Map Room 5: Mapping Story Shapes

Today in the map room, we consider how shapes can be used as maps, entertaining a little traffic between the idea of diagram and the idea of map. The diagrams we’ll be making are of the shapes of stories. We’ll look at some of the most familiar story shapes — “shape” here is really just a metaphor for how stories proceed — look at some less familiar shapes, and then turn the order around and think about how other shapes could become maps for structuring a story. As we think shape, we’ll also think about time as line, carrying forward the last installment’s sense of the living gesture line — the line that goes for a walk. We’re looking for ways to use a shape map to tell us something about structure while remaining exploratory and open-ended.

Let’s start by looking at three classic shapes that have been used to stand for the idea of story structure.

the pyramid (read from left to right)

The circle (read clockwise from the dot)

The braid (read from top to bottom)

Story shapes offer skeleton key guides to organizing a story’s unfolding. But what aspects of a story do they actually refer to? I like to think of the arc and its straight line variant, Freytag’s pyramid, as both mostly about a graphic quantification of pressure, which is why instability starts an upward movement and crisis or conflict is a high, rather than low point. You could think of this pressure also as volatility. The opening and ending line segments represent a normal and a new normal. Although in nature, volatility is an ingredient in a plurality of chaotic outcomes, the story, so-structured, aims at a single apex (crisis!), after which everything works to re-establishing a norm.

Personally, I like what the choreographer and great genie Merce Cunningham had to say about crisis in “Space, Time, and Dance”:

“There is also a tendency to imply a crisis to which one goes and then in some way retreats from. Now I can’t see that crisis any longer means a climax, unless we are willing to grant that every breath of wind has a climax (which I am), but then that obliterates climax, being a surfeit of such. And since our lives, both by nature and by the newspapers, are so full of crisis that one is no longer aware of it, then it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and is separate from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper headlines. Climax is for those who are swept by New Year’s Eve.”

If Freytag’s pyramid is traditionally taught as a movement toward and away from the climax of crisis, as instigated by conflict, as agitated by desire, the way we talk about “arc” tends to have a bit more breadth. The pyramid is usually summoned up to stand for the whole structure of the story. You’ll hear people talk about story arcs but also character arcs, and the idea that a character must have an arc is basically a naturalized concept at this point. So what is it?

This is the image “arc” has always produced in my mind: a single arc of trajectory, of projectile motion. Not pictured: the projecting mechanism. This image is meant to be read from left to right.

When people talk about character arcs, they’re talking about a process of transformation. As with the pyramid, the movement of the line represents some kind of escalating pressure over time whose greatest dimension is supposed to happen close to the end of the story, which ends with the new normal.

What the character arc, plotted in this way, doesn’t account for are the time signatures and shapes of all the other varieties of change: what about the conversion experience? What about sudden shock? What about the incredibly slow drift? What about the multiplicity of metamorphoses we undergo every day, that don’t necessarily point in any particular direction, or that depend on our contexts and immediate social relations?

The circular narrative is not about controlling the path of a transformative change but about pattern and return as a kind of grounding rhythm in the movement through time. In circular narrative, landmark scenes or phrases are returned to through a process of symmetry. From the center again begins the decentering action. Pressure or conflict could move through the circle in any way; the circle as a story shape has nothing to say about them. It’s not that change is absent from the story, but that the circle and its symmetry are able to assert a kind of steadiness, almost like a diurnal cycle or annual cycle. (I recommend some great studies of classical circular narrative if this pattern interests you: Mary Douglas’ Thinking in Circles, and the recent book by Daniel Mendelsohn, Three Rings. You might also want to read Erin Courtney’s play “A Map of Virtue,” which explicitly works with circular symmetry.)

another way of visualizing circular narrative

So: the pyramid and arc shapes are guides for controlling the escalation of pressure in a story toward a single intensity of transformation. The circle shape is a guide for directing the path of a story back to a point of habitual return, and also a template for building in symmetry in the movement away from and back to that return.

The braid doesn’t tell us anything about pressure; instead it tells of an alternation in the foreground, and controls a choice about the limitation of threads or lines that run through the piece. The braid has been normalized for us in longform television — the A plot, the B plot, the C plot. There’s an implication in the join of the three strands in a braid that there is some kind of convergence, whether the TV kind where the plots finally tie together and all have a bearing on a single question, or an interpretive or emotional resonance that starts to grow through their alternation and nearness to each other even if their purviews never overlap. The strands of a braid may be made out of the same hair, or they may be truly distinct materials joined together only in the gesture of the form. The strands may be the same thickness or not. The braid is read from the top of the page to the bottom, down the center.

