African writers by the World Story Plot Architectures
The architectures come from GriotsWell, where each people’s stories, mythology and history make up its own GriotsWell World Story World. Nine World Story Plot Architectures have been mapped from them so far: Linear, Cyclical, Spiral, Balance-Seeking, Web / Network, Non-Conflict, Geographic, Multi-Trial and Negotiation / Reciprocal.
Here the catalogue is filed by the architecture each book is built in, so an epic, a manuscript chronicle and a new novel can sit on the same shelf.
A line of cause and effect. A want or a wound sets things moving, pressure builds to a turning point, and the story resolves. Peoples all over the world tell it, in the epic and the three-act play alike.
The story returns and renews. What looks like an ending is a crossing into the next turn, and the whole is a circle walked again, as the seasons and the generations are.
Return with deepening. The story comes back to the same ground, and each pass goes further in, the way a griot returns to a lineage and finds more in it each time.
Order is disturbed and the story works to set it right. Its motion is the weighing and restoring of harmony: between people, between the living and the dead, and between a people and their world.
Many strands, many centres. The meaning lives in the threads and what they do to each other, across a family, a village or the generations.
A scene is set, developed, then turned by something unexpected, and the parts come together in a new understanding. Its tension is the tension of the turn.
Place as plot. To move through the land is to tell the story, and each river, hill and crossing holds its part.
Destiny proven through a series of trials. Each test reveals more of who the hero is, and the sum of the trials is the story.
Exchange and obligation. What is asked for, what is given in return, and the terms that bind the parties to each other.
