In her book on writing published in 2019, Meander, Spiral, and Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison, a novelist and professor of creative writing, discusses design and pattern in narrative. She divided the book into four main sections, including a 24-page introduction. Drawings illustrate the narrative patterns discussed in most sections of the book.
In her long and scholarly “Introduction,” Alison explains how she came to develop her ideas on narrative. She begins with a discussion of Eileen Gray’s organic—that is life to art— approach to furniture design and architecture (which aroused Le Corbusier’s jealousy). Alison describes writing and reading as following a textual path. Based on research she has done examining texts, she suggests that aspiring novelists look beyond the “masculo-sexual” arc or wave of storytelling to engage with other story patterns reflective of life, for example, spirals, meanders, and explosions. Jane Alison’s “Introduction” to her thought process is one of the most novel that I have read.
Alison begins the chapter on “Primary Elements” with a close-up view of text, addressing, Point, Line, and Texture, examining the way a reader moves through a story “word after word until the end.” Echoing a statement made by Ursula Le Guin, she points out that as we read, we “hear” the words in our heads and we see “pictures” in our mind’s eye. Her analysis explains how the black and white of letters, words, sentences, punctuation, and white space on a page produce this effect. She gives examples of varied styles of literary writing to demonstrate how the author’s style affects the reader’s “seeing” and “feeling” as they progress through a text.
In the second part of this chapter, Alison addresses “Movement and Flow,” discussing how authors can magically shift the reader’s perception of time, giving the example “A story covering millennia can flit by in six minutes.” She goes on to analyze the relationship of text time to story time, giving quotes drawn from novels as examples.
The third division of this chapter adds Alison’s thoughts on “Color.” She references musicians, painters, and writers as models for how to use color in writing text. She provides a color analysis of Tobias Wolff’s novel The Barracks Thief in which “color words appear just forty-seven times in ninety pages: one color-word every other page.”
The chapter on “Patterns” begins with a discussion of the derivation of the word itself and goes on to include eight identifiable writing patterns derived from nature. The first pattern Alison discusses is the “Wave” which resembles a dramatic arc. She defines the wave as having a rising and falling symmetry. As examples, she first analyzes sections of Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and secondly, sections of The Lovers by Marguerite Duras—both examples of rising and falling love affairs.
Her analysis continues with a discussion of “Wavelets,” that is “narrative rippling” which she defines as smaller repetitive and circulating ripples or oscillations. As she searches for this concept in the text of novels, she traces how Carver uses a pattern of dry/wet/dry in his novel Where I’m Calling From, a story about alcoholism. Then, she returns to Wolff’s novel, to demonstrate how he used oscillation in scenes and in characters’ actions.
In the chapter on “Meanders,” Alison explores how some narratives seem to wander, following what appear to be detours along the way, but in a way that continues to move the story forward. The author might create “deliberate slowness, a delight in curving this way or that.” To demonstrate, Alison discusses Eucalyptus, a delightfully complex and modern fairy tale set in Australia by Murray Bail. The book is designed to highlight “the needs of the plot and the delights of telling…get to the end, but not yet.”
In the section on narrative “Spirals,” Alison points out how the spiral is constantly present in our lives as galaxies, winds, and water currents swirl around us. She states, “A spiraling narrative could be a helix winding downward …or…wind upward, around and around to a future.” One of her example texts is Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street which Alison views as “…a spiral staircase revolving with many small polished steps around a single axis.”
The chapter on “Radials and Explosions” focuses on works of fiction that seem to emanate from a core, “energy starts from the center and radiates out” either in the form of spokes or circles. Alison discusses Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold which she describes as taking the form of a pupil and iris, saying that the murder forms the pupil and the lines of the iris equate with all the characters who saw it coming. Alison also describes other variations on the form.
