Not enough people have read my favorite book on writing.
Every year I read 25–50 books on the art and craft of writing. While all the books I read become reference books. I’ve read Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison cover to cover three times.
I love it because it teaches you to write better prose by first learning to be a better reader and listener.
Reading Fiction the Right Way Means Training Your Eye, Ear and Mind.
Writers need to approach their reading much more mechanically than a fan might.
I want your writing to touch fire. As you grow in ability, your words will wield incredible power.
You write it funny: suddenly filled with mirth, they laugh.
You write it sad: suddenly filled with sorrow, they tear up.
You write it with empathy: suddenly with compassion, they sigh.
But writing can be even more powerful… as it brings forth from emotional fire a story so commanding it moves culture.
Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral Explode is Trying to Shift Writing Culture.
I recently wrote about Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This.
There he recounts how back in the 1980s he paid $3,000 for his first writer’s workshop. It was terrible, and he felt snookered by a ‘guru.’ He went on to describe an experience a lot of my friends experienced while in an MFA program or heading out to a writing retreat.
Imagine, you travel to a remote location and sit with a so called writing guru. But you’re not alone, for eight sessions you’re with 10 other students, all of you wet under the collar. Each session the guru, perched on a tall stool, nods sagely as students read their pages. Then asks, “Well class, what do you think?”
Boom! A cacophony of contradictory advice for ten minutes. (This way, he doesn’t actually have to teach.)
After which the person running the class claps, “Well, I thought it was wonderful! It reminds me of [Name Drop Famous Author he’d supposedly worked with.] I hope you submit it to a publisher or agent.”
You’re left to wonder, was all the student advice given good? Bad? Neutral? Before you’re seated, the next reader is up and running through their story.
My imagination runs wild thinking about how Jane Alison would go off on a teacher who’d try to pull that on her. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a treatise against milquetoast-platitude-cacophony, assembly-line-style workshop. As such, her work is aligned with Story Luck’s philosophy surrounding oral storytelling.
The culture shift she seeks, is one away from rote prescriptive answers of, “This is how you should write,” and towards experimentation. Because in experimentation, in bringing different maps and lenses with which to examine prose, you gain deeper understanding of how the magic is woven.
She Opens up how We Read Great Works of Fiction.
The three-act structure is a useful framework.
It’s morphed over time to be versatile at creating and analyzing story. If you’ve not been introduced to this structure or found it confusing back in high school AP Lit, understanding its tenets is the place to start.
However, Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode highlights how incredibly limiting three-act structure and analysis is as you progress.
Constantly being re-branded by various storytelling and writing teachers. Rightly, Alison points out, Aristotle didn’t “create” the three-act structure, nor was Aristotle being prescriptive, as in, “All your stories should have three acts.” Instead, he merely pointed out, “All stories have a beginning, middle and an end.” Once you start, it’s as impossible to avoid a halfway point, as it is to avoid stopping.
Tossing the three-act structure aside, as it’s purely descriptive, makes it easier to search out new structures.
Most of her book goes on to explore structures she’s found.
What about instead of acts you look at colors, emotion, the flow or stages of a stream over time? She looks at the use of time and concentric circles. Inside of novels, there’s bound to be multiple structures and repeated motifs. Look for them, and then the curiosity blossoms. Because once you’ve found one, say in your favorite fantasy novel, then you can place it as a scaffolding over the next literary novel you read.
While the lenses she discusses aren’t inevitable like the three-act structure, all of them are descriptive.
Where does it line up perfectly? Where does the book strain against this structure’s edges?
You can use these, not just in the reading, but also in the wielding of your own work.
A Swim Across the Snoqualmie River with a Child Not Mine
30 plus and male with baby fever
As a Storyteller, I Want You to Abandon the Term Good.
Instead, I want you to think in terms of intentional and effective.
Does that make sense? We get so caught up with asking, “Is it good?” A poet would never use the word good. There’s always a more specific word. One less subjective. Which doesn’t conjure a blank image. Once tossed out, that sends us on this path of… let me find the rules instead of the better path… what magic do I want to elicit in my reader? What in the culture do I want to change?
Excellent art is always intentional.
You can like random. Be pleasantly surprised by a happy accident. You can write as though you’re a sculptor chipping away at the block of marble to let it reveal the statue inside. But once revealed it’s time to do the hard work of editing.
In the editing you bend work to your will.
The three-act structure is FINE… but your will could be to meander, to spiral… to explode! To mold your prose to a structure as yet unseen. The more intentional you get with your writing, the more control you have of the magic.
After, you need to ask yourself, “Was that effective?”
If you are creating intentionally, you want your ideas to hit as intended with the majority of your audience.
Implement Obvious Ways to Test Effectiveness Because Most Writers Don’t.
- Ask yourself, is it working for you?
Define what it would feel like when it does work. There’s a lot of talk of killing your darlings. But how do you know a darling when you have it?
For myself, I love verbing. Turning nouns into verbs. I love creating scenarios where you can see humor in a particularly sad moment. I want to delve into the contrast of, “Buddy, this is really sad,” while also holding, “God, I’m grateful to be alive in the universe.”
