#jane alison

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison (2019)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onMay 15, 2025

[exhaled-spirals]

« For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. Teachers bid young writers to follow the arc. If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs.

And it is an elegant shape, especially when I translate arc to its natural form, a wave.Its rise and fall traces a motion we know in heartbeats, breaking surf, the sun passing overhead. There’s power in a wave, its sense of beginning, midpoint, and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories. But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. [...]

Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.”

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 patterns aren’t just around us; they inform our bodies, too. We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas, irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander [..]. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Why wouldn’t they form our [literary] narratives, too?

A digressive narrative meanders; at times it flows quickly and at times barely at all, often loops back on itself, yet ultimately it moves onward. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with a system of rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances, deepening into the past, perhaps, or rising into the future. A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core [...]. And cellular narratives come in like parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a network of meaning. [...]

In this book I’ll look at ways that writers have done all of this, finding patterns other than the arc inside their stories. This will be a museum of specimens. »

— Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

[fragbot]

A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time.

- from "Beyond the Narrative Arc," Jane Alison (x)

[doctornerdington]

Just picked this up and I am loving it. Recognized that I am in the midst of writing what she calls a fractal narrative, and her description and subsequent discussion of it is SO helpful. I’ll probably post more quotes. Can’t wait to read more.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Spiraling.

[leehallfae]

“although we think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, of course it’s interestingly visual, too; a story’s as much house or garden as song.”

— jane alison, meander, spiral, explode: design & pattern in narrative

[ellenvanhelsing]

And as we read, we travel not just through places portrayed in the story but through the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block: neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled.

Jane Alison in the Paris Review

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Desire can't be desire if it doesn't slant toward an object. That is a snake eating its tail.

Jane Alison, Nine Island