In the chapter “Networks and Cells,” the reader is presented with Alison’s view of a spatial form. Patterns from life that she gives include a beehive, a layer of cracked mud, or a foam of bubbles, all of which form a connected or disconnected type of puzzle. When a narrative takes such a format, the reader is forced to figure out the puzzle and connections as the novel proceeds without chronological order. One example Alison gives of a novel of his type is Susan Minot’s Lust which she describes as “more a catalog of like moments than a drama.”
The chapter on “Fractals” uses the mathematical concept of a system that involves splitting and splitting again, as in the way a tree grows and continues to form branches while the branches form smaller and smaller branches. Fractals may appear to be almost symmetrical but are not. She notes that Woolf, Joyce, James, and Bolaño all create fractal-type sentences. Alison defines fractal narratives as those in which “an initial segment is more likely to be compacted like a seed and generate the rest.” Among other examples, she discusses Clarice Lespector’s The Fifth Story which involves a series of connected stories.
Alison presents her chapter “Tsunami?” as a question mark. She gives one example, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. A tsunami is similar to a wave but more complex and powerful. Her analysis of Cloud Atlas seems to suggest that the form has a 12345 then 54321 alteration as though the big complex wave flows in and out but creates a whole.
In her “Epilogue,” Alison encourages the reader to pay attention to patterns that exist in nature and to watch for them or to create them when writing fiction.
I think I have learned more about the structure and the creation of an author’s style by reading Jane Alison’s book than I have ever learned from other books on writing. This book is a treasure that every aspiring or currently published novelist should have on their bookshelf.
My Writing Goals for 2023
Continue to work on my poetry.
I have continued to write a poem each day. A participant at our BWA happy hour invited me to meet her at a local poetry reading in an art gallery. There, she introduced me to Beth Franklin who maintains the online Colorado Poets Center, a listing of poets who have published in five venues. This month I have attended four poetry readings at the Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program whose faculty and students exhibit extraordinary talent and energy.
Submit poetry to contests/awards:
No news yet on my poetry book submission. I did read up on other poetry contests.
Finish, request feedback, and send my first novel out for review:
I am workshopping this novel with my critique group.
Continue to work on my other novels:
These stories have been percolating in my mind even though I have not been working on them on my computer.
Continue to develop a network of kindred spirits in the world of writing and publishing:
Boulder Writers Alliance: This month I held a Steering Committee Meeting on Zoom. I also hosted a BWA happy hour event at a local venue.
Denver Woman’s Press Club: I listened to a Zoom presentation on producing audiobooks by Scott Ellis, of Scott Ellis Reads (https://www.scottellisreads.com/). Scott has narrated one hundred audiobooks at present. He stated that the audiobook market will continue to grow exponentially. He discussed how to find a narrator to create an audiobook and the process involved. Scott narrates books for authors but also collaborates with authors who prefer to produce their own narrated books.
Women Writing the West: This month three members of our critique group met. One commented on my pages, “I understand why you sent the long section because it fits together. It was fun to read. There are big sections with no paragraph breaks, I would have liked to see the dialog broken down into paragraphs.” The other remarked, “I just read Stephen King’s book, and I think you understand your characters. But you need to tell the story. What is the story? Where is it going? Why are you telling me the story?”
About twenty local WWW members also met locally for a social event and shared updates on their current work via a round-robin discussion.
Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers: I read the RMFW newsletter.
This year I plan to monetize my blog:
I still have not figured this out.
Document my writing progress through my blog and post it on the seventh day of each month, one blog per month 2023:
Today is the seventh day of July which is the seventh month of the year. I am posting my seventh blog for 2023. After a rainy month of June and, so far, a cold wet July in our area, our reservoirs are full and the foothills are such a vibrant green that I expect to see a leprechaun hop out at any moment.
July 7th in History
Margaret Walker, a member of the South Side Writers, a group of African American writers in Chicago during the 1930s, was born July 7, 1915, in Alabama. Her works include the 1966 novel, Jubilee and This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, among others.
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