Growth – Gryphon's Aerie

I’m Back.

I said the other day that I’d write a thing about why I gave up on ‘learning’ reading, and in fact almost all reading all together. But time I try to write ‘why’ it ends up sounding like whining. (I’m not in a healthy place right now, but then very few of us are).

So here’s the short version:

I was a shithead and turned my back on one of my core principles. I let myself be convinced that growth was ultimately impossible. That people really can’t change, and there was no point trying to educate myself or anyone else. I’d already given up the education activism I spent most of the past decade and a half on, for similar reasons. Giving up my reading was just the next shitty step in a path I didn’t consciously realize I was following. I had nothing to say, I had nothing worth saying, because I was a shit person who would never free myself of my bigotry and it didn’t matter anyway because even if I had anything to say, no one else would ever change anyway.

God it hurts typing that. Admitting that. `

That for all the stubbornness I’m so proud of, I was that willing to give up. That for all my commitment to growth, I was willing to accept stagnation.

The worst part is that on some level, I still believe it. I still don’t see the point in trying.

But I’ve got my feet under me again. I remember who I am and what I am committed to.

And there being ‘no point’ has never stopped me before.

It’s time to start growing again, start writing again, start making a difference again.

It’s time to be me again.

What Makes a Growth Centered Story?

Growth-centered stories are a relatively new idea for me, and I’m still exploring all the different facets of what they are and how they work. Today I want to explore what makes a growth-centered story and how it’s different from other stories.

So today, we’re going to take a look at that.

As always, I’m figuring this out as I go and I’m sure I’m missing some stuff.

For this discussion, I’m using Andre Norton’s Hands of Lyr as an example. The Hands of Lyr and the other Senses stories have a central conflict which is critical to the plot. But the stories are not centered on that conflict; they are centered on growth. As a story that walks the line between conflict- and growth-centered, I think The Hands of Lyr is a good choice to identify what makes a growth-centered story and how it is different from conflict-centered even when there is significant conflict. Expect major spoilers.

Several things make up a growth-centered story. Here’s my current take (subject to evolution and change):

The plot can be defined in terms of growth.
The story cannot happen without significant character growth.
The story doesn’t need an antagonist, and if there is one the protagonists are not focused on them.
The protagonist’s growth and actions affect the world around them/the wider community.

Destroy the Binary — it’s not just growth or conflict

I’m focusing on the line between growth and conflict-centered stories because most English stories are conflict-centered. But not all stories are one or the other. I mentioned in another essay LeGuin’s story Those Who Walk Away from Omelas as a Carrier Bag story that is not growth-centered. In fact, it rejects even the idea of growth, pointedly saying that none of the characters seek or achieve change. They only either accept or reject the horror their seeming utopia hides.

Defining the Plot — the one line summary

The first requirement of a growth-centered story is that the story can be defined in terms of growth. The one-line summary is probably the most common way to define a plot.

If Andre Norton used one-line summaries for her stories, I’ve never seen them. But if I were to write a logline for The Hands of Lyr, it would go something like this:

A priestess-in-training and a priest-hating warrior must learn to work together to find and restore a sacred relic and save a broken land.

There are several other ways you could put together a one-line summary. Still, I can’t think of any I’d write that doesn’t include the need for Alnosha and Kryn to learn to work together. Learning to work together is a form of growth.

So, this story can be defined in terms of growth.

Now, it is possible to define this story in terms of conflict. For instance:

A priestess-in-training and an embittered warrior must work together to defeat an ancient evil poisoning the land.

This summary is less accurate (and we’ll see why later), but it’s a workable summary for this story.

Some growth stories can be defined in terms of conflict, but that doesn’t make them not growth-centered. The important thing is that they /can/ be defined — accurately — in terms of growth.

The Story Cannot Happen without Significant Character Growth

This… almost goes without saying, right? You can’t have a growth-centered story without growth. This growth may take different forms, but it has to be there.

It Does Not Need an Antagonist

Many growth-centered stories don’t have an antagonist or a central conflict to overcome. Instead, they may have a series of small conflicts the protagonist must navigate or have other types of challenges.

