earlier episode I talked about narratives that don’t really create room for exploring trauma, and how that can sometimes hold us back. And I don’t think that has to contradict anything in this episode.

We all contain beautiful contradictory multitudes. I just want us to be more free to discover those stories, and not to keep cramming ourselves or our work into a box we might not even realize is there. And my goal in this space is just to share the ways that I’m questioning my own assumptions about writing and about what it means to be a storyteller.

So, no matter what you’re working on… if the structure is feeling restrictive or you keep hitting dead ends, maybe take a look at the way your structure is currently relating to trauma – either centering it, or not – and see what new questions you might discover if you shift to a different orientation.

This month’s praxis tip for newsletter subscribers is a bit of a companion resource for Meander, Spiral, Explode, although you can still use it even if you haven’t read the book. I’ve taken each of the structural shapes Alison analyzes and given examples of the types of story questions I think each shape is most focused on. And I’ve also shared some thoughts on how each shape might relate to both stories that center trauma and stories that don’t.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can find links to join the newsletter circle by scrolling down in the shownotes. (And like I mentioned at the top of the episode, there’s now an option to get your newsletter updates via Substack if you so choose!)

Until next time, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.