Have you ever wondered if there were alternative plot structures to the “dramatic arc”?
If you’ve taken an English lit course, you’ve probably learned to analyze narratives in terms of exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. That framework, called Freytag’s Pyramid or just The Dramatic Arc, has been the presumptive way to speak about plot structure for over 100 years. Before that, we were mostly still talking about Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he breaks up narrative into beginning, middle, and end.
(BTW, do not underestimate the power of that seemingly obvious model. Plenty of stories struggle to accomplish something meaningful within this structure. Incidentally, we call Aristotle’s model the Classical Story Structure. Also, Freytag is really a modification of Aristotle.)
In Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison argues that we already have alternative plot structures to Aristotle and Freytag. Actually, she argues that the conventional form relies too much on a metaphor of male sexual response. It’s not clear if that was a motivating reason for seeking alternatives; the mere assumption that there’s only one way would be enough for me.
Texture, Color, Symmetry: Writing as Design
At the heart of Alison’s study is a search for alternative metaphors for plot structures. If Freytag’s Triangle has a masculo-sexual metaphor, or more banally, a triangle or pyramid, are there other useful metaphors?
She takes a cue from the world of design, the way furniture designers, architects, fashion designers can find inspiration in the patterns and textures of nature and our lives. Concepts like texture, color, and symmetry have obvious meaning in fashion or furniture, but it’s not a big leap to writing.
The way the words fall out on the page creates a visual texture. The way the words sound together unfolds a verbal or aural pattern (we have words for that: rhyme, assonance, alliteration, trochee, etc.).
We’re also familiar with the idea that authors use color in various ways to draw our attention to important themes. Color can be symbolic or metaphorical or simply emphatic. The obvious examples from film are Schindler’s List and The Sixth Sense.
We find symmetry in paired characters (doppelgangers, opposites) or in paired actions. Sometimes one action raises a question or opens a possibility and the other answers or resolves it.
Alison’s point is that the leaning pyramid structure isn’t meaningful because it’s the Platonic idea of story but because it’s a pattern.
[I loved] structures that sorted things, such as the grammar of Latin sentences and how parts cogged together, Linnaeus’s branching genera, and the genealogies of myth. Patterns: sense.
— Jane Alison
In Meander, Spiral, Explode, Alison excavates dozens of stories to identify alternative patterns to the familiar pyramid. I will summarize these below to give you something to chew on, but the book is really lovely and worth the read. It will point you to all sorts of stories you’ll want to check out, too.
A Caveat About Alternative Plot Structures
I offer this summary with some wariness. If you’re stuck in your writing, it’s easy to get excited about anything that promises to help you get unstuck. In my experience, however, we writers are not always great at knowing what is too much or too little to do.
What do I mean? Well, a common error I see young writers make is thinking, “Oh, shoot, I need to start all over.” They get some feedback about a problem in their writing and, instead of asking how they can better accomplish their goals with the material they’ve already invested in, they conclude there’s a fundamental problem that cannot be solved and that it would be easier to start from scratch.
In reality, they haven’t had to solve that problem before, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable.
The other mistake is thinking, “Ah, because this successful author did a thing like I’m doing, I don’t actually have to change my thing.”
Maybe not, but if an editor is saying you should, then maybe give that some thought. Unless you’re an already successful author and you don’t really respect the opinion of the editor you’re paying to help you improve your work.
So, I think the best way to approach these structures is to let them inspire your imagination and to challenge you to work on the patterning in your own story.
8 Alternative Plot Structures
Plot Structure 1. Waves
The wave is really our familiar dramatic arc. After establishing a status quo, tension builds until it crests in a decisive moment.
Where we often speak of a triangle or pyramid, however, Alison substitutes the wave. This is a much more dynamic metaphor, suggesting the movement of energy through a medium, i.e., your characters’ lives.
Anyone who’s ever been chest-deep at the shore knows there’s more fun to a wave than the peak: the swell, the rise, the rush of foamy water on the shining sand, the tug back toward the deep.
— Jane alison
Writers create a wave effect through paired scenes, or symmetry. The first scene establishes some condition or initiates a state of affairs; the second comes after a change and is marked by that change. It mirrors the first, maybe in the surface action or the setting or key objects, but because it harkens back to the earlier scene, we’re also able to feel the differences, what’s changed.
Or what’s about to change. The symmetry needn’t be across the break of the climax. It’s probably not helpful to be too rigid about where, exactly the line of symmetry would be. If symmetry is going to play with your head, think mirroring or pairing, instead.
1.a. Circle Plot Structure
We’re familiar with a version of this from many popular films. It’s when a scene in the resolution repeats a scene from the exposition, only this time the protagonist responds with a new confidence or wisdom that she lacked the first time around. One might suggest this is more a circular structure in the way it usually plays out, if only because it’s so on the nose.
The circular plot brings us back to where we started, except not exactly. We’ve “advanced” or “moved,” or at any rate, something has changed. Think of the way the tube of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls splits open as a spiral. Trace one end to the other, you may go around a circle, but you don’t wind up exactly where you started.
Plot Structure 2. Wavelets
Obviously, a variation on the wave, wavelets suggest a plot that doesn’t build to a great breaking so much as repeating gentle breaks that slowly carry your character through their transformation.
