Story Structuring
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Create three possible endings and three beginnings (bring to class next week) – there will be suggestions posted on the classroom page
Think about how next week’s feedback session will best serve you and your work (What would you like to focus on regarding your project? What specific questions do you have ? What boundaries would you like to set?).
Keep updating your list of stories (and don’t forget to bring this to class!)
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
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🌱 Beginnings
Ways to start a creative piece:
In Media Res – Jump straight into the action, a moment already in motion.
Thematic Statement – Open with a line that states or hints at the core theme.
Provocative Question – Begin with a question that hooks curiosity and invites exploration.
Unexpected Image or Metaphor – Start with something vivid, strange, or symbolic.
Anecdote or Flashback – Lead with a memory or personal moment.
Dialogue or Voice – Drop into a conversation or a distinct narrative voice right away.
Quiet Scene or Stillness – Use a calm, atmospheric opening to set tone and mood.
Contradiction or Juxtaposition – Begin with a paradox or unexpected pairing.
List or Inventory – Start with a catalog of things that gives clues about a person, place, or idea.
Direct Address – Break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience/reader.
Set a Rule or Condition – "It always rains on Tuesdays…" or "Before we begin, you need to know…"
Dream or Surreal Moment – Open with something slightly out-of-step with reality.
🌒 Endings
Ways to conclude a creative piece:
Call-Back or Full Circle – Return to an image, phrase, or theme from the beginning.
Emotional Climax – Let the ending be the heart's breaking or breakthrough.
Open-Ended – Leave the audience with a sense of ambiguity or possibility.
Revelation or Twist – End with something unexpected that reframes the entire piece.
Moment of Stillness – Quiet the energy, zoom in, and let it land gently.
Echo or Repetition – Repeat a line or rhythm with new meaning.
Invitation – Leave the reader/viewer with a question, action, or call.
Resonant Image or Metaphor – End with a powerful, symbolic visual.
Shift in Perspective – Pan out, or turn inward, to offer a new vantage point.
Let Something Go – Drop something that’s been carried through the piece.
Unexpected Humor – Close with a surprising wink or moment of levity.
Time Leap – End by jumping ahead in time, showing change or consequence.
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1. Hero’s Journey (Monomyth)
A protagonist embarks on an adventure, faces trials, transforms, and returns changed.
2. Heroine’s Journey (Maureen Murdock, Victoria Schmidt)
Unlike the Hero’s Journey, which focuses on external quests, the Heroine’s Journey explores internal struggles, the rejection and integration of the feminine, and reconnection with self/community.
3. Save the Cat (Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet)
A story follows specific beats (Opening Image, Catalyst, Midpoint, Dark Night of the Soul, etc.) to engage audiences emotionally.
4. Three-Act Structure
A story unfolds in three sections—Setup, Conflict, Resolution.
5. Kishōtenketsu (Japanese & East Asian Narrative Structure)
A four-act structure—Introduction (Ki), Development (Shō), Twist (Ten), and Resolution (Ketsu)—which often lacks direct conflict.
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1. Linear (Chronological Progression)
Definition: A straightforward, time-ordered narrative that moves from Point A to Point B. Common in coming-of-age memoirs and stories of personal growth.
Examples in Memoir:Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert), Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt), Between Two Kingdoms(Suleika Jaouad)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A sequential series of paintings, photographs, or comics that depict a personal evolution (e.g., a self-portrait series from childhood to adulthood).
Theater/Dance: A one-act play or choreographed piece that unfolds in real time, mirroring the progression of events.
Music: A concept album tracing a personal transformation, with each song representing a different stage (e.g., Beyoncé’s Lemonade).
Film/Multimedia: A documentary or video art piece that follows a linear journey, such as a travelogue or an artist’s progression.
2. Braided (Interwoven Timelines or Perspectives)
Definition: Alternates between different timelines, themes, or perspectives. Often past and present narratives weave together, revealing connections between them.
Examples in Memoir:The Color of Water (James McBride), Pieces of My Mother (Melissa Cistaro)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A diptych or collage juxtaposing past and present selves.
Theater/Dance: A performance where different actors portray the same person at different life stages, shifting seamlessly between timelines.
