Meander, Spiral, Explode. Jane Alison

       INTRODUCTION

      In 1926 an Irish designer named Eileen Gray, who’d created lots of gorgeous, strange furniture but scarcely a house, began designing a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that would drive the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had just announced that a house was “a machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start designing, Gray studied how she and her housekeeper moved throughout the day; she made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns—loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room—an organic choreography. The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this choreography: a mouthlike entry pulled you in; screens and mirrors unfolded from walls like wings; windows and shutters opened in all directions for the right air, light, or view at any time of day. On her plans she drew lines showing ways you could move, look, and live in this house: her pathways transformed to design.

      I love how Eileen Gray designed, and really love how much it maddened the bombastic Corbu. I think that Gray’s way of working from life to art could describe writing, too. We writers go about our observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experience shapes itself, ways we can replicate its shape with words. We create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when the reader’s done—levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, sees the pattern of the whole.

      I used the verb see several times just now because, although we think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, of course it’s interestingly visual, too; a story’s as much house or garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” Glancing at a page, we first see text as texture: marks in a white field leave enough space to feel airy or form dense blocks, even weighted with a sludge of footnotes. Looking closely, we see each word as a picture: the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces, and if we never learned to read, both parts would focus on faces. As we pass through the words’ looks and into their meanings, our way of “seeing” shifts, now absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language. We might develop another layer of vision, too, growing aware of elements that give the story structure: a late scene might mirror an earlier one, creating a sense of symmetry, or a subtle use of color might render an overall hue. Reading on, we travel not just through places conjured in the story, but through the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block. Neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. A river, roller coaster, wave.

      Given all of this, my writer self thinks two things: first, being aware of visual elements such as texture, color, or symmetry can open windows and let us design as much as write. Text comes from texere, after all: to weave. Next, we can be conscious, deliberate, innovative, in the paths we carve through our words.

      Goethe calls the path through a text a “red thread” pulling you forward. Henry James speaks of the “figure in the carpet.” Ivo Vidan says that what stays in the mind is a “condensed Gestalt,” not the book. I like best how Ronald Sukenick puts it: “Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back.”

      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 (or triangle or pyramid). If you ask Google how to structure a story, your