University of Virginia
by Jane Alison
Reading a story—moving across sentences and passages of text—can feel like travel, not just to places conjured in the story, but through the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block. Once you’ve finished reading, that movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel—one writing students are told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc, derived from ancient tragedy: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs. 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 breaking surf or the sun passing overhead. There’s power in 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? Why so masculo-sexual? And why should all story follow the shape of ancient tragedy? Many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too? This talk will explore alternative patterns for narrative, patterns that might feel more true, less restrictive, than the classic dramatic arc.