Music: A song or album interweaving distinct musical styles or motifs that eventually merge, mirroring the blending of time and perspective.
Film/Multimedia: A short film or animation that fluidly moves between childhood memories and present-day experiences.
3. Associative (Theme-Driven, Nonlinear Narrative)
Definition: Less focused on chronological events and more on exploring a central theme, emotion, or concept. These narratives evoke meaning through imagery, memory, and reflection rather than traditional plot structures.
Examples in Memoir:Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp), Devotion (Dani Shapiro)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A series of abstract or symbolic pieces that explore an idea (e.g., identity, addiction, or resilience) rather than a concrete timeline.
Theater/Dance: A movement-based performance where gestures and repetition convey the emotional core rather than a traditional storyline.
Music: A collection of songs linked by mood or theme rather than a chronological story (e.g., Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell).
Film/Multimedia: A poetic documentary or experimental short film that reflects on a theme through montage, sound, and imagery rather than direct narration.
4. Framed (Anchored by a Specific Event, Journey, or Time Period)
Definition: Focuses on a single transformative period, often structured around a specific journey, with reflections and backstory woven throughout. The story always returns to the present moment.
Examples in Memoir:Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A travel-inspired series of paintings or sketches mapping a physical or emotional journey.
Theater/Dance: A solo performance or play where a central event serves as a framing device, with past and present intertwined.
Music: A song cycle that revolves around a single pivotal experience, returning to a central refrain.
Film/Multimedia: A documentary structured around a single experience (e.g., an artist’s residency, a long hike, or a healing process).
5. Circular (Recurring Themes or Events as Anchors)
Definition: The story revolves around a central moment, returning to it from different angles throughout the narrative. Often begins in the middle of an event and loops back to provide context before moving forward.
Examples in Memoir:The Liars’ Club (Mary Karr), H Is for Hawk (Helen Macdonald)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A series of works featuring recurring imagery or symbols that shift in meaning over time.
Theater/Dance: A performance where a single movement, phrase, or scene repeats with subtle changes, gaining new layers of meaning each time.
Music: A composition that returns to a refrain, with variations each time it appears (e.g., a piece where a melody evolves subtly, mirroring memory and change).
Film/Multimedia: A narrative film or animation that loops back to a significant moment throughout, revealing more depth each time.
6. Outlier/Experimental (Fragmented, Nontraditional Forms)
Definition: Breaks conventional storytelling structures. Can take the form of memoir-in-essays, poetry, fragmented storytelling, or a nonlinear collage of experiences.
Examples in Memoir:Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris), Safekeeping (Abigail Thomas), The Dragons, the Giant, the Women (Wayétu Moore)
Applications in Other Art Forms:
Visual Art: A mixed-media installation incorporating text, photographs, and found objects.
Theater/Dance: A performance piece blending movement, spoken word, and digital projection in a nonlinear fashion.
Music: A sound collage or experimental album without a traditional song structure (e.g., Björk’s Medúlla).
Film/Multimedia: A video art piece that combines documentary footage, voice recordings, and fragmented memories in an abstract way.
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Each structure serves a different emotional and narrative purpose. Ask yourself:
Which structure best captures the essence of my story?
Does my medium lend itself to a linear or nonlinear approach?
Would weaving different timelines together deepen the impact of my work?
Could a central event or theme anchor my story?
How can form mirror content in a way that feels authentic?
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Exploding Details Exercises (from class)
What is a small moment or memory you could zoom in on that highlights the theme of your story? Explode the details! Show don’t tell.
Pick an exercise:
Pick something from your Settling In Task and develop it further
I remember poem
Six sensesCharacter Interviews / Dossiers (characters interviewing each other)
Pick a scene and make the objects and actions be metaphors. (Ie, Moving in — packing in and out/ what to choose to bring and leave behind/what to put where/memories unwrapped….)