Those scenes, those lines, that’s what I’m shooting for. And beyond that, part of my personal process is finding the golden nugget of the story. What’s the gift I want to share with the audience? The answer is how I check to see if the story is working.
- Check in with beta readers.
If you don’t have fans, use your friends and family.
When you’re first starting out, use them frequently. Show them the super rough drafts. But take note of the common corrections they send your way. Make a list. This will become a checklist for you in the future. You can go through this before you email your work to the beta readers in your life.
As your work gets more tuned to your beta readers the more fun they will have being beta readers.
Common notes I get back include, needs more description, I don’t know what this story is about, and I got confused because there were too many named characters.
So before I send off a draft, I attempt to correct those mistakes. Your list is going to be unique to you. We all have idiosyncratic rough draft errors.
- Ask Your Audience Questions About Your Work.
Putting your stories under someone else’s microscope is scary.
A lot of artists send out surveys to remove themselves from direct contact with the audience. Some of you’ve been to writer workshops. It’s rare to get off stage and tell someone, “Here’s what I was going for, did that hit for you?”
You are putting people on the spot, most of whom just want to tell you, “Good Job!” But it can also work double duty to bind you to them and them to your work. When people offer insight into your own work, whether it’s advice, letting you know how it sparked emotion, or general comments, it leads to them feeling like they helped.
- Helping you creates a sunk cost for them.
- Gives them a sense of collaboration.
- Ties them to your reflected glory when you’re work does well.
The work becomes a little more theirs. And that’s what you want. With your writing and storytelling, you want to create a gift for the audience. It’s a great feeling when you pick up a book and feel seen. Feel a kinship. How does this person know you so well without having met you?
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s because the author has been in deep communication with their beta readers. You’re unique, but you’re not without a tribe. If you want to find fans who resonate, you’re going to be asking for feedback.
“These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
Jane Alison Sees Books in Primary Elements and Patterns.
Structure helps you organize your work.
Organization creates clarity for yourself and your reader. Organization creates interesting ways to imbue metaphor into the text. The structure can bolster your theme, naturally and authentically.
Over three chapters she discusses primary elements such as point, line, texture, color, movement and flow.
This examination begs you to think of your own.
Beats quickly come to mind. Speed, shape, paragraph, page. There are ways to take books as art objects. There are ways to write coherently where the art of the book helps the reader understand a grand metaphor. Bolsters the gems at the end.
Poetry goes full tilt showing how the visual line can impact our reading. Don’t dismiss that sense when you’re writing a longer work. The length and density of your writing changes how the reader processes the work.
Medium’s Nicolas Cole touts the 1/3/1 method.
But the ethos behind that method isn’t to only use short, medium, and then short paragraphs. It’s to take a look at sentence and paragraph length and examine how readers deal with it. It is one more place for you to be intentional with your work.
A beautiful thing about being human is we are pattern recognition machines.
We don’t need intentionality to see patterns. We can find patterns where none exist. Often, when we create art, we build golden ratios subconsciously. We obey the rule of three when we take a photo — even when we’ve never been taught the rule of three. We’ve internalized structural rules, and often use them intuitively.
Meander, Spiral, Explode, helps train your brain to see these hidden patterns.
Over the past 10+ years I have been focused on the oral tradition.
Late last year I reached out to every Discord, Slack, Facebook, Reddit writing group I belong to and asked people what their top 10 storytelling mistakes were. “What do you see on stage that makes you cringe?” And, “What’s something easy to fix, that you wish everyone knew?”
I’ve compiled those answers and transformed it into a free guide. Please pick it up and tell me what you think!
The discussion of patterns in novels and short stories follows the long 2nd half of the book.
She looks at waves, meanders, radials, networks, fractals, and tsunamis.
She explores these patterns not to find the one true nature of structure. Instead the idea is simply, if all stories have a beginning, middle and end, maybe there are other structures that always exist! Maybe there’s other structures that sometimes exist?
Each one you find, whether on your own or through this book, gives you a tool to dissect a work. Understand it better. See how these hidden structures help the reader find, theme, mood, and pacing.
I’m obsessed with storytelling and the craft of writing.
I read books on how to write all the time. Surprisingly, there are many authors who hate the three-act structure. Who swear, “I don’t think about structure.” Their process is to create cross-motivated characters and let them run wild.
Judy Blume, in her Master Class, says something akin to, “My critics diagram my novels and I used to think, you’re such a faker. But now I’m more charitable, and I think… maybe they can see something I don’t see. Maybe these structures just appear because I’ve been writing so much.”
Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode spoke to me as response to authors like Judy Blume. The book spoke in the language of Chicago and Second City Improv as each chapter said, “Yes and!”
As an artist, I want you to be as intentional as possible.
Can you luck into other wild structures? Can you break free from three-act structure and into spiraling motifs? Where your narrative arc circles a central theme moving further and further away from a core? Yes. But once you see it, you can go back, and edit to make it clear and intentional.
Once you’re creating intentionally, reach out to your audience and see if they picked up on it.
I’ve been producing live storytelling shows in Chicago for over a decade and would love to share my knowledge with you, for free, 1-on-1. Click here to get personalized coaching.
