If A Story Is Your Visitor
Story has something to say, but she can’t get it out.
Her point will teach and entertain readers, she’s sure. But if you don’t help her get that point down, she’ll be like all other unwritten stories and disappear.
She needs a plan to get her point out in a clear and engaging way. As her guide, you’re ready to help her do it.
So what exactly is her point? You invite Story to visit you at home and figure it out together.
Sitting with her in the living room, you’re optimistic. It’s so comfortable there! Filled with memories, pieces you’ve written in the past, techniques that might help, and scraps of ideas you’ve tried before that might help bring her to life.
Story looks around, but nothing there seems relevant.
So you ask questions to clarify what point she wants to make, and how she’d like it to sound.
Unfortunately, this Q&A takes you from bad to worse. Her answers don’t gel into structure. Story, frustrated, wonders aloud if she’ll ever get anywhere. Her ideas and your questions just seem to be taking you around in circles.
So on a sketch pad and pencil, you cross one vertical line and a horizontal one. The horizontal X-axis represents the chronology of the story, from beginning to end, and the vertical Y-axis represents the visceral experience of the protagonist, on a spectrum of ill fortune to good fortune.
This, as you know, is Kurt Vonnegut’s famous platform for plotting what he calls “the shape of story.” You and Story play around with six wave shapes on the diagram — Rags to Riches, Riches to Rags, Man in a Hole, Icarus, Cinderella and Oedipus — but none of them satisfies Story.
So you try a less visual structure: a simplified list of the twelve stages described by Joseph Campbell as the “Hero’s Journey.”
Story is getting depressed. She’s already growing fuzzy around the edges.
Next you propose a currently popular genre as a last resort. It includes truth, theme, first-person POV narration, voice, memory and musing.
And Story rushes out to catch her bus so she can sit down at home and finally start sharing her point.
In a memoir.