If there is an antagonist —

The Protagonist Is Not Focused on the Antagonist

Just because there is an antagonist doesn’t mean that the protagonist is focused on them. Sometimes, you have a “I am your greatest rival!” “I didn’t know I had a rival” moment. The antagonist is obsessed with the protagonist, and the protagonist just… didn’t know they existed. Or they might know about the antagonist but consider the antagonist a ‘later’ problem while they try to focus on this other thing.

Or, as in The Hands of Lyr, the antagonist may be interfering with another quest.

Nosh’s goal in The Hands of Lyr is to reassemble the titular Hands of her goddess. Kryn gets dragged into her quest, initially unwillingly. This quest is a threat to the antagonist — the evil wizard who broke the Hands nearly a century ago. Having the Hands reassembled will be a major threat to his power in the world. But —

If the evil wizard got struck with lightning a few chapters into the book, the story would still have happened and had the same basic plot.

Nosh and Kryn would still have traveled across the land seeking the scattered Fingers. They still would have faced raiders, criminal lords, and blizzards. Kryn would still have needed to confront himself and his goals and accept that he had become a new person and his old goals did not fit the person he became. Nosh would still need to learn how to interact with people and function in society after being raised in total isolation by the last priestess of Lyr.

Now, the evil wizard doesn’t get hit by lightning a few chapters in. He is a threat throughout the entire story up until the final confrontation. But the main characters, when they become aware of him, are aware of him not as the goal but as an /impediment/ to restoring the Hands and, with them, the land once ruled by Lyr.

Even in the final confrontation, we see this. When Nosh and Kryn reach the statue, they find the evil wizard left a spell which threatens the Hands and the wizard himself slowly manifesting in the room.

Instead of a big climactic battle, Nosh /ignores/ him. That’s her big challenge: ignoring the big bad and his threatening magic while she restores the fingers. To trust in herself, her goddess, and Kryn at her back. And Kryn, who does confronts the evil wizard, defeats the big bad not by attacking /him/, but by attacking the magic cord that ties him to the spell.

The evil wizard is, as far as the world is concerned, the big bad. He broke the world, destroyed the old order, and laid waste to entire countries. But as an antagonist, he is a distraction. It is by not being drawn into a confrontation that Nosh and Kryn win the day — because the wizard may fill the role of an antagonist, but he is not their focus.

Their focus is on healing and restoration, not conflict.

The Protagonist’s Growth and Actions Impact the Wider Community (Maybe)

I’m not sure about this one, but it’s a pattern I am seeing. Growth-centered stories generally focus on the growth of the protagonist, but growth does not happen in isolation. The growth of the protagonist will impact the world around them. If all change is internal, it is not true growth.

It’s been over six months since I first wrote this and posted it on my old website. Maybe over a year, I kind of lost track in there. Reading it over now, I’m pretty happy with it. I think this is a good litmus test for what is and is not a growth-centered story.

What do you think? Drop a comment and let me know!

Growth Centered Story-Structure

The Most Dangerous Game got me interested in story structure. It has long been a popular short story in American high schools. Most USian folks I’ve spoken with are familiar with it and I’ve seen some good rewrites and alternate takes over the years.

The thing is, in US English class they teach that there is only one story structure – the 5 act (sometimes the 3/5 act) with the Hero’s Journey as an incredibly detailed take on one type of 5 act story. And then they present you with The Most Dangerous Game, which fits the 5 act structure by courtesy only.

My English teacher used it as an example of the flexibility of the 5 act. “The resolution is only a single sentence! Everything else is implied.”

You know what else is implied?

The climax. It does not exist in that story. Not in the usual sense. Like, you can cram it into the definition. But say “We are going to have a to-the-death fight, winner takes all,” jump straight to “Victory was sweet” and tell me there was a story climax there? Bullshit.

The climax is in the blank spaces between the words. It’s a beautiful piece of writing. But it’s not 5 act.

(And don’t get me started on Shakespeare and 5 act. How any English teacher can claim with a straight face that the Bard wrote in ‘classic’ 5 act baffles me.)

The point is if you still think ‘5 act structure’ and ‘conflict-based narratives’ are universal and important, I have a reading assignment for you: Worldwide Story Structures by Kim Yoonmi

For me, even though a bunch of stuff made me question the 5 act structure, it was years before I ditched it for my stories. I kept having stories that didn’t work and trying to ‘fix’ them by adding more conflict/better climax/what have you.

