Story Shapes by Allison Symes

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

I plan an outline of any story or blog I write and find doing this reveals shapes I use. For a blog, my writing usually has a linear shape. I want to make certain points. I start at A and finish at Z.

Stories have more variety. I have used circular tales where I start with an opening line and close the story with it. All the action happens in the “middle”. I like the use of repetition for the opening and closing lines here. It gives good “echoes”.

I use linear for stories a lot but vary the format. For example, I’ve written A to B stories as “normal” prose, as diaries, as letters, as monologues etc. 

Even when I use twist endings and know how a tale will finish first, it is still a linear shape. The line is working “backwards” when I do this.

Do I decide the shape of the story in advance? Generally, no. A character occurs to me. A situation occurs to me. Sometimes just from that I can tell this situation would work well as a circular story. This is especially true if the line I repeat is a poignant one. 

When putting a collection together, it has been lovely to mix my story shapes. I deliberately wanted some linear, some circular, and a varying word count. I was considering the look of the story on the printed page too. 

Occasionally I’ve told a story in poetic form so that has a shape all of its own. I suppose this could be like the ballad, only without music.

Then there are the undulating stories - the rise, the fall, the rise again. Sometimes it can be the other way round - the fall, the rise, the fall again. (The Oedipus story would come into that category).

Unless it is clear from the outset a story would work best as a circular one, I believe most writers realise the shape of their tale only after they’ve got that first draft down. I believe the story shape should contribute to the theme and the characterisation in that it “suits”. You don’t want a square peg in a round hole after all.

But it can be fun mixing up the type of stories you write and therefore the shapes that work best for them.

For blogs, the circular shape can work if I want to repeat a point and show how I got to it at the start and then returned to it at the end. This can be effective in getting that point across. The trick here is to avoid repetition in the middle of the piece. 

There should I think be a sense of logical movement from the start to the end but hopefully done in an entertaining way that keeps the reader engrossed. By the time they get to the repeated point at the end, it should seem like it was the inevitable place to reach.