Write a first person POV breathless paragraph or sentence like this Gwen Kirby did here OR do your own thing, but don’t write in a straight line. Your prompt for today is to write a story that meanders in this way, keeping the central conflict on low hum the whole time. And it’s a wonderful example of the power of meandering. It’s funny, angry, sad, desperate, tender, real. ![]() Anyone who reads stands to appreciate her argument that the primary way most of us are taught that fiction ought to be structuredFreytag’s famous. It’s actually one looping sentence, spilling over with emotion, yet banal in its attention to, well, that pizza. 'You don’t have to be a professional writer to enjoy novelist Jane Alison’s brilliant new craft guide Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, published by Catapult Press. I’ve read Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison and Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, both of which advocate moving beyond Freytag’s Pyramid and the three-act structure, but how do you do that and keep a genre story moving (I write science fiction/fantasy for adults. Kirby, published in Wigleaf. This narrative is all over the place, yet focused like a laser at the same time. Her first novel, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has been translated into seven languages. Italo Calvino says that “digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. This week’s interview is with Jane Alison, author of Meander, Spiral, Explode Jane Alison was born in Canberra, Australia. ![]() A meander begins at one point and moves toward a final one, but with digressive loops. But it might be bored by classic conflict, so instead lingers by flowing along an extravagant arabesque of detours: this is what meandering narratives do. “If a narrative naturally wants to flow toward its end but doesn’t want to get there yet-the pleasure’s in the journey-it might hold back by strewing conflicts, boulders, along the way, as an adventure story might. ![]() In her excellent craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison says:
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