The Shape of Your Story
Photo by Ellen Blum Barish
A story’s structure is its container.
Whether its a six-word haiku or a 75,000 word novel, social media post, memoir, letter, fable, satire, essay, recipe or dream, told chronologically or starting at its middle or end, a story unfolds in some kind of pattern. Most of us know about the arc. But there are other shapes in which we can tell our stories. Patterns we can borrow from nature: a wave, spiral, cell or fractal.
Of the four big picture elements (storyline, structure, theme and voice, structure is the most challenging to find. But once discovered, it can be the most productive. Because the right structure operates as making the right kind of space for a story to be absorbed. Structure, even a complex one, provides the reader, and the writer, with grounding and context.
Before Seven Springs became a memoir, it began as a 750-word newspaper column, then became a short story, followed by a poem, a radio commentary, a long-form essay and a story told on stage. (Numerologists might like that the number seven is not only part of the title but also represents completion.) I credit all of those forms with getting me to its final one as a memoir.
Perhaps the most important question to ask about structure is how does it serve your story? Try applying it to your own life. In Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison writes, “Patterns could fascinate me because an uncanny one structured my life. When I was four, my parents and another couple traded partners, creating families as symmetrical as moth wings… Symmetry orders the lobes of leaves and insect wings, so why not my family?”
Spring was the season in which my story was set in motion and when I discovered that it reverberated in several springs that followed, this provided a structure for a complex storyline. It allowed me to break my story into small pieces - seven actual springs - and as I wrote, I was able to make some meaning from how they connected to one another.
Find a shape for your story, What weather system that best describes your family? A rainstorm? A heat wave? A snow storm? A tsunami? It can be a useful metaphorical tool that can provide personal discovery as well as a way to open the windows and the doors to your story.
Photo by Ellen Blum Barish
A Few Coaching Openings
Are there stories from your life you’ve been wanting to take to the page?
In September, I will have a few spaces available for new writing clients. Reach out before the end of August for 2025 pricing. Find out more about my coaching programs and what writers say about working with me here.