Meander spiral explode catapult9/25/2023 ![]() 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. ![]() The Primary Elements section grounds us not in the elements of fiction as “character, plot, place, etc.,” but “down to true elements, the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes.” With plentiful examples, Alison examines texture, color, and narrative speed and flow, drawing our attention to “our elementary particles, the visual, auditory, and temporal units with which we first design,” and laying the foundation we’ll need for the deeper examination of patterns to follow.Ītterns other than the arc are everywhere. ![]() Next, we can be conscious, deliberate, innovative, in the paths we carve through our words.” She returns to Aristotle, not for the dramatic arc that has forever aligned form in Western fiction to that of ancient tragedy, but to share that she loves how he “likens specimens of literary art to living creatures, having organic unity-indeed, having souls.” Text comes from texere, after all: to weave. Just before allowing that the arc, in “its natural form, a wave,” is “elegant,” and establishing a series of other patterns fiction can borrow from nature, she encourages us to notice that “visual elements such as texture, color, or symmetry can open windows and let us design as much as write. I doubt it.”) This introduction (if not the book) urgently belongs in the creative writing classroom and workshop.Īlison first establishes writers as pattern makers: “We writers go about our observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns-ways in which experience shapes itself, ways we can replicate its shape with words.” Then she draws on John Berger and Northrop Frye to illuminate writing and reading alike as ways of seeing: “although we think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, of course it’s interestingly visual, too a story’s as much house or garden as song.”Īlison’s exuberance with the subject matter is contagious, her approach both personal and deeply researched. Gardner does talk about other structures for fiction, but he firmly favors the causality of the arc and says that Aristotle would, too. The introduction alone serves as a master class in interrogating our preconceptions, tracing the narrative arc from Freytag’s triangle back to its Aristotelian origins before introducing other ways of seeing, while also serving some delightful shade (“Novels didn’t exist for Aristotle and weren’t Freytag’s subject. While the structure of this important new entry into the craft book/literary criticism space is familiar-an introduction and epilogue bookending two sections, Primary Elements and Patterns-the content is fresh, with each section comprised of chapters deeply exploring a diverse array of global texts, from Tobias Wolff to Caryl Phillips, Sandra Cisneros to Joyce Carol Oates. Alison has created a virtual page-turner. In Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison challenges our notion of the narrative arc as the paragon of form in Western fiction. ![]() 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. I hope…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. Elements Contest 2018: Character | Dialogue Setting. ![]()
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