These are classical story shapes, but there are plenty of others. In Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison finds narrative structures in a range of literary texts that match persistent patterns in nature (waves, cells, meanders). Some of the texts she looks at we might qualify as experimental, but what’s most interesting to me about her analysis is that she finds these patterns occurring in the texts as they do in nature, that is, not necessarily as the product of explicit formal intentions, but growing organically in the unfolding of a voice in the process of listening to itself. These patterns most likely felt intuitive in the act of composition, showing themselves as patterns only in close reading. As participatory beings in the natural world, we humans authors know these patterns intimately, intuitively.

The meander says something about how attention moves, and if we follow the watery metaphor the ending point isn’t one of coming to a close or a point but actually one of joining or emptying into a larger body of something.

So what do all these shapes tell us about what structure is when we talk about stories?

At best these pictures create a dialogue with the matter of the story. They propose filters and offer a rubric for control or permission in the storylines’s movement. They are bound up with the variable of time most of all. Time, as a duration in which something is approached or consumed, further specified by the speed and focus of that approach. But also time, as a rhythm or meter, understood by its divisions, units, sectioning, beats. When you combine those two — duration and meter — you get time as proportion: how much of one thing, how much of another? Structure rubrics also have something to say about scope and focal point, again giving control or permission for focus on a particular time or space in the story world.

Let’s carry this little packet of simple ideas forward into today’s experiment: that the story shape read for the story’s time line may speak to one or all of duration, meter, and proportion; that the story shape read for the story’s world space speaks to areas of focus.

The experiment at hand is to explore shapes that please you, free drawing various possible shapes and then working backwards from them to distill their guidance into some playful rules. Before the prompt, I want to offer a story shape from one of my own plays that I found using this exercise.

The play is in three parts of roughly equal proportion, though each has a different meter. So part one puts its voices in a 3-channel logic. Part two uses 2-channel logic; Part 3 has only one channel. But even as the play’s voices are winnowed, its area of focus gets progressively larger. The structure map’s timeline is read from the top down. So when two active areas are side by side, that means they are happening simultaneously. Not all of those aspects were apparent in the original shape — at first all I understood was that the play would hold the same center point but comprehend a progressively larger swath of the world. The layer of 3-channel, 2-channel, 1-channel was something I only saw later, and wasn’t something I planned, but perceiving it as a pattern and visualizing the logic inside that original diagram allowed me to trust it as I went into the last stages of finishing the play.

PROMPTS

Free drawing shapes

Set a timer for a duration of your choice, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes so you can push through your first thoughts and a little bit of boredom.

Use the time to draw a set of shapes, each on their own piece of paper.

You can draw a shape found from something that happens to be in front of you. (I see my studio headphones, with two giant donuts, an arch connecting them, a coiled cord wrapping around.)

You can draw a shape by letting your hand move around.

You can draw the shape of something that feels like it has a logical or poetic connection with your story, or has a logic or poetics you would like to make a story from.

You can draw something that feels like a picture, but you can also draw something that feels like a diagram. A particular kind of machine or process?

You can also copy a diagram you find laying around. Or trawl the beautiful online magazine, Diagram, for diagrams.

If you are already in the middle of a process, you might want to source a shape from the image life of the existing material.

Try to have at least four or five shapes.

In at least one of your shapes, play with adding additional Z-dimension. What does this new dimension mean?

(In Speculations, the essay by Mac Wellman I linked in installment 4, he talks about finding radiant dimensions to the x-axis timeline. The radiant, or strange, lies perpendicular to the time line, he says.)

Stage Two

Briefly, for each shape, write a “how to read this map” notation. Note how the time line is to be read. (Right to left? Top to bottom? Bottom right to top left? By turning the paper over and moving in a spiral? Center to margin? Stochastically by throwing darts at it? Try to find at least one map whose time line is read counter-intuitively to the way you are used to reading a page.) Note any information about rhythm, proportion, or focus that should be controlled by the map. Note any other variables you think the map could speak to.

Stage Three

When you have written all your notations, read them over. If you want to keep writing, follow the one with the most heat, by re-drawing it, adding detail or elegance, adding a symbol key, adding captions, place/point names, or any other kind of titling you would like. Think about also giving names or symbols to its units.

Stage Four

Finally, write a notation of your shape in terms of its permissions and its requirements. And from that notation, write a series of playful rules to be followed in structuring a story.

Last thought

Most stories have more than one simultaneous structure. What happens when you combine? What might a parliament (a functioning one) of structures do?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?