Creative Structural Models

In Your Life as Story: Writing the New Autobiography, Tristine Rainier offers these structural models: She believes that "In its simplest form a story is: what you wanted, how you struggled, and what you realized out of that struggle . . . the consequence."

Submarine Sandwich

The shape of most traditional, full biographies/autobiographies. The person's life is imagined as a continuous line (a long loaf) stretching from birth to the present. The life could be divided by chapters into years, decades, or pivotal events.

Single Slice

This form focuses on one period of a person's life, usually centered on a pivotal event.

Embroidery Thread

With this technique, the writer chooses a particular theme or dramatic line, skipping over months, years, or even decades that are irrelevant to the particular story. "When you read a work that runs an Embroidery Thread through a Single Slice, it can feel much like a modern novel.

Examples of Thematic Threads could include conflicts and resolution, stepping stones, or relationships.

Quests

Many life stories, especially religious quests, adventure stories, and success stories in a chosen vocation or profession lend themselves to a Quest structure.

Point A= Hero's Goal is Set

Point B= Hero's Goal Achieved (or not) and wisdom attained.

Rainer lists Nine Essential Elements in this archetypal (mythic) pattern:

Beginning

1. Initiating Incident (something happens)

2. Problem/Need (established at beginning to be resolved at end)

3. Desire Line (what you want to happen as result of problem)

Middle

4. Struggle with Adversity (conflict--within or without)

5. Interim Pivotal Events (events that lead to final crisis)

6. Precipitating Event (pivotal event that forces a crisis)

Conclusion

7. Crisis (narrows options so that choice has to be made)

8. Climax (something dies so that something can live)

9. Realization (desire is satisfied, disappointed, or transformed)

Quilt

In this structure, each story or chapter stands on its own, but looked at together, tell a larger story. In quiltlike stories, the attempt to create smooth transitions is dispensed with in favor of tighter unity within each chapter or story. In quiltlike stories, there are often a series of problem/realizations that lead up to a final realization.

Transparency

Transparencies are complicated structures that superimpose two or three single slices of time to tell multiple, complementary stories. It is a very complex and artful structure and Rainer believes it shouldn't be used unless it is the only way your story can be told. The integration of overlapping stories in different time frames runs the risk of becoming terribly confusing and too mechanical.