The Shape of a Creative Thing

Delving into the book—Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

What shape is your project?

Because I’m a writer, I’m going to ask this question of narrative, but this study of shapes can be applied to any project, from film scores to tech start-ups.

In thinking about the application of shapes to creative works, I suggest a two-pronged approach.

1. Study the shapes of other people’s pre-existing projects.

2. Try on different shapes with your own projects, either by refitting them, or designing them as a shape before you begin. Think of shapes like outfits your projects can slip into, discard, and tailor.

I’ve also offered some writing prompts to “get you in shape,” at the bottom of this post. If you’re reading it in your email, please open this in your browser or on the Substack app to see everything.

Can your project be a shape recurring in nature?

Must stories always feel like a climax?

Can other living patterns shape books?

How can form serve function while still being emotive, meaningful, and organic?

These are primary questions tackled by writer and literary researcher and teacher Jane Alison.

“[Writing craft] It’s magic but a magic that can be mapped, which I suppose makes it technology.” – Jane Alison

The book Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison solicited the desire in me to press my stories into shapes, like a book of dried flowers or a collection of pinned butterflies.

If I had to name a shape for this book, it would be a spring tree. By the end, the leaves fall to reveal a different, harder, well-defined, sharp creature.

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

In Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison identifies nine shapes/patterns from nature that a fictional novel might exploit for structure, in addition to looking at the texture, movement, flow/speed, and color of novels. This inspiring book is part writing craft tome and part literary critique.

The Shape of Novels as Life/Cum/Gym Memberships

American writer and literary theorist Ronald Sukenick said that “instead of reproducing the form of previous fiction, the form of the novel should seek to approximate the shape of our experience.” He wanted to move away from the novel as a sex-arc, as a climax, or series of climaxes, to depart from ejaculation.

He also said, “Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back.”

But what is the shape of life/novels if not the graph of a man’s climax?

(Stay with me.)

The three-act structure of many books, plays, and movies is similar to a sexual arc or the lifespan arc of birth, life, death.

Typical male sex pattern

Estrogen cycle graph for women

Many bell curves make this same shape.

Novels could look like gym memberships by age curves.

But for literature, these common bell curves, which also match three-act structures graphed by the number of words, need not be the case.

Books, projects, songs, and stories could take many pictorial and multi-dimensional forms.

Why do we insist on 3-4 acts? Why not 1 or 10?

“Our brains recognize and want patterns.” – Jane Alison

I’m sure this desire for conflict+resolution or dissonance+resolve is linked to human physiology and instincts, but let’s push beyond our natural tendencies.

Alternative Shapes.

First off, people don’t all have the same sex-arcs; arousal and fulfillment shapes vary by individuals, sexes/genders, hormone configurations, ages, and cultures.

I remember attending an undergrad human sexuality class at UC Berkeley and being SUPER surprised at the differences in climax experiences documented by biological men vs biological women.

Male vs Female typical sex arcs from Wikipedia

You can consider how a novel would feel written in the top vs the bottom graph above and how one might be a thriller and one might feel like a family saga or literary fiction.

If you asked different people to “draw the shape of sexual climax” or the shape of a book, you would also get different answers from each person.

Like the varied sex-arcs, we also have varied life arcs. Here are some examples:

A book need not be a bell curve or a line. It can contain symmetry like a leaf.

Narrative as Nature (Shapes)

“Texts often begin with absence, loss, or trouble: black holes can engender narrative.” — Jane Alison

Besides the bell curve, Jane Alison explores eight other patterns/shapes drawn from nature:

1.     Waves

2.     Wavelets

3.     Meanders

4.     Spirals

5.     Radials or Explosions

6.     Networks and Cells

7.     Fractals

8.     Tsunami

For each shape, the author offers examples and text samples to support her claims. She especially goes into depth exploring three books:

1. The Emigrants by W.G. Selbald (Greman, 1992)

2. The Lover by Marguerite Duras (French, 1984)

3. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (British, 2004)

There are other novels and novellas cited, but these get the most page-time.

Shapes can be a book’s skeleton or flesh. One shape she neglects is a perfect circle, though she does discuss an orange and an orange tree.

Why a “love triangle” but not a love circle? I ask myself.

“Plot can “swarm around characters.” — Jane Alison

Italo Calvino said that his book, Invisible Cities, was shaped like a crystal.

What does the crystal shape conjure? Refracting narratives? Multi-sided characters? See-through structures?

Have you read a crystal-shaped book?

Color and Texture

If we apply shapes to projects, what about also analyzing their color and texture?

How does white space and formatting impact narratives?

If The Handmaid’s Tale is clearly red, blue, and gray, what color is Lolita? Green and black? With desire comes texture and touch.

“Imagine a field so parched a network of cracks has crawled through it.” — Jane Alison

Now imagine that field as a book.

