NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
This is a link that will take you into various approaches to writing a narrative.
https://jerryjenkins.com/story-structures/#story-structure-1
I have some others in mind. One is taking an old rigid story or adage — let’s say something Biblical — and imagining it to recommend the opposite conclusion. Like, “curiosity killed the cat” and “satisfaction brought it back.” Or someone remarked the other day it would be healthier to change wine into water.
Another, based on my experience, is something happens that blasts you into a new world, either a shift in perception like when a movie shifts from black and white to color, or some kind of attitude shift, a realization. This was the key to New Yorker stories once. The old Joe Campbell pattern of going up a mountain can be switched to a spelunker or archeologist going deeper. What would that mean?
I’ve been reading about the architecture of sentience, that is, how one senses and interprets what happens, maybe according to what a toddler’s experience taught one. For an instance, I’ve learned to just watch, to not risk, which is a good idea for a writer but not for a lover.
A much larger version of a change in perception is the worldwide sea change science is pressing us into, a complete reorganization of what we thought the world, its very structure, is all about. A proportion of us have had to go from the practical Newtonian physics/industrial understanding of existence to a strange swirling particulate, theoretical, challenge to our practical sensory understanding of life. This story has been better told in movies than in books, but that might be wrong. Maybe I don’t read the right things. Another example might be the overwhelming of the fine cultures of North America by Euros and then a compensating formation of Pan-Indian culture, a composite.
Parallel to this re-framing of the scientific understanding of the world is a sociological sharpening of the existence of parallel and but sometimes adjacent strata of hidden cultures, each parasitic on others: the captive, the poor, the criminal, the young, the homeless, the disabled, the ultra-rich, the high-status professionals, and the sex workers. Stories about their relationships within and among themselves are age-old. Only recently they have burst into sight again through politics and the courts. So surprisingly, so omnipresent, that the media — which is highly compromised in a materialist society — can hardly understand in order to report.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/facebook-bot-farm/
We are all Scheherazade, hoping to survive by telling stories. The trouble is that if we find one we like, we let it become a script without questioning it enough.
A bit of reverse engineering. In writing a story about a fake little town in a vast landscape, which is Western. there’s a sense of withdrawal from the head-gnarls of the post-modern to a simpler place of an earlier time. And one can deal with various approaches to life by “embodying” them in personalities..
So what I’ve got here, the cards I’ve invented for this little narrative game, are three characters who can interact, remember with flashbacks, express points of view, dream. For instance, the middle-aged widow who plays the piano can recover from the death of her husband and/or loss of her piano so that she comes to understand the music didn’t burn. She owns the town. How much responsibility comes to bear on her? It’s too materialistic for her to make the town a venue for concerts of whatever kind, but who can blame her for wanting to be outstanding?
The older woman who also plays the piano is not at first a “townie” but a route to nature. I wanted overlap with the younger woman. Maybe she should play a different kind of music. She could be scientific, working on botany or geology, or she could be more earthy, maybe managed a flock of sheep so I can talk about pastoralists. She can be a foil in dialogue and action with the town owner. (Both need names.) If a newspaper with a printing press is taken over by one of the women, would that introduce the industrial revolution? Or if there is a pile of old newspapers in the corner, that would be another source of stories. But this is just a movie set — the press wouldn’t even work. The real technology was the cameras and they have been taken away by the crew. Maybe there’s a pile of stills downloaded from digital cameras.
Maybe the boy should be Native American, but not one from a specific rez. Maybe he’s been a captive of his white father or another male relative, maybe even forced into sexwork — to draw in a little realistic darkness — working truck stops and using the computer to keep track of them, since so many have left CB’s and gone to the Internet. But then the captor dies, leaving the boy free but formless.
Is bringing up Notre Dame burning just too much? I wanted an attack on the elaborate, dominant, but seductive pre-existing Euro culture to explain why people will participate and defend something that stands for so much that is tragic and destructive. Because the value of the little ghost town has to stand up against something. Otherwise, it’s just an elusive fantasy, a real ghost town. This is the way most people see cinematic reconstructions of the recent past — a lost Garden of Eden without snakes. Maybe a gunslinger.A
Of course, finding a tech savvy tribal boy with a laptop in the back of a fake church is just a “marker” scene, a little narrative node to be expanded and “dressed.” I should note here that when the woman looks for something to throw on over her nightgown, she opens the vestry closets (vestry for putting on vestitures, which were pretty elaborate in traditional Catholic places) and finds instead an ancient black silk academic robe like preachers from “learned” traditions wear, so that introduces scholarly stuff. I have vivid sense memories of Nat Lauriat’s half-rotted but elegantly constructed silk robe, the smell and the rustle of it. Good narrative like good acting comes from sense memories.
A small town, like a congregation, is a collection of people of various kinds with a common cause, yet this narrative has only three characters. One option would be adding animals, horses and dogs especially. Cats maybe in the background, sitting in the sunny windows of facades with no rooms behind them — just observing. No commitment. What if barn swallows had come instead of eagles or vultures.
“Begin Again” — one word or two. What about naming the little newspaper “Beginnings”? What ended? Confidence, hope, connection to the point of intimacy? What is being begun? Will there be a huge explosion of new understanding that involves Haley’s Comet? Has to be something that will make curious readers want to know.