Alison also suggests the pattern left in sand as the tide recedes or the lines in the ocean as seen from the air.
As with the symmetry or pairing of the wave, with wavelets you can of course repeat certain actions or experiences, but you might also repeat a motif, an opposition, perhaps even a color. The reader doesn’t need to literally see the repetition so much as feel it happening, feel the pulsing of images or motifs as they expel against the protagonist.
Plot Structure 3. Meanders
Meandering stories enjoy the journey too much to drive in any straightforward way toward the end.
There may be one plot that keeps looping back to explore other angles or several plots that overlap and circle around one another. I think of Proust, whose novel structure was theoretically infinite, since it proceeded by the causal logic of memory and association and not linearly. Any memory could spur a digression to another.
Meandering plots may be complex, but they’re not so because they’ve been meticulously plotted in the way a thriller might be. The show Westworld, for instance, is complex, with some repeated scenes continuing to evolve in meaning over three seasons. Tristram Shandy is complex in an entirely different way; it’s trying to “catch up” to life but can’t seem to stop itself from luxuriating in the process of storytelling.
The point of a meandering story is that it doesn’t want to end. Its digressions are a form of avoidance, a revelry in the journey, even a denial of death.
Plot Structure 4. Spirals
Spirals spin out from a central point, moving away with their own energy but drawn into the orbit of their focal point.
Or, seen another way, they drive at ever-increasing velocity toward their centers, pulled by something irresistible, though they do try to resist.
The circle structure (above) is simple, neat, satisfying in its symmetry and in the sense of completeness one gets. Things have returned to some peaceful state, better for the story the protagonist experience. Spirals (or coils, corkscrews, helixes, vortexes, swirls, gyres—Alison loves her spiral words) don’t just come back to where they started, they spin out again . . . and again . . . and again. They can be obsessive and driving like a hurricane or whimsical and exuberant like a dance.
4.a. Helix
A helix may be a special case in the way two (or more) threads spin around an axis.
In Alison’s example, Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter, the narrator is the axis around which the narrative turns, and in fact, Alison wonders whether first-person retrospective narratives aren’t often a form of helix. Many stories might develop that don’t obviously concern the protagonist, but the narrator keeps bringing it back to herself, to the power of her narrative voice, in fact.
Plot Structure 5. Radials or Explosions
Plots structured like radials shoot out from a center like the blinking embers of fireworks.
Radials, like spirals, are defined by their centers. Alison suggests a radial differs, however, in that the force of the center is so strong that we don’t have the same movement in time. There’s a sense of everything emanating from the center but nothing changing. Anything that tries to move away just gets pulled back until the energy just dissipates
Plot Structure 6. Networks and cells
These plot structures are two sides of the same coin. Like bubbles or cracks in sand, if you look at the centers, they look like cells; if you trace the lines of the cells you have something more like a network.
These are plots that don’t give you a straight line to follow—or even a meandering or spiraling line. Instead, they lay out the cells or the network and require your brain to discern the pattern, chart the course. There’s no thread, there’s only a sense of an unfolding landscape or system with no causal connections. Maybe this is a better place to class Proust, the space being memory itself?
Scholars who have studied this plot structure call it spatial form and oppose it to the usual chronology of narrative. They may chop up chronology, even, so that what’s important is not the sequence of events in time but the way laying them out spatially can point the reader to some insight or transformation. The examples Alison give suggest a process more like inductive or even abductive reasoning, looking for the patterns and meanings as the emerge from the repetition of cellular structure.
Plot Structure 7: Fractals
We tend to think of fractals as mathematically generated repeating patterns, and they can be. But in nature, fractals are closer to what they sound like, fractures, breaking apart in irregular patterns.
The core concept of a fractal is that you see similar patterns at any scale, large or small. This is how, say, bonsai trees can look like scale models of much larger trees. Fractal plot structures begin with a seed or origin which generates the rest of the narrative.
Whereas the cells in a cellular plot are all roughly equivalent, the branches of a fractal pattern grow or develop from the seed. There will be repeating patterns or motifs, but there’s a clear causal, probably chronological relationship between the origin and the branches.
Plot Structure 8: Tsunami
Alison created this model based on one inspiration: Cloud Atlas.
I’ve not read Cloud Atlas as of this moment, though it sounds like an experience worth giving myself. The book is a series of nested narratives that proceed somewhat methodically, introducing the frames of stories 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, then telling all of plot 6, and then wrapping up in reverse order: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It’s a simple enough structure, but one gets the sense that it needs to be simple to sustain the weight of so many narratives—thus, the sense that, even if each proceeds as a kind of wave, the overall experience is not as simple as a wave, it’s a tsunami.
At the end of the day, I have a sneaking suspicion that most of these alternative plot structures still map onto the dramatic arc in some way. That is, one could probably find the basic concept of a protagonist facing a problem that gets incrementally worse until a decisive moment that somehow resolves that problem. These patterns simply offer nonlinear or indirect ways of hitting those basic beats. I don’t know that we’d find the stories satisfying otherwise.
In other words, Alison’s book doesn’t let you off the hook of writing a compelling story. If you’d like some expert feedback on your plot structure, let’s talk. Together we can shape the pattern of your story.
N.B.: All the drawings are mine, inspired by images from Meander, Spiral, Explode.
Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash