Meander, spiral, radial, fractal, cell. Perhaps there are even correlations between kinds of stories and certain patterns, like tragedians following the arc. This way of seeing structure in narrative might seem reductive; that’s partly my point. And you might see slightly different patterns from those I see in the narratives examined in the coming pages. But what I hope is that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural, that evolving writers won’t feel oppressed by the arc, that they’ll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they’ll discover ways to
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