Geeking Out about Story
Neon on wall reads “We are all made of stories”
Story is a beautiful thing.
Story is inherently human. When we want to understand something, we tell a story about it.
Some of my earliest memories are from visiting my grandmother, and listening to her tell stories about the year she and my grandfather spent traveling Europe. This was back in the day when you took a boat to cross the Atlantic—and more boats and trains to travel around the continent.
Those stories are what sent me traveling the world, usually on my own, when I was young and single—I wanted to see the places, and more, just to experience what it was like to go somewhere unknown and Be there for a little while. I’ve been to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, I spent 3 days in Nice in the south of France so I could visit the Marc Chagall museum, then took a night train to Paris where I had just one day to wander the city before flying home. A week in Rome, with a side trip to Assisi. A week in San Juan, Puerto Rico, just walking the Old City, sitting on the beach…oh, and writing.
On each of these trips, I wrote, journalling furiously about the things I saw and did and experienced, the sights and smells and little touches that made them special in my memory.
Like my first evening in France, when I missed my connection to Taize and found myself in a little town called Chalon sûr Saone at sunset without any idea where to stay. I ended up stopping a young-ish woman on the street who looked like she was walking home from work, in my broken French, if she knew of an affordable hotel that she would recommend, since I had missed my train. She walked me to the hotel her parents stayed at when they came to town, which was full, but the patronne there called another hotel and got me a room a few blocks away. Then Christiane, the woman who’d stopped her own trip home to help me, invited me to her family’s home for dinner—a stranger off the street.
I was torn at first—did she really want me to accept the invitation, or was she just being polite? Were they crazy people, and I would step into their apartment and never be seen or heard from again? Were they just maybe a little weird, and would it be…weird?
I’m not sure what pushed me, a terminally introverted shy person, to it, but I went. She and her husband and three children welcomed me into their home in a third floor walkup apartment and let me share their simple dinner; I brought flowers from the corner florist as a hostess gift. (I don’t know if that’s a thing in France, but it is for me, and I figured it would be polite.) We communicated in my terrible French plus with a white board on which the dad drew pictures of what kind of animals the cheese we were eating had come from, and his children laughed at his attempt to render a goat in dry-erase marker. It was one of the loveliest evenings I can remember, and one of my best memories from the trip.
It was also a story—a story with shape and flow, tension and choice and conflicting wants and needs, and it is still easy to tell twenty-five years later largely because of that shape and flow. Most of my memories of that glorious trip were simply sequential movements from point A to B to C, all lovely, but they don’t all make good stories.
What is a Story Spine?
Somewhere about 2019, when my third attempt at a novel fizzled out at about 30,000 words, I realized I was missing some crucial element of how to write not just a novel but a story. I was trying to pants my way through, with clear images of a few spots through the book, but no idea how to get there or what the overall shape would be in the end. I was ready to toss it all out and, for the nth time in my adult life, conclude that I was not cut out to be a fiction writer.
But I have this kid. Even at age 14, they knew they were going to be a writer—a novelist of fantasy books with creative world building and fascinating characters and stories of creation and destruction and countless amazing creatures grown out of their fertile brain. They were way ahead of me—combing the web for authors with advice on how to shape a story, reading K.M. Weiland and I can’t remember who all else, and giving me advice, sending me to their favorite sites for more.
For the first time in my over-literate life someone was talking to me about how a story was built—about the three (or four) act structure, about the midpoint shift, about the wants and needs of the characters and the tension created when they are at odds with each other. About arcs and subplots. Then I found Pages and Platforms and their StoryPath course, and StoryGrid with its elaborate systems, and I just bathed in it all for a while. And I learned. And I kept writing.
It was like a giant floodlight lit up my creative brain, and I could suddenly see. And at this moment, I’m tying up the loose ends of my first finished novel—I’m on about draft 3 or 4 now, I can’t remember which—giving it one last rough polish before sending it to my first round of beta readers. (Or are they alpha readers? I’m never sure…it seems like I’m the alpha, so the first people after me would be beta, right? Ah well, irrelevant.) Over those four years, I have not only learned about story structure, I have fallen deeply in love with it. It’s like a slightly coy dance partner, alternately leading me into the next steps or spinning away for a moment to leave me on my own before coming back either to catch me on the leap or let me crash to the ground if I’ve gone too far…but then I get up, brush myself off, and we dance again.
I also now see these amazing story structure layers in every other piece of narrative I consume, from books to movies to musicals to even simple songs, echoes and fractals large and small, the shape of a good story suffusing everything in life.
This blog is, in effect, my ongoing love letter to story structure—not in a clinical, “this is how you have to do it” kind of way, but as a dancer, and one who loves watching others dancing. I will applaud beautifully crafted stories, and I may rant when they go wrong and I see opportunities squandered.
But I’ll keep telling them, and writing them, and learning from them.
