Fieldnote 07: My personal storytelling curriculum.
I’ve been building and following an in-depth modular course on the history and structure of storytelling. These Fieldnotes are the long-form supplements, one essay per section, written to stand on their own. This is Section 7, the last of the orientation module, and it does what the first six were quietly building toward. It hands you the map of everything ahead, and the key for reading it:
Where does this whole curriculum go, and how should you travel it?
The orientation module was the legend, the little box in the corner of a map that tells you what the symbols mean. You now know what a story is, how the telling can depart from the events, the difference between showing and telling, why the mind cannot stop narrating, how meaning gets imposed rather than found, and how to use a theory without being used by it. With the legend learned, you are ready for the country itself.
──────── ◇ ────────
The country divides into three regions, and the division is not arbitrary. Any act of storytelling has three parts: a source it comes from, a made object that carries it, and a mind that receives it. Most questions ever asked about narrative land in one of those three places, so the map has three regions, and you will walk them in that order. Lose your bearings later, in any module, and you can always ask which of the three you are standing in.
Where stories come from
The first region is the oldest. Before anyone asked how a story is built, they asked where stories come from, and why the same shapes keep returning across cultures that never met. This is the country of origins. You will go back to the oral tradition, to the singers who composed whole epics in performance with no page in front of them, and to the songlines that hold a continent’s knowledge in narrative form. You will sit with the first people who tried to make rules for it, Aristotle in Athens and the rasa theorists in India, arguing about what a story is for. And you will test the great claim that there is a single master-pattern beneath all stories, the monomyth, and learn exactly where it holds and where it lies. What this region gives you is depth in time, and a set of recurring shapes old enough to feel like instinct.
How stories are built
The second region is the workshop. Here the question turns from where stories come from to how they work, and the tools get precise. You will learn to separate the events from their telling with a jeweller’s exactness, and to name who is seeing a scene and who is speaking it. You will learn to measure how a page speeds up time or stops it dead. You will take apart the novel, the form that swallowed all the others, and the screen structures that quietly govern most of the stories you now consume. By the end of this region you will not be able to read a paragraph without seeing its machinery, which is the small price of learning how anything is made. What it gives you is power, the move from feeling that a passage works to knowing why.
How stories are received
The third region is where the story happens, which is not on the page at all. It happens in a reader. You will follow the long turn in which the field stopped treating meaning as a thing sealed inside the text and started asking what the reader brings and supplies. Then you will go further in, into the brain itself, to the cognitive science of why these patterns work on a nervous system, why we model the minds of people who do not exist and weep for them. This region closes the loop the first one opened. The shapes that recur across all cultures recur because of the equipment in the head of every reader who ever received them.
──────── ◇ ────────
Running through all three regions is one current, genre and effect, the question of how a story produces a particular feeling, fear or grief, on purpose. It has its own module near the end, and if you write in the dark forms it is where you will spend your longest hours. And above the whole country stands the thing you will build for yourself, a capstone in which you stop applying other people’s theories and write your own.
That capstone deserves a word now, because it is the secret purpose of everything before it. For most of the course you borrow other people’s instruments. In the last module you put them down and build your own, a short statement of how you think stories work and what you intend yours to do, defended with everything you have learned. You study every theory in the field to earn one thing, the right to disagree with all of them in a voice that is yours. A reader finishes the course. A writer finishes the capstone.
One more thing the legend should tell you. The road has a direction, and knowing it keeps you oriented. The study of story began as command, when Aristotle and Horace told poets how it ought to be done. Centuries later it became a science, when the formalists and structuralists stopped giving orders and started taking the clock apart to see how it ran. Then it fractured, as a later generation doubted the parts ever truly cohered. Then it handed the whole question to the reader, and at last to the brain. Rules, then system, then reader, then mind. Every module you are about to enter is a stop on that road, and when you feel lost you can ask which one you are standing on.
The six ideas from this orientation module do not stay behind at the border; they ride with you the whole way. The change of state from the first section is what every plot theory in the origins region is trying to systematise. The cut between story and discourse runs the length of the workshop. The reason we narrate and the meaning we impose are waiting in the region of reception, where they turn out to be one question seen from the reader’s side. And the skill of holding a theory lightly is the one you will reach for in every module, because each delivers a lens powerful enough to blind you. Carry the six lightly. You will need every one of them.
So, how to walk it. The first rule is to walk, not ride. These essays are the map, but the tasks are the territory, and a map you only admire leaves you exactly where you started. Do the analysis. Write the bad first answer. The second rule is to keep a logbook. Your saved answers are a commonplace book, and the patterns that surface across them, the moves you return to and the ideas you resist, are the beginning of your own poetics. The third rule is that you may enter the country anywhere, since every module stands alone, but the reward compounds for anyone who crosses the whole of it.
One habit underwrites all three rules. From here on, read like a writer. The ordinary reader asks what happens next. The writer reads the same page asking how the effect was produced, and what the author refused to show. It is a slower and less innocent way to read, and you cannot undo it once it sets. That loss of innocence is not a side effect of this course. It is the course.
Before you take a single step into the first region, set a north star. This essay has been a map, its three parts the three great questions the rest of the course will answer, and a map is only any use to someone who knows where they are trying to get to. So decide, now, in rough and private words, what you want to be able to do by the end, and you will have something to walk toward and something to measure against when you arrive.
Your task, the last of the orientation module: write your starting intentions. What do you want to be able to do as a storyteller that you cannot do yet? And which single work, the one you most wish you had written, will you carry to the capstone and take apart with everything this course gives you? Keep the answer somewhere safe. At the end you will read it again, and the distance between the two readings is the whole point.
The first region begins where all of it began, around a fire, with someone saying: listen.
- AJW
──────── ◇ ────────
Further reading for this section:
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, for the history of the road from formalism to the present.
Jonathan Culler and H. Porter Abbott, met in earlier sections, remain the clearest general guides as you go.
