Welcome to Litsy!

I was 100% on board for this book about alternative dramatic structures to the Aristotelian arc, and was along for the ride for the first half. I still agree with the premise that other structures are possible & can be successful, particularly for narratives outside the context of Western heteronormative patriarchy. She lost me after spirals though & the remainder felt like a dogged attempt generate a long enough manuscript for a full length book.

Down with narrative arc! Death to climax! Alison makes a case for non-standard narrative structures, praising patterns in nature: meander, spiral, explosion, radial, fractal, cell, tsunami. Some good examples (Sebald, García Márquez, Lispector), but tons of omissions (Calvino, Borges, Pavić, Vonnegut, Bolaño), few “stun gun” insights. Section on pacing, “narrative hydraulics,” Wolff‘s “Bullet in the Brain” strong. Narrative by accumulation. 2019

Has anyone here ever read Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer? He has a brief chapter about story structure, and points out nonlinear narrative structures that, when drawn, clearly come from nature: spirals, anemones, neurons. But it ends there. "Meander Spiral Explode" is a brilliantly clear deep-dive into this idea, exploring narrative shapes (SEPARATE from plot/character development), how to spot them, and what they do to "create magic on the page."

New library haul! Both of these have been on my TBR for a long time now. Excited!

A thoughtful book about different types of narrative patterns (waves, cells, fractals, meanders, spirals, explosions, etc) rather than the linear plot. It was a really fun way to challenge how we look at non-linear plots but a number of the examples she cited were pieces I had not read and had an emphasis on short works (short stories, novellas, short novels) with the longest book cited (Cloud Atlas) being used only once as an example of tsunami.