This is a book for writers. I suppose it could also be a book for readers, especially those in the academic, literary criticism vein. At any rate, it had been zinging across my path like a ping pong ball, for something like a year, as every writer around me read it and talked about it and recommended it. And yet, I was not super into it. I read it. It had some interesting things to say and was written in a thoughtful, calm, (academic,) even literary voice, which I think is what made it so popular with the writers (and will probably recommend it for use in college classes). But I didn’t think it said anything much exciting or innovative, nothing that I didn’t already know by just being a writer and a reader. So for all the claims made on it (including using it to justify a structure so weird it was alienating which is another way of saying lazy plotting), I was underwhelmed by the content.

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison is a book about alternative structure in story-telling. It is, according to what others told me, a treatise meant to overthrow this outdated (and very plebian) notion that the hero’s journey (or whatever you want to call it) exists because it is what speaks to the human imagination, that it is old as the hills, and that it can he found at the heart of all successful stories. No! Indeed, there are other ways of telling stories which are not linear, not built on the rise and fall of the old, mountain-shaped, plot diagram! Filled with examples (from literary fiction, explicitly, if I remember correctly), Meander, Spiral, Explode is Alison’s apologetic for abandoning the usual structure—for critiquing it and possibly poo-poo-ing it—and for experimenting with story structure, and this for the betterment of literature. Vive la innovation! Sections of the book are devoted to specific, alternative structures (though the list is, obviously, not complete), what she calls “patterns”: waves; wavelets; meanders; spirals; radials or explosions; networks and cells; fractals; and tsunami? (yes, with the question mark).

It’s not unusual for me to argue with a book as I read it. This doesn’t always mean that I don’t appreciate the book. But sometimes it does mean that I have a problem either with the logic or the basic assumptions, and I had a problem here with some basic assumptions, namely that the patterns she is naming are mutually exclusive to a more traditional plotline. (I don’t believe they are.) I also find fault with the working definition of plot or pattern or structure or form or whatever, and we’ll talk more about that in a blog I’ll be writing soon. But the short of it is that there is a difference between plot/pattern as a journey through the story from page 1 to “the end” and plot/pattern as a journey through the actual story, like in its more chronological presentation. Alison does not distinguish between these (because, quite frankly, I’ve never seen anyone else distinguish between them which I think is a gaping hole in literary criticism and creative writing education, but whatever). Which means that we sometimes lose our way in understanding her patterns, I think. It is much more common, you see, to vary the pattern in the telling than it is in the story’s storyboard-y plot. I will move on, because I could get stuck here for days. Suffice it to say that Alison and I were not always on the same page.

But I was still looking forward to exploring these interesting patterns which Alison was about to elaborate on. I will give her this: many of the examples she gives us are beautifully written. And I was happy to sit and muse about pattern in the books and stories I am reading and writing, right now. I will be considering her patterns as I deal with structure in my own stories, for sure, and I will be on a hunt for pattern in stories I read, in the future, too. But I was underwhelmed, overall, by what I read in Meander. Personally, I tend to write stories—novels in particular—in what she would call spirals, explosions, or even cells. I have purposefully reigned in some of these tendencies because I have found that they lose the reader if they don’t also contain a more traditional story pattern. But that’s just it: the basic story pattern is still contained inside the other, if we want to do everything for the reader from entertain to instruct. I didn’t find that Alison’s celebration of alternative pattern was anything but saying the same old thing in a different way. I wrote in the margin, at one point, “I’m beginning to think this is just a way of seeing the same thing… or at the most, styles.”

There is a phase that most humans go through on their journey of maturation, which I call the “head up their own a*#” stage. For people who remain in the academic fields long after young adulthood, there is a danger of stagnating in this stage, even multiplying on it. I find this happens in the writing world, plenty, and has caused a false dichotomy between the more practical writers and the more idealistic writers. While I feel like Meander, Spiral, Explode has been used to argue against a hero’s journey sort of format for stories, I think (and have argued on this blog) that the differences between higher forms of innovation versus tried and true forms that engage the masses are highly exaggerated. (By the way, Alison’s actual thesis is more that story forms emerge from natural patterns we find in nature.) In that case, I enjoyed Meander, Spiral, Explode—and you can, too!—for sitting still and considering the ways that stories are being told to you and, more importantly for me, the many ways that they can be told. (In truth, I think this idea could have been done in an article and what I learned from this book was limited, still, it’s worth considering reading it.) Very few stories would not benefit from careful attention to their structure, including the entertaining of more out-there presentations. Yes, experiment with the pattern! Listen to the story and see what interesting way it might be better told! But don’t underplay the reader. Stories, if they are to be shared, should be clear and approachable, and drawing from tradition is one surefire way to understand the magical mechanics of how humans communicate, imagine, explore.

QUOTES:

”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” (p24).

“So, a fundamental way to design narrative is to work with a range within our smallest units, from syllable to word to phrase, clause, and sentence, much as you’d plant a garden with different leaves: pixelated baby’s breath, spike of aloe, palm” (p31).

“The same epiphanies every week…” (p96).

“’Part of me wanted help,’ he says. ‘But there was another part’” (p100).

“The questions a spatial narrative asks are not ‘what happens next?’ but ‘why did this happen?’ and, more complexly, ‘what grows in my mind as I read?’” (p202).