Structures
Structures
Walk the secret paths that stories follow
Of all the wonderful illustrations that Carol Michelin came up with for the collection of writing exercises I’m currently working on, this one’s my favourite. It features her original take on the symbols from George Spencer-Brown’s work that I’ve used to map story structure, the Quest structure being the structure highlighted in the central rectangle:
The Quest structure is a simple and commonly found structure - often appearing as a nested structure, or as part of a larger group that combine to form a multi-layered narrative.
Are there structures you gravitate towards naturally as a writer?
Are there structures you haven’t yet tried to use?
In this penultimate month of writing course and competition featuring themes from my book, we’ll be veering away from the more familiar story structures such as the Quest structure and looking at some more unusual ones.
Maybe this is a chance to try out some new approaches to using story structures you don’t generally work with and see what happens.
You’re invited to take inspiration from Carol Michelon’s illustration and come up with a response to her artwork. Your response should be no longer than 500 words, and be accompanied by an outline of the story structure you used to plan it out.
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises.
What do you have to lose?
To help you, and because this is both a course and a competition, let me define what I mean by story structure, and how it differs from plot patterning.
In short, story structure is all about ordering the key events in a character’s story line in ‘bare bones’ form according to the ‘time of the tale’, where they happen one after the other in chronological order.
Plot patterning is all about ordering those events based on principles related to the ‘time of the telling’, as dictated by how you want the reader to experience the story.
In this post, I’m going to look at two key structures featured in my book, Story and Structure: A complete guide: the Perpetual Motion structure and the Ki-Shō-Ten-Ketsu structure.
The Perpetual Motion structure
There are a few stories that follow what I call ‘the Perpetual Motion’ structure, in which a sequence of events repeats itself over and over again.
These stories usually follow planetary cycles (the rising and setting of the sun) (the waxing and waning of the moon), the cycle of life. You’ll recognise it in songs like Solomon Grundy, or Found a Peanut. The example I give in Story and Structure is that of the story of The Moon and His Two Wives:
Exercise: Where you end … is where you begin
Write three endings that allow you to loop back to the beginning of a story.
Example
The knights burst back into the city walls, they had won the battle, everyone was happy… until a dragon’s roar followed by wingbeats was heard in the distance.
Allita
They got home safely … only to find …
And they lived happily ever after in the stone castle … until they woke up to find themselves …
Exercise: Spinning a never-ending story
Choose one of the examples from your group of three to develop what happens between the starting and the ending points – limit the middle of your story to around 6 to 8 stages.
Example
The kingdom was in a panic; another dragon was coming to burn the city down. The king rallied the knights to go fight the dragon before it entered the city. They chased the dragon down; a large battle ensued. The dragon was strong but the knights had strength in numbers. Eventually, the dragon was defeated. Returning to the king once more, the knights burst back into the city walls. They had won the battle, everyone was happy … until a dragon’s roar followed by wingbeats was heard in the distance…
Allita
I’ll outline the Ki-Shō-Ten-Ketsu structure in a separate post. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of this month’s competition theme and rules:
You’re invited to take inspiration from Carol Michelon’s illustration and come up with a response to her artwork. Your response should be no longer than 500 words, and be accompanied by an outline of the story structure you used to plan it out.
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises.
What do you have to lose?
Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Wednesday 25th January 2023 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller Project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story; Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide, a Firebird Award winner, NAA Gold Award winner; Readers’ Choice Book Awards Bronze Award Winner; INA Book of the Year Award Finalist; IPNE Book Award Finalist; Honourable Mention in the SoCal Book Festival Awards; shortlisted for The People’s Book Prize. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell.
With a breathtakingly simple and yet profound handful of symbols, Conrad has created a flexible and precise system for analyzing the inner structure of stories. With this lens he lays bare the absolute essence of all the imaginable story forms, from fairy tales and quest stories to tragedies, riddles and koans. It's a powerful tool for storytellers and scholars and will change forever how you view the simple but profound act of saying “Once upon a time..”
Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey
I’d be keen to hear from YOU - what unusual fundamental story structures (rather than narrative plot patterns) do you like to use? Are there structures you haven’t yet tried but would like to?
Leave a comment below!