Create a “beginner’s” guide for that moment.*A Beginner’s Guide to a Head On Collision by Sebastian Matthews*
“Whatever you do, don’t see it coming. You’re too busy doing your thing, driving from Point A to Point B. Just driving, tunes blasting, smiling at loved ones. When the car drifts into your lane, don’t see it. Not at first. It takes a split second for the bull’s eye to be slipped on before you understand the simple equation of mass and force and o shit, here it comes. Now the hard part’s over. No, that’s a lie. It gets harder each second from here on out. Ignore the sound of the engines sizzling like a diner grill; no good letting your mind puzzle that one out. More importantly, why can’t you get your feet out from under the dash, chest pressed into the wheel? What to do about that? Breathe, man. And keep breathing. As they take your family away, one after the other, alive, breathing, as they pry you out of your seat like a splinter deep in. And keep breathing on the stretcher. And in the helicopter. Don’t stop breathing, you’re doing fine. We’re almost there.”
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from Wired for Story
By Lisa CronThe second it takes you to read this sentence, your senses are showering you with over 11,000,000 pieces of information. Your conscious mind is capable of registering about forty of them. And when it comes to actually paying attention? On a good day, you can process seven bits of data at a time. On a bad day, five. On one of those days?
More like minus three.
And yet, you’re not only making your way in a complex world just fine, you’re preparing to write a story about someone navigating a world of your creation. So how important can any of those other 10,999,960 bits of information really be?
Very, as it turns out – which is why, although we don’t register them consciously, our brain is busy noting, analyzing, and deciding whether they’re something irrelevant (like the fact that the sky is still blue) or something we need to pay attention to (like the sound of a horn blaring as we meander across the street, lost in thought about the hunky guy who just moved in next door).
What’s your brain’s criterion for either leaving you in peace to daydream or demanding your immediate and total attention? It’s simple. Your brain, along with every other living organism down to the humble amoeba, has one main goal: survival. Your subconscious brain – which neuroscientists refer to as the adaptive or cognitive unconscious – is a finely tuned instrument, instantly aware of what matters, what doesn’t, why, and, hopefully, what you should do about it. It knows you don’t have the time to think, “Gee, what’s that loud noise? Oh, it’s a horn honking; it must be coming from that great big SUV that’s barreling straight at me, The driver was probably texting and didn’t notice me until it was too late to stop. Maybe I should get out the –…”
Splat.
And so, to keep us from ending up as road kill, our brain devised a method of sifting through and interpreting all that information much, much faster than our slowpoke conscious mind is capable of. Although for most other animals that sort of innate reflex is where evolution called it a day, thus relegating their reactions to what neuroscientists aptly refer to as zombie systems, we humans got a little something extra. Our brain developed a way to consciously navigate information so that, provided we have the time, we can decide on our own what to do next.
Story.
Here’s how neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sums it up: “The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick – was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution – storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly… [I]t should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.” We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us. Simply put, the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival on a need-to-know basis, and tells us a story about it, based on what it knows of our past experience with it, how we feel about it, and how it might affect us. Rather than recording everything on a first come, first served basis, our brain casts us as “the protagonist” and then edits our experiences with cinema-like precision, creating logical interrelations, mapping connections between memories, ideas, and events for future reference. Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters. Other people’s stories are as important as the stories we tell ourselves. Because if all we ever had to go on was our own experience, we wouldn’t make it out of onesies.
[pp 7-9]
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Excerpt from The Mythic Path
By David Feinstein and Stanley KrippnerYour personal mythology is the loom on which you weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story. You live your life from within this mythology, drawing to yourself the characters and creating the scenes that correspond with its guiding theme. A great deal of this activity occurs outside your awareness. To discover and begin to transform your mythology is one of the most empowering choices open to you. A renewed mythology calls up fresh perceptions, values, and a revitalized sense of purpose.
When carefully examined, personal myths reveal themselves to be every bit as creative and imaginative as the most enterprising nighttime dream, setting the standards for success and failure, good and evil, heroism and villainy, while defining for you a unique role in it all. The source of your mythology is also the source of your motivations, of your imagination, of your emotions, of awareness itself. It is the point at which consciousness springs into being. In his classic work on the intrpretation of dreams, Sigmund Freud wrote of “a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unraveled… This is the dream’s naval, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.” To explore your guiding mythology… is to bring your awareness even closer to that mysterious, illuminating source…
Two Facts of Psychological Life
One fact of psychological life…is that beneath your conscious awareness, a dynamic personal underwood is in constant motion. It is, moment by moment, involved in the enormously create task of mapping the reality in which you live. You operate according to the map that it creates, yet the influence of this map is largely outside your conscious awareness. Most people are so thoroughly immersed in their personalized version of reality that it is invisible to them, much as fish are the last creatures on the planet likely to discover water. Yet you can cultivate the immensely useful skill of stepping back, examining your lived reality, and recognizing it as a personal mythology that you can learn to articulate, assess, and transform. The more effective your guiding mythology, the better equipped you are to meet the challenges your life presents.
