Narratives that strike me as radial are those in which a powerful center holds the fictional world—characters’ obsessions, incidents in time—tightly in its gravitational force. That center could be a crime or trauma or something a figure wants to avoid but can’t help falling into: something devastatingly magnetic. Unlike in a spiral, the story itself—the incidents we see dramatized—barely moves forward in time. Instead, a reader might have a sense of being drawn again and again to a hot core—or, conversely, of trying to pull away from that core. You might already know the end at the start and
...more
