A Story's Movement
Journal excerpts and reflection on the movement of story and idea generation.
Writing Skins is a reader supporter author newsletter that shares excerpts from Aigner Loren Wilson’s writing journal. Aigner is an award nominated author of literary speculative fiction and critic.
Whether you’re a fan of speculative fiction, books, or a fellow writer, Writing Skins offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.
Transcript of journal entry 1/14/24: One-page and story idea generation
One-Page
I don’t think there is a singular movement of narrative or a particular dance that it takes, where people can be like oh, yes, that’s a ——. You can see the theater narrative dances in the clothes that it wears so you can see it move across the stage, change shape, morph, but the actual steps, spins, and choreography of story is wholly on the single story level.
The way it moves is not the same way another King book. Potentially the reason many books and stories foil is because the author confuses structure, genre, and story movement.
Structure: the clothes our stories wear; the arrangement of scenes and inclusion of certain elements
Genre: the music and set pieces; how our story appears to readers and the arraignment of the atmosphere
Story movement: how our characters work out the story on the page; choreography
Instead of trying to make all three or two be the same thing, we as writers need to keep the bricks of the story genre and structure away from the dance of story.
The dance of story is where writers become artists, musicians, they stand out from the crowd.
Mosaic Story Idea Generation
Make To Sleep a mosaic novel with all the different characters making up the story.
A blizzard comes to a town and isolates it while a mysterious sickness ravishes the children. The story is told by the different townspeople.
A horror novel about the survivors of a monster attack that tells the story of a monster’s life and death in a way that humanizes and connects reader to monster.
Narrative history of the island from To Carve Home in Your Bones told over the course of 800 years including the before, during, and after of the events in the novelette.
Bellefleur style family saga set in a fantastical PNW that charts its arrival and follows the story of how the PNW cedes from the US and tells a clifi story of family and survival.
Olympia speculative fiction short stories that aim to tell the story of the place through several fictional archetype characters and making fantastical things out of the ordinary.
The toy story idea but told through disconnected stories of different cases in the life of a shop of magical wares.
Journal Reflection
I think what I was trying to do here was think about the idea of narrative as a movement. That all stories, even ones where nothing happens, have movement that helps differentiate between the stories. And that the movement of a story is it’s own element and plane separate from genre, structure, plot, theme, and all that.
The movement of a story is held in how our characters in their natural environment of the story move through the narrative.
Story movement: how our characters work out the story on the page; choreography
Right now, I am eye balls deep in an SVU marathon. My partner has lovingly begun calling it a crime spree. So, forgive for using Law & Order: SVU as an example here. I will also do a literary example based on Beloved by Toni Morrison.
SVU’s structure is a police procedural, and it’s genre is a legal serial drama. All of those story planes are popular and when stated don’t make the show sound any more interesting than Sherlock, Homicide, Castle, or any of the other procedural legal drama TV shows out there.
But then when we look at its movement: the characters that move through the series.
When I say move and movement or even choreography, I don’t necessarily mean the physical actions of the characters I mean, I think, their emotions, too. When it comes to SVU and one of the longest running main characters, Olivia Benson, her movement throughout the show includes both her rise from detective to captain and her journey from living with the shame of being a child of rape to making amends with herself, her mother, her father, and growing to be a mother of a child of rape.
It’s a complicated dance and combines her emotional journey, story journey, and how it relates to the individual episodes. For example, Benson’s journey of coming to terms with who her father was and her feelings about being a product of rape are done over the course of multiple episodes, seasons, and years.
It’s a movement in 10 season acts.
In Beloved, the strangest movement in the novel is that of Beloved herself. An unchild. An unwoman. Someone who never was made manifest. Her movement goes from being a crawling already? infant to a young woman made flesh and this movement happens across decades some before Beloved was before and after she is gone.
To be honest, I’m not really sure if this idea makes sense yet. It’s something I started writing one day when I was wondering about story concepts. It could easily be ill informed and nonsensical, but I do think there’s something there.