Amy Cassidy suggest in
her
article in the Sunday Times of 2 August 2020 that we should ask the ancient
Greeks to do the big numbers when it comes to designing musicals. The ones that
respect the Golden Ratio have the most financial success.
Accidental geniuses
Yet Claude-Michel Schönberg
denies composing by numbers for the very successful musical Les Misérables. Maybe Victor Hugo got there
first with the novel. And just because you
don’t plan it that way doesn’t mean it won’t turn out like that. After all, Stephen King is the ultimate panster
in his writing but his plots are technically perfect and adhere to all of the theories.
The turn, the crisis point, the change of tempo
Yes you can see it there in most stories. Something happens somewhere
between two thirds and four fifths of the way through a tale that is a point of
no return. That gap between that and the
resolution creates the climax and this is often where we have the car chase moment.
In most rock songs we get a change of tempo,
a key change or a change in the lyrics. Maybe all of these things. In a pre-school child’s picture book after multiple
repetitions there will be a change. A haiku may do this with the turn into the
final line.
Not just in literature
It is all around us. Look at any respected painting,
pleasing architecture or even every camera shot produced by professional film
makers. Even the way we rest our eyes. Often we see this vertically and horizontally
in images.
The ration is one: 1.618 and was identified by Euclid over
2,300 years ago.
Learned or natural?
Probably a bit of both. It is present in nature in the way
sunflower seeds grow, the way trees branch and the way rabbits breed. There has
even been a suggestion that it’s there in the way viruses spread. Italian
mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, later known as Fibonacci introduced 1 1 2 3 5 8
12 21 34 55 89 144 etc/.
This number
sequence was recognised centuries before in Indian mathematics. My book
Fibbin’
Archie plays with this sequence. The overall story
shape follows the Golden Segment and the text is several chunks. One word, then
one word, then two words, then three words etc. The numbers come closer and closer
to the Golden Segment the further you go with the number sequence. Is our inclusion
of the Golden Segment in our artefacts an attempt to push that sequence, that
is in nature, to its limit? And are we now used to the proportion?
Story theories
I work mostly with an adaptation of McKee’s theory and loosely
plot my story thus:
Inciting incident
Rising complexity 1
Rising complexity 2
Rising complexity 3
Crisis point
Climax
Resolution
(I suggest read his entire book then reread Chapter 14)
The Iron Clocks
Vogler suggests that his theory works best when people don’t
follow it rigidly but skew the template slightly.
This reminds me of the Iron Clock Company. I’m afraid they don’t
seem to exist anymore. A shame. They
used to produce the most beautiful long case clocks made of iron. They looked
as if they had slightly melted but they were still recognisably grandfather
clocks. This is what I believe Vogler means
when he urges us to skew the template a little. The shape should still be recognisable
but pulled apart a little.
When as tory doesn’t work
As a publisher I frequently reject stories that aren’t really
stories. I do this more often than I reject poor writing. A lack of story is in
fact the most common fault in fiction writing. Some stories slip through the
net and I can remember being very disgruntled and dissatisfied as a reader with a novel that could not make
up its mind what it was about or whose
story it was. Was it the story of the young girl who had got pregnant? Was it about
the pyromaniac she’d befriended? Was it about
his long-lost mother who was looking for him?
The story lacked a firm structure.
A tool for writers
Even if you’re a panster it might be worth just laying the Golden
Segment stencil over your story and seeing if you have it there. You may need to
put a little more into shape. If you’re a planner start with this as your first
outline.
Eureka moment/ really?
Going back to Cassidy’s article she tells us ““It was a
eureka moment,” said Stephen Langston, a lecturer at West of Scotland
University, who made the discovery during studies for his PhD.” They are referring to the successful musicals.
But I’ve known this for a long time, even before I could put
a name to it. I know how stories work because I’ve read so many of them. Perhaps
we gain some comfort from knowing what to expect. We love this shape that is first
hinted to us in nature.
Image by Rafael Javier from Pixabay
