Narrative Shape

February 7, 2023 Gilliam Writers Group

The most basic work of a writing coach is helping their client find their novel’s shape. Although narrative, or plot, has taken many different shapes, one in particular recurs again and again. This is the triangle, the pyramid, the arc: the three act structure.

The plot is the action, or what happens in a story. All shapes are valid structures for novels, as any book coach worth their salt will tell you, but just as writers must learn grammar in order to transcend it, all novelists should be familiar with three act structure. The shape has been widely discussed and critiqued in Aristotle’s Poetics, (c. 335 BC) Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 19 BC), Gustav Freytag’s The Technique of Drama (1863), Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (1983), Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode (2019), and countless others. The three act plot appears to be natural, in some way, to how humankind tells stories. The three acts are defined as follows:

Act 1: Beginning. Exposition (or, telling how things have been up to this point)
Act 2: Middle. Rising Action and Climax (or, complication and a change in fortune)
Act 3: Ending. Falling Action and Denouement (or, consequences and resolution)

From Meander, Spiral, Explode:

“The famous arc came from drama. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle dissected the structures of tragedies such as Sophocles’s Oedipus the King to find their common features, much as he might dissect snakes to see if their spines were alike. He found that powerful dramas shared certain features including a particular path. Here’s (some of) what he wrote in Poetics:

“‘A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself [with a] beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes. . . . To be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. . . . Just as a beautiful living creature must be of a size to be taken in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of a length to be taken in by the memory.’

“And: ‘Every tragedy is in part Complication and in part Denouement; the incidents before the opening scene, and often certain also of those within the play, forming the Complication; and the rest the Denouement. By Complication I mean all from the beginning of the story to the point just before the change in the hero’s fortunes; by Denouement, all from the beginning of the change to the end.’

“Beginning, middle, and end; complication, change, denouement. Two thousand years later, in The Technique of the Drama, Gustav Freytag examined Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and drew a graphic like the pattern Aristotle described, a triangle showing the parts of drama: introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe. This is Freytag’s famous triangle or pyramid.”

Other shapes of narrative in Jane Alison:

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 lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds.
Cellular patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool; these can look like cells or, inversely, like a net.

The most far-reaching decision a novelist can make is to determine which shape works best for their work. Writing coaches online can help guide that process through our experience within the genre, and previous relationships with novelists can help inform future decisions in your work.