Hello structure lovers, structure seekers, and structure evaders!
We kick off a new season with the brilliant Jane Alison and a wide-ranging conversation about form and structure in fiction and memoir. Brooke and Grant were so inspired by Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane’s her book about craft and the theory of writing, that this episode is dedicated to the ideas around structure and form that are at the heart of that book. This is a nerdy, writerly deep dive to welcome listeners to a new season. Also of note is a new feature, Substackin’, which will be rounding out each episode this season. This week’s Substackin’ is inspired by Brooke’s post.
A few Write-minded guests who experiment with and appreciate structure and form:
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke Warner, back in the saddle alongside my cohost of six years—Grant Faulkner. And Grant, I can’t believe it—six years. Where did the time go? Welcome back to a new season.
Grant: Holy moly, it seems that we’re strangely veterans now of the podcasting eras. More than 300 episodes, two Pulitzer prize winners, and more than a million downloads. And we have to account for COVID time in all that so it’s really more like ten years. But we’re back. New year, new season. Back to school time and back to the grind time. Did you have a summer?
Brooke: I mean—sort of. I had a few good trips. I had some amazing times with my partner and my son. And I completed this big transition to Simon & Schuster for my publishing imprints, so that feels good. I think I can say that the summer of 2024 was not the most relaxing summer, but it was a summer.
Grant: I have a hunch, Brooke, that we each need to make a resolution to relax. I also have a hunch we won’t do that, haha, because as I was explaining to my mom recently, I’m most at peace when I’m working. So my summer was a working summer, but in really good ways. I went to two great writing conferences and presented and taught—at the Chucanut Conference in Bellingham, where, lo and behold, I saw you, and then I was writer-in-residence at Chautauqua this summer. Both were tremendous honors and included a good taste of vacation, but I had to work. Especially on this top secret big adventure of a venture that I’m doing with you. This is one of those annoying hints listeners where I’m not going to tell you what it is, just that it’s huge, earth-shattering, transformative, and more.
Brooke: I for one appreciate these people who invited you to Chucanut and Chautauqua this summer just to say those two words in close proximity. And also yes, to dropping hints. That’s good. We’re gonna drag that one out for a little while, but listeners, just know that you really will be the first to know what we’re doing because we’ll drop an episode about it when the timing is right. Which will be this year—so soon. But before we get there, Grant, it’s the beginning of this new season, which always makes me conscious of who we’re bringing on and what we’re going to talk about. And I’m thrilled about today’s show, and getting to talk to Jane Alison. If you’re a book or writing nerd like us, listeners, then you get as excited by authors who write about writing as you do authors who write good fiction and memoir. But it should be said that most people who write about writing are of course well versed in their forms and genres—and Jane Alison is a novelist, who’s also written a memoir. But I want to geek out a bit on her book Meander, Spiral, Explode because that’s the book that put her on my radar. And Grant, I’m not sure that you know that I’m completely obsessed with structure, and yet for some reason I didn’t read this book until this year even though it came out in 2019. And I’m just going to blame the black hole of COVID for that one. But what are your feelings about structure? Is it something you spend a lot of time thinking about? What’s your approach?
Grant: I’m very obsessed about structure, and especially the kinds of structures Jane discusses because she dispels the dominance of structures like the ever popular Freytag’s Pyramid, which she says is, well, like a male erection and orgasm, so she searches for alternative structures, like those shapes in her title: meander, spiral, explode. I had many similar ideas about a looser structure when I discovered her book, but she goes really deep into them, and writes about structure in a really poetic way, so I found her book literally liberating because of the validation she offers. We need validation as authors. I was so happy to see you taken with Jane’s book because I saw your post on Substack back in March, and I went back to look at it in preparation for today. You wrote that one of the things you were most taken by in Meander, Spiral, Explode was how Jane’s ideas about structure overlap with what you teach in your memoir classes. But it sounds like her approach is also different than yours. Would you offer up a bit of a compare/contrast?
Brooke: Yeah, absolutely. Jane does a lot in her book to deconstruct traditional western storytelling structures, which I love but which has never been a specific focus I’d looked at our considered too much before reading her book. The title of the book, Meander, Spiral, Explode, speaks to nature patterns, which she offers up as ways to think about how we unfold story. She covers these structures and I’m just going to read from her book for a second:
Spiral: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head or a chambered Nautilus; Meander: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens; Radial or Explosion: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite. Branching and other fractal patterns: self replication at a lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds. And Cellular patterns—repeating shapes you see in honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool.
Beautiful, right? I love these considerations, and she writes about how much the brain recognizes and wants patterns. I know this to be true because as a reader—I look for patterns. I’m satisfied by patterns. And when you look at these patterns and apply them to book structure, it’s great food for thought and consideration for writers. The meandering path aligns with the linear structure I teach in my memoir classes. The spiral is what I call circular, and frankly it’s not all that common in memoir, maybe more so in fiction. But this would be a story that starts in medias res, where you have an inciting incident that the rest of the story then circles and keeps coming back to. The example we use in our memoir classes of this structure is Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. In fiction I think about Ian McKeown’s Atonement, whose central event is a girl who witnesses something that she thinks is one thing, but turns out to be another, and the entire novel circles this story of misperception and its incredible consequences. Jane writes about the radial and cellular patterns, which I don’t teach. And then I do teach a couple structures that she doesn’t touch on—like the braided structure and the framed structure. And then we have overlap on what she calls the fractal structure, which I call fragmented. I loved reading her way of thinking about structure and adding it to how I already think about structure–and it’s very helpful for writers to have a handle on all these different structures that exist, mainly because they’re a container for the work, and the same story can be held by any one of these choices. Yet, the one that you choose is the vehicle for your story. I’ve always been taken by the creative force of the container. I think how a story is told is as important as the story itself, actually.
Grant: I totally agree, Brooke, and we use similar language. I use the word container for story structure, especially when talking about flash fiction, because different containers create different stories. I also believe that one’s aesthetic reflects their existential position in life, so an aesthetic that offers different contours and shapes to tell a story in affects the substance of the story, the statement of the story, because the writer is taking you on a trip, essentially, and there are many different roads to take and different vehicles to travel in. I know that we want to touch upon form in this chat, too, because structure and form are interlinked. Basically structure is the framework and form is the execution.
Structure speaks to how the book is organized.
It’s the framework for your story and speaks to the order of events (chronological or nonchronological) and the choices you make about how the story will unfold on the page. Will it be fragmented or braided or framed?
Form is the shape your story takes.
Form is about the choices you make on the page within the contours of the structure you choose. I have to confess that I don’t get too hung up on these definitions because I tend to tell a story mostly via my intuition and trust the rhythms and the contours I see in the story. In fact, I write mainly through rhythm, mood, and the feel for a story’s contours. I think that was one reason I connected so much with Jane Alison’s thoughts; she opened up the story from its rigid structures and gave permission to seek new shapes. But these new shapes don’t rule out the principles of any good story. I think there has to be a dramatic tension, a momentum, an escalation, so you can’t just say that you’ve chosen the ripple structure or the meandering structure and excuse yourself from engaging the reader in a story. That was actually why the novel I just completed, required so much time. It’s an epistolary novel, so it’s fragmented and elliptical by design. I thought I was done with it in 2017, but it’s more challenging to write a novel that doesn’t adhere to conventional structure. I had to think hard about some of those craft elements you mentioned, Brooke.
Brooke: I like what you’re saying, Grant, because I don’t think authors should get too hung up on definitions. I love that you write intuitively. And at the same time the work of learning craft is an important skillset. Writing a book is not just about sitting down and knocking out a story. You have a legacy that you step into as a writer when you decide that you’re going to tackle a book project. People have been studying craft and writing about craft for centuries, literally, and reading craft books, for me, places all of us in this lineage. One of the things I was taken by in Jane’s book was the speed of how we write on the page, and this was taken from Henry James’s understanding of scene. Scene is a “real time” event that unfolds at the speed of real time. Text time equals story time. But then there are things that move much faster—gaps and summaries for instance, where text time is very little and story time is very fast. Or the opposite, dilation and pauses, where there’s very little story because the text is taking up more time on the page. I love this as a way of understanding my own reading experience, and writing because in my writing I can control the speed of the narrative. I can slow it down and speed it up—and understanding this control is a lot like having your hand on a dial. I feel like too often writers feel like the narrative is in charge, and reading a book like this helps writers feel a little more in control—which ultimately makes you a more masterful writer.
Grant: That’s exactly it. When I was talking about the dominance of Freytag’s Pyramid, part of that is that it’s taught as the story telling form, not a storytelling form, so it’s very authoritarian. For years I thought my stories needed to follow that structure, but they rarely did, so that structure dictum made me feel like I was a bad plotter and a bad writer. Jane’s book was so liberating because it gave me more control. I love that she offers metaphors for storytelling because I think metaphors can guide our writing in more interesting ways. I love thinking of my writing through the lens of a collage or a quilt, for example. So, Brooke, it’s wonderful to have Jane kick off our sixth year, and maybe this can be a theme for the year, pondering the many different narrative structures and forms. Can’t wait to talk more to Jane after this non-meandering, non-spiraling, non-exploding break.
This week’s Substackin’:
#WriteMindedPodcast is kicking off a new feature with our new season. We’re calling it Substackin’, where we'll explore Substack posts, our own and others’. This week’s Substackin’ explores my recent Substack piece, “Structure, Deconstructed.” In this post, I discuss the idea that writers need to know convention in order to disrupt convention. Too many people think that they don’t need to study or know the craft, and that they can just fling themselves into the writing of the book and then they’re going to have this amazing book that everyone is going to love and the rest is history. But that's not the case. It is true that the art of writing is for everyone and everyone has a story, but at the same time, writers need to take their work seriously and learn the craft. So remember, knowing the craft—and the theory—will make you a better writer, even if you choose to break the rules.
Read the full post here!
ABOUT JANE ALISON
Jane Alison is the author of four novels — The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and Nine Island and the memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, about growing up in a family in which parents traded partners. Her other books are Change Me, translations of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation, and Meander, Spiral, Explode, about the craft and theory of writing. Her newest novel, Villa E — about the collision of architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier — is just out on Norton/Liveright. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Loved this episode! I’m a big fan of Meander, Spiral, Explode. Recently, I wrote a Brevity Blog post about transforming my memoir from chronological to spiral structure: “From Chronological to Spiral Structure— Why and How.” It got a lot of positive response. I think there are a lot of people who like the idea of spiral structure, but have no idea how to make it happen (the same way I felt). I offer one way in. You can read it here:
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/from-chronological-to-spiral-structure-why-and-how/