A second fact of psychological life is that your personal mythology is continually evolving. It is a map that forever needs to be updated because its territory is always changing. You take a new job, your guiding mythology needs to be modified. You enter a new relationship, your mythology needs to be modified. You reach another state of psychological maturity, your mythology has been modified. You lose a lifelong partner, your mythology is turned upside down. Your culture’s mythology is in chaos, parts of your mythology are in chaos….Out of that chaos, dynamic new myths are vying to be born in your society as well as in your psyche.
Your life resonates to the myths you spontaneously create to explain your past, account for the present, and guide you into the future. Life our ancestors, we are myth-makers. To conceive of oneself and one’s world is to create a mythology. While you are not necessarily aware of your underlying mythology, you can become aware of the way it serves as a dynamic inner force by examining the significance of your dreams, by making up a fairy tale about your life, or by reflecting on the themes woven into your ways of loving, working, and living in the world.
The renowned inventor Buckminster Fuller… reflected on the consequences of his severely impaired eyesight as a small child. Everything he saw was extremely fuzzy until, at age four, he was given eyeglasses and was astounded by how the world suddenly came into focus. This modern Renaissance thinker speculated that receiving those glasses might have accounted for his lifelong conviction that even if ideas and relationships seemed fuzzy to him at first, they would eventually become clear. That was, for him, a positive, effective, and realistic guiding myth. It organized his experience of the world and directed his actions.
A personal myth is a constellation of beliefs, feelings, images, and rules—operating largely outside of conscious awareness—that interprets sensations, constructs new explanations, and directs behavior. When Buckminster Fuller confronted a baffling question, his mythology explained to him that his confusion would clear once he found the lens that could bring the matter into focus, it directed him to keep looking for that lens, and it provided him with images of how to proceed.
Your personal mythology is a lens that gives meaning to every situation you meet and determines what you will do in it. Personal myths speak to the broad concerns of identity (Who am I?), direction (Where am I going?), and purpose (Why am I going there?). For an internal system of images, narratives, and emotions to be called a personal myth, it must address at least one of the core concerns of human existence, the traditional domains of cultural mythology. According to Joseph Campbell, these include:
The hunger to comprehend the natural world in a meaningful way;
The search for a marked pathway through the succeeding epochs of human life;
The need to establish secure and fulfilling relationships within a community;
The yearning to know one’s part in the vast wonder and mystery of the cosmos.
Personal myths must explain the external world, guide personal development, provide social directions and address spiritual questions in a manner that is analogous to the way cultural myths carry out those functions for entire groups of people. Your myths do for you what cultural myths do for society. Your personal mythology is the system of complementary as well as contradictory personal myths that organizes your experiences and guides your actions. It is the lens through which you perceive the world. Its values and assumptions color all you see.
[pp 3-6]
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Excerpt from The Stories We Live By
By Dan P. McAdamsWe are tellers of tales. We each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories. This is not the stuff of delusion or self-deception. We are not telling ourselves lies. Rather, through our personal myths, each of us discovers what is true and what is meaningful in life. In order to live well, with unity and purpose, we compose a heroic narrative of the self that illustrate essential truths about ourselves. Enduring human truths still reside primarily in myth, as they have done for centuries…
What is a personal myth? First and foremost, it is a special kind of story that each of us naturally constructs to bring together the different parts of ourselves and our lives into a purposeful and convincing whole. Like all stories, the personal myth has a beginning, middle, and end, defined according to the development of plot and character. We attempt, with our story, to make a compelling aesthetic statement. A personal myth is an act of imagination that is a patterned integration of our remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future. As both author and reader, we come to appreciate our own myth for its beauty and its psychosocial truth.