Is there a gradient or slow or fast change of color in the novel? What about the book’s temperature? Is it hot, cold, lukewarm? Why? What words signal these elements?

And texture: how does the repetition of words like grit, sand, and cement change the tactile/sensory experience of a book? What words contain desire and sexual heat?

StoryTime and Flow

“A story covering millennia can flit by in six seconds.” – Jane Alison

How are slow burns structured vs page-turners? What creates the speed?

Of all the sections in the book, I found the one about time to be the most useful and fascinating.

Stories can dilate; an event that would take five minutes in real life can last ten pages.

Conversely, stories can accelerate. An entire generation of humans can live and die in a paragraph.

Flow is contained in sentence structure, the use of crotts, breaks, italics, and more.

Alison suggests examining and mixing speeds and time to improve your writing and create new pathways and sensations, connections between author and reader.

The book also offers many examples of different “time movements” and writing techniques for showing the passage of time at different speeds.

She graphs the primary speeds as:

1. Pause/Single Word Emphasized = Frozen Time

2. Dilation of Experience = Slow Time

3. Scene = Real Time

4. Summary = Fast Time

5. Ellipsis or Gap = Jump Time

One technique for increasing movement/flow is numbering things. By adding numerical sequences Alison explains, citing the case of Dorthe Nors’ novella, Days, from the collection So Much for That Winter, in which every line is numbered like a shopping list, you create forward motion.

(*Way before reading Meander, Spiral, Explode, I wrote a short horror story that was numbered like instructions. Maybe I’ll share it here for Halloween.)

Rare/New Words

Meander, Spiral, Explode is beautifully written and uses many interesting words to apply to creative works. I’ve added quick definitions to the less obvious ones and links for ones that are too complicated to explain briefly.

1.     Coriolis Force (the force that causes things to spin in different directions depending on geographical location)

2.     Allo-centric vs Ego-centric knowledge

3.     Parataxis/Paratactic (short and arranged side by side with no joints: "Veni, vidi, vici.")

4.     Hypotaxis (uses joiners to connect separate phrases into a more lengtht compound concept)

5.     Oulipists

6.     Nouveau-Romanists

7.     Loiterature (literature that loiters)

8.     Narratologists

9.     Discurro (looping discourse)

10.  Stanza as a “room” (its original meaning)

11.  Phonemes

13.  Narrative hydraulics

14.  “Story Time” vs “Real Time”

15.  Complimentary/mirroring symmetry vs oppositional symmetry

16.  Embodied cognition

17.  Profligacy (reckless extravagance)

18.  Conflict boulders (obstacles for your main characters)

19.  Digressive loops

20.  Schuss (a straight downhill run)

21.  Moiré

22.  Prolepsis (Jumping forward in time.)

23.  Skein (strings like hair)

24.  Leitmotifs (recurrent themes)

25.  Chronological Disorder

26.  Discandied (dissolving)

27.  Synaptic Links

28.  Sierpinski Triangle (triangles that fit triangles within them)

29.  Faux Non-Fictional

30.  Dendroglyphs (symbols carved into trees)

31.  Story Cameos

32.  Syllabary

33.  Entomology mated with etymology.

34.  Orison (a prayer)

35.  Aristotle’s Hylomorphism

36.  Vortex Street

Could we also apply the utilization of different shapes to our writing practices or techniques? What about applying shapes to reading habits?

Words can “defamiliarize the ordinary, making us see the “trivial.” – Jane Alison

Sentences that all follow the same syntax are boring. However, great authors often repeat syntax and sentence structure in elaborate patterns not easily identifiable to the human eye without careful analysis.

We struggle “to pass through the skrim of unknowing—that is to translate, to carry the known over to the known.” — Jane Alison

Is this why humans must correlate everything to orgasm, birth, life, and death?

Writing Activities/Prompts:

1.  Write the same scene at different “speeds.”

2.  Write a page-long sentence using every kind of punctuation and every letter.

3.   Graph a story or chapter into patterns using the following codes:

a.     _ = Summary

b.     -- = SCENE

c.     * = Character reflection

d.     ^ = pause/time, setting, or POV change/break

4.    Write a short story where the main character turns themselves into an object. In the process make your tense and pov change.

5.    Write a flash fiction story based on any self-portrait by Cindy Sherman.

6.    Write a story about a picture that you never took of an important moment of your life that was never documented.

7.    Write a bridge between two, unlike items.

8.    Write a story about a broken shoelace.

9.    Write a short story in the form of a numbered list.

10.  Write a short story where an inanimate object engages in human acts.

11.  Write a short story in the format of a calendar. Write it on a calendar.

If you’re working on a creative project that has a special shape, I’d love to hear about it. I’m also always looking for folks who want to contribute guest posts or be interviewed. If this is you, please reach out.