How do you make a story flow?
Digging deep into story structure to explore the secret life of story
It was windy last week. Walking by the lake in Wimbledon Park, I watched the wind pushing at the water, creating wavelets that hit the banks and pushed back again in an ever-changing fluid tapestry of movement in which light was caught, pulsating, winking. The lake is life; each wave, each pulse of light an element of story – a fluid, living structure that we love to dive into and delight in doing so.
Dive deep below the flowing surface of any story, and you’ll find storylines that form the channels and banks. They shape the paths that the waves and light specks take to tell their stories.
We dip into these stories. We engage with their structures. We explore them. We follow their forms. We trace the paths we take with words. We map them out. We give them names.
But why do so many writers and literary analysist end up confusing the reader’s story line with the story lines that their characters follow?
The Hero’s Journey (typically associated with Joseph Campbell’s work on the Monomyth that many epics follow) is one well-known structure.
Rags to Riches (typically associated with Christopher Booker’s work - one of seven plot types he identifies) is another. Voyage and Return (often associated with stories like Sinbad the Sailor that comes from one of the oral transmissions of the vast nested oral tradition of stories that make up the so-called 1,001 nights (The Arabian Nights) is a third.
In mapping the shape of a story as a whole, all analysts end up doing is mapping the reader’s journey through the story, as it is told at the time of the telling. That is like trying to map the shape of the lake rather than tracing the path that an individual wave takes as it carries the light from one part of the pond to another.
Mapping the shape of the lake may be useful in setting the limits within which the story has to stay. As for analysing the path of the story, it typically results in a rather vague waveform. I’m sure you’ve seen the kinds of approaches that Kurt Vonnegut or Robert McKee take to analysing story as a whole in this way.
The problem with this approach is that it tends to be either version specific or generic. If the former, as in McKee’s analysis of Cinderella, then where an analysis works for one version, it may not work for another. If the latter, as in Vonnegut’s approach to analysing the qualitative difference in story structures generally, the different line graphs differentiate, but lack the detail needed to plot scenes or craft individual character development.
Why do so many writers and literary analysist end up confusing the reader’s story line with the story lines that their characters follow?
What if there were a clearer, simpler way to map the flow of story? A way of looking at story that would help you shape your story as a whole to ensure it flowed while also being able to give you the granularity you need to follow individual characters’ story lines as they unfold through a story?
I use six simple basic visually intuitive symbols drawn from George Spencer-Brown’s work Laws of Form to map the way in which story lines flow. You can map individual characters’ story lines with them as they unfold at the time of the tale. You can also map the flow of the story line that your ideal reader follows as the story unfolds for them at the time of the telling. Here’s an example of a commonly-found story structure: the Quest structure, as it appears in the popular version of the story of The Three Little Pigs.
In short …
Not only can 18 distinct structures be identified, but the approach allows us to find out new information about how they interrelate, and why they differ in the first place. This allows us to check we are using the optimal structure for a particular situation that a character might face. And that allows a greater sense of flow to emerge in the telling.
I thought of the ebb and flow of this story structure as I stood at the side of the lake at Wimbledon Park, watched the waves, and wondered. Sometimes I watched the track an individual wave took as far as I could as long as I could. Sometimes I took a mental step back and observed how I engaged with the waves - following the individual paths that the waves took; switching to a larger-scale sense of wonder at how the paths merged and flowed in relation to each other; tracing the patterns of flow at different levels.
At every level, whatever I was looking at, I traced the same basic patterns - patterns of tension and release; patterns of successful or unsuccessful flow towards a destination; places where wavelets met in harmony and places where they merged into one another and collapsed temporarily into chaos, only to re-emerge once again.
At every level, they followed a pattern of ebb and flow which mapped out a story structure.
Writing a story is a bit like diving into a sea of story. To follow a clear path through the sea, you need a reliable and simple way of navigating that tells you something about where you are in relation to where you’ve been and where you want to get to.
Rather than try to map the structure of a story as a whole, it makes far more sense to map out the way in which events in individual characters’ story lines unfold, in chronological order, at the ‘time of the tale’ than it does to try to map the shape of a narrative in which events might be placed in non-chronological order, alluded to but not mentioned directly, or even told using a nested structure.
Go with the flow - the flow of story.