Though we may act out parts of our personal myth in daily life, the story is inside us. It is made and remade in the secrecy of our own minds, both conscious and unconscious, and for our own psychological discovery and enjoyment. In moments of great intimacy, we may share important episodes with another person. And in moments of great insight, parts of the story may become suddenly conscious, or motifs we had believed to be trivial may suddenly appear to be self-defining phenomena….
We do not discover ourselves in myth; we make ourselves through myth. Truth is constructed in the midst of our loving and hating; our tasting, smelling, and feeling; our daily appointments and weekend lovemaking; in the conversations we have with those to whom we are closest; and with the stranger we meet on the bus. Stories from antiquity provide some raw materials for personal myth making, but not necessarily more than the television sitcoms we watch in prime time. Our sources are wildly varied, and our possibilities, vast.
[pp. 11-13]
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Excerpt from Wired for Story
By Lisa CronNeuroscientists believe the reason our already overloaded brain devotes so much precious time and space to allowing us to get lost in story is that without stories, we’d be toast. Stories allow us to simulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them. This was a matter of life and death back in the Stone Age, when if you waited for experience to teach you that the rustling in the bushes was actually a lion looking for lunch, you’d end up the main course. It’s even more crucial now, because once we’ve mastered the physical world, our brain evolved to tackle something far trickier: the social realm. Story evolved as a way to explore our own mind and the minds of others, as a sort of dress rehearsal for the future. As a result, story helps us survive not only in the life-and-death physical sense but also in a life-well-lived social sense. Renowned cognitive scientist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker explains our need for story this way:
Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? If my hapless brother got no respect in the family, are there circumstances that might lead him to betray me? What’s the worst that could happen if I were seduced by a client while my wife and daughter were away for the weekend? What’s the worst that could happen if I had an affair to spice up my boring life as the wife of a country doctor? How can I avoid a suicidal confrontation with raiders who want my land without looking like a coward and thereby ceding it to them tomorrow? The answers are to be found in any bookstore or any video store. The cliché that life imitates art is true because the function of some kinds of art is for life to imitate it.
Not only do we crave story, but we have very specific hardwired expectations for every story we read, even though—and here’s the kicker—chances are next to nil that the average reader could tell you what those expectations are. If pressed, she’d be far more likely to refer to the magic of story, that certain je ne sais quoi that can’t be quantified. And who could blame her? The real answer is rather counterintuitive: our expectations have everything to do with the story’s ability to provide information on how we might safely navigate this earthly plane. To that end, we run them through our own very sophisticated subconscious sense of what story is supposed to do: plunk someone with a clear goal into an increasingly difficult situation they then have to navigate. When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.
So, What Is a Story?
Contrary to what many people think, a story is not just something that happens. If that were true, we could all cancel the cable, lug our Barcaloungers onto the front lawn, and be utterly entertained, 24/7, just watching the world go by. It would be idyllic for about ten minutes. Then we’d be climbing the walls, if only there were walls on the front lawn.
A story isn’t simply something that happens to someone, either. If it were, we’d be utterly enthralled reading a stranger’s earnestly rendered, heartfelt journal chronicling every trip she took to the grocery store, ever—and we’re not.
A story isn’t even something dramatic that happens to someone. Would you stay up all night reading about how bloodthirsty Gladiator A chased cutthroat Gladiator B around a dusty old arena for two hundred pages? I’m thinking no.
So what is story? A story is how what happens affects someone who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult goal, and how he or she changes as a result. Breaking it down in the soothingly familiar parlance of the writing world, this translates to:
“What happens” is the plot.
“Someone” is the protagonist.
The “goal” is what’s known as the story question.
And “how he or she changes” is what the story itself is actually about.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, a story is not about the plot or what even happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story is an internal journey, not an external one.
[pp 9-11]
Sources
Cron, Lisa. Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence.Ten Speed Press, 2012.
Feinstein, David, and Stanley Krippner. The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories of Your Past—Creating a Vision for Your Future. TarcherPerigee, 1997.
McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. Guilford Press, 1993.