Many Ways of Visualizing Story Structures

By Nancy McCabe

If you try typing “Narrative Structure” into Google Images, a long string of diagrams will appear, most of them variations on ideas outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics about how a story works, a diagram commonly known as Aristotle’s Incline. While he was writing about drama, these concepts were handed down from drama to short stories and novels and then from fiction to creative nonfiction.

In her book Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway describes the typical Aristotlean diagram as an “inverted checkmark.” My undergraduate students describe it as “that mountain-like thing.” Essentially, as in the illustration above, a line rises upward to a peak, then quickly descends. The terminology for the different parts of the story will vary: the climactic moment alone is also referred to as the crisis, catharsis, confrontation, reversal, epiphany, or turn, among other terms. Whatever terminology we prefer, many writers find it useful to draw a picture to examine the way their stories work—and many have created their own variations on Aristotle’s ideas or found altogether different diagrams or metaphors to examine their stories’ shapes.

Your “Narrative Structure” Google search might also yield diagrams of Freytag’s Pyramid, which uses similar elements while slightly reconceiving the shape of a story.

It may also bring up the Fichtean Curve, which skips the initial inciting incident and starts with the rising action, and a representation of Kishotenketsu, a Japanese form that lacks a traditional idea of conflict but builds to a twist.

Years ago in graduate school I searched through dozens of writers’ manuals to see how they diagrammed or described narrative structure. A very dusty old fiction-writing manual that I found in the University of Nebraska stacks showed a picture of water dripping from a faucet. The author of this metaphor said that water pulls from the lip of the faucet, extending into a larger and larger drop; the story ends at the moment it lets loose and starts to fall.

I took a YouTube lesson on drawing a faucet to try to represent this. The result below is my evidence that drawing skills are not necessary for the exercise that I’m recommending.

I found other diagrams that resembled seesaws, big X’s, and hourglasses turned on their side, all attempts to show the Aristotelian idea of how the fates of characters cross in many stories, like in, say, Anna Karenina or A Star is Born. In that, the female character’s star rises as her mentor and lover’s star falls; we see a similar structure in Anna Karenina, in which Anna’s fate declines as she confronts the effects of her adultery until (spoiler alert) she finally throws herself under a train. At the same time, we follow the story of Levin, whose fate improves through the course of the story and who has a happier ending.

While the influence of Aristotle is apparent in many diagrams, other writers have rebelled against the implications of the incline. Virginia Woolf regarded traditional narrative plot as an instrument of male control. “In 1925, not long after publishing Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf turned to a fresh page in her notebook and set out a plan for a new novel. It took the form of a sketch. . . This spare diagram—’wo blocks joined by a corridor,’ as she captioned it—was the seed of To the Lighthouse,” Kensy Cooperrider begins her blog on narrative structure. (See Woolf’s image and the entire blog here)

Indigenous and feminist critics took up ideas similar to Woolf’s in the 1970’s and 80’s, arguing that the experience of many groups tend to be more circular, cyclical. Feminist critics argued that Aristotle’s incline is a male-oriented linear structure based on patterns of male sexuality, implying that all experience leads to one explosive climax. In the late 1980s, quilts became a popular metaphor to describe a “feminine” narrative structure. Rather than encouraging the eye to follow a linear course across a surface and to complete a motion, critic Ann Romines says, “the geometric figures of a quilt advance and recede, with duplication and reversions of the same forms and configurations, again and again.”

How ever you conceive of narrative structure, there’s a longstanding tradition of writers sketching out the shapes of their stories as a tool for understanding them. Journalism classes taught me to envision news stories as inverted pyramids. Google the five paragraph essay and you’ll find drawings of pyramids and towers. The eighteenth century novel Tristram Shandy  was originally published in nine volumes and integrated playful narrative devices that include digressions, fragments, visual images, and representations of both chronological and psychological approaches to time. Author Lawrence Sterne includes a diagram of “four lines I moved through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes.”

Kurt Vonnegut identified eight patterns in storytelling, represented by infographics by Maya Eilam here. https://bigthink.com/high-culture/vonnegut-shapes/ And Tim Bascom offers an entertaining look at different ways to visually conceive of stories in essays here: https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/picturing-the-personal-essay-a-visual-guide/

Sometimes I have students take off from this, drawing diagrams to represent the shapes of their own essays and stories. Some borrow from Aristotle’s ideas; others search for alternative ways to conceive of their stories’ shapes, like a group of students many years ago who envisioned  Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” as a flower. They said that the center of the flower represented the gathering of the group of characters while each petal represented each character telling his or her separate version of events.

I think it’s clear by now that I’m not an artist—but I hope that it’s also clear that it can be a useful exercise to draw a picture of what we’re writing in order to gain insights on the shapes of the stories we’re telling and the balance of elements in the story. Further, creating a visualization of how a story works—or how we want it to work—can be a useful way to gain insight, perspective, and direction.
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Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, including the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Missouri 2020). Her debut young adult novel Vaulting through Time was just released by CamCat Books. Her work has received a Pushcart. Her asynchronous online course ‘The Shapes of Stories‘ begins September 10th at Muse Writing and Creative Support. Her synchronous workshop, ‘The Healing Power of the Artful Essay: Transforming Experience into Art’ will be offered through Craft Talks and will begin September 24.