Will I love Meander, Spiral, Explode?

This book has a playful quality that engaged me immediately.

I was intrigued by Allison’s adventurous vision—one that sees patterns in nature as models for stories that don’t follow the traditional Aristotelian arc.

Alison analyzes many novels in terms of their shape (waves, spirals, tsunamis, and fractals)—stretching my imagination. She also makes it brilliantly clear that the shape of the hero’s journey is just one of many possible shapes for a fictional work.

I love the way Alison looks to nature to explore the almost unlimited possibilities for structuring a narrative.

She asks readers to move beyond the traditional narrative arc and think instead about how writers employ other structures such as waves, echoes, spirals, and varying narrative speeds to get to the heart of their stories and keep readers turning the page. I have seen this craft book repeatedly open new narrative possibilities for my students.  

This is a craft book that one of my coaching clients recommended to me.

It offers an intricate approach to narrative design, using geometry, biology, and philosophy to build networks and systems of thoughts and ideas within the framework of literary writing. As a creative writing teacher and coach, I read a lot of craft books, and in terms of actionable ideas, this one is top tier.

It is written in the tone of a manual yet contains a high level of its own syntactic beauty and was clearly written using the very ideas and strategies it details.