Meander, Spiral, Explode. Jane Alison
narratives that hint at structures inside them other than an arc, structures that create an inner sensation of traveling toward something and leave a sense of shape behind, so that the stories feel organized—not just slice-of-life. Recently I began dissecting some of these to see what they had in common. What I found: many structures that recur in these texts coincide with fundamental patterns in nature.
Matter fills space according to a host of natural laws that again and again yield the same patterns. This I did not know until recently, when I read Peter Stevens’s brilliant 1974 book Patterns in Nature while riding the Amtrak to New York. I actually went through a cascade of epiphanies as I read, turning again and again to stare out the window at the world Stevens had just transformed. Philip Ball’s recent book with the same name expands and illustrates gorgeously how a cluster of patterns recurs at every scale in our world, atomic to galactic. The wave is one. There’s a reason we’re drawn to it, whether viewing a drama with swelling and collapsing tensions or watching entranced as one wave after another breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy charging static matter until that energy is spent and equilibrium returns, elegant and satisfying. Arcs or waves exist all around as waves of light and sound. They can create powerful narratives, but it might be more freeing, as writers, if we think not of a story always following an arc, but of a reader’s experience absorbing the story as doing so. A tentative entry leads to greater involvement until the words stop and you’re back in your own world.
But patterns other than the arc are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.” SPIRAL: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus. MEANDER: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens. RADIAL or EXPLOSION: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite. BRANCHING and other FRACTAL patterns: self-replication at lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds. And CELLULAR patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool; these can look like cells or, inversely, like a net.
These patterns aren’t just around us; they inform our bodies, too. We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas, irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. Our brains recognize and want patterns. We follow natural patterns without a thought: coiling a garden hose, stacking boxes, creating a wavering path when walking along the shore. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander, heartbreak can be so great we feel we’ll explode. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn’t they form our narratives, too?
The digressiveness of “loiterature,” the cellularity typical of the most spatial fiction, a text with various branches, a narrative arranged like an orange: maybe all of these different approaches can be seen within the larger scheme of natural patterns. What seems to be the generative impulse or starting point for a story; how does it move in time; how does it deploy repetition? A digressive narrative meanders; at times it flows quickly and at times barely at all, often loops back on itself, yet ultimately it moves onward. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with a system of rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances, deepening into the past, perhaps, or rising into the future. Essayists speak of spiraling form in reflective personal pieces; reflective, lyrical novels might do the same. A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core, possibly branching on indefinitely. And cellular narratives come in like parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a network of meaning.
Meander, spiral, radial, fractal, cell. Perhaps there are even correlations between kinds of stories and certain patterns, like tragedians following the arc.
This way of seeing structure in narrative might seem reductive; that’s partly my point. And you might see slightly different patterns from those I see in the narratives examined in the coming pages. But what I hope is that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural, that evolving writers won’t feel oppressed by the arc, that they’ll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they’ll discover ways to design, being conscious or playful with possibilities. How can you spread color across a story? Make texture with different kinds of words or sentences or zones of white space? Create repetitions or symmetries to strengthen (or trouble) a sense of movement? Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes, these elements working beyond or with narrated incidents to create further motion and sense.
In this book I’ll look at ways that writers have done all of this, exploiting the visual and finding patterns other than the arc inside their stories. This will be a museum of specimens.
Before flying overhead to view spirals, meanders, or branching patterns in stories, I want to look at text close-up: how it feels to travel word-by-word as the narrative unfurls around you. This is the first way we move through a story: one-way motion, word after word until the end. Narratologists call it movement on the discourse or textual level. (Discourse comes from discurro, to run back and forth: think of your eyes reading lines on this page.) Other movement takes place inside the content of the story: what happens, whether things happen chronologically or are tangled and must be unraveled, whether you move less through events than through ideas, and so on. These storyworld movements can be more complex than the word-after-word transit and form the large patterns we’ll look at soon. First, that one-way trip.*
A physical way to envision the trip: think of swimming along a river. Stroking, kicking, floating, you’d feel or see the water’s chills and warm plumes, its siltiness or clarity, when it burbles over pebbles or grows still, when it’s tangled with greenery, when it sparkles or flows through shade. Moving word-by-word through a story is analogous: we “see,” “hear,” “feel” what we read as we flow forward, line after line.
Fine for a metaphor, but how do writers create those primary sensations of speed or sluggishness, transparency or murk, that a reader meets in our medium? What actually are the elements of our medium? Most craft books say that the “elements of fiction” are character, plot, place, etc. But I want to go down to true elements, the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes. These gather to form words, which line up as sentences, which clump in paragraphs or crots (prose stanzas, stanza being Italian for “room”), everything flowing over white space. With all of this we create the medium, or texture, through which a reader moves.
Text and texture are joined at the feet, for both come from texere.
Although we first absorb printed letters or words as pictures, we also “hear” them: neural activity registering sound is about the same whether a word is read silently or aloud; a part of the brain called Broca’s area generates the “sound” of a word internally. So, reading, we see a picture and “hear” a sound, and in both cases we experience the word in time. (The sense of a word, its clarity or cascade of connotations, naturally also affects how long a word feels to us.) In English, the sounds of letters and syllables are so varied that their length isn’t as measurable as scored notes of music, but we still sense differences among them. The letter