Yeah, that was going nowhere, no way, no how.

So I stopped thinking about it and just wrote what worked. For nearly ten years, I hardly thought about the structure of my stories. I read a shit ton about story structures and tried to read a variety of stories with a variety of story structures. But my stuff? I let it be what it was.

Mostly worked, but caused some problems.

One problem was Mighty Hero Force Epsilon.

Overall, the serial came out well, but I spent over a year fighting it because Season 2 did NOT want to come together for me. Which is why I wrapped it up and pinned “the End” on the piece.

It was also what made me sit down and think about my story structure, if I have a consistent one, what am I doing with my stories?

It turns out, I do have a story structure I follow fairly consistently. It’s just not one I’ve ever seen described.

My Growth-Based Structure

To start with, my story structure is built around growth – character growth and relationship growth mostly. This is why I kept failing when I tried to fix the conflict in my stories. Conflict is a side issue in my stories. By increasing story conflict I actually distracted from the central plotline, which only made the stories worse.

I don’t have a name for my particular growth-based story structure. But (borrowing Kim Yoonmi’s analysis format) I can break down how it works –

Number of Acts: As many as needed

What is it?:

pushed out of normalcy/comfort
lack of stability causes discomfort and upset
growth leads to temporary stability which cannot be maintained
repeat 2-3 as necessary until
characters grow enough they can establish actual stability in a new ‘normal’

Story Driver(s)?: discomfort/unhealthy personal situation

Notes:

Most stories have a ‘central conflict’ in the sense that an outside force disrupts the ‘old normal’ and continues to interfere in establishing a new normal. However a central conflict is not necessary, and if it exists may be resolved before, during, or after the establishment of a new normal. Or not resolved at all.

Other Growth Based Story Structures

This is not the only way to write a growth-based story. It’s just my way. When I look at my reading over the years I recognize other authors using what could be called growth based story structures, all using different structures. There are also some structures, like the four act ki-sho-ten-ketsu and it’s many varients, which don’t necessarily center growth OR conflict, but can center either or neither as the author wishes.

Below is a short list of other authors who have written growth-centered stories

This list is not meant to be comprehensive or academic. It covers the growth-centered stories I am familiar with, which is probably a small portion of the growth-centered stories out there. My goal here is to get a few ideas for different kinds of growth-centered story structures on paper. If you are writing or know other types of growth-centered structures, please reach out!

Maeve Binchy:

Maeve Binchy wrote what I call braided stories. Her novels have one or two ‘main’ characters, but in and around the main character, many other characters twine their own stories. Binchy truly grasped the ‘we’re all the protagonist of our own story’ idea, and wrote books where every character was a protagonist. The story they were protagonist of may have appeared only briefly, but it was there.

In braided stories there is not a climax, any crisis will be a ‘normal’ life-gone-to-hell moment and these happen throughout the story. Lovers may come together without any great declarations, quietly sliding into and through each others lives until it’s obvious that they belong together without anyone needing to say anything.

Instead, each character has a story thread. Most of them start distinct, others are already twined together – often in unhealthy ways. Over the course of the story, these threads come together and pull apart in different ways. Usually, ways that support and buttress each other. By the end, with the direct and indirect support of the stories around them, most characters have grown into a new normal and a healthier life. Those that don’t stand out as examples of what happens when we reject the growth and support offered by people around us.

Andre Norton

Andre Norton is best known for Witch World, but for me her stories that stand out most have always been the Senses and Dipple series (serieses? How do you plural that?)

In these books, the main character gets caught up in a conflict that was none of theirs – until the wider world forced it on them. Surviving this wider conflict requires growth, often a great deal of it. These stories often include a traditional 5-act conflict structure. But I would argue this conflict structure essentially acts as a macguffin to drive the growth.

The climatic scene in the Senses books particularly often have an almost staged quality. All the characters know their parts, and there is very little tension. They have all grown in knowledge of themselves and their compatriots. Everyone will act in the right way at the right moment, everyone trusts the others to do their part.

This growth may come in the form of new abilities and powers, learning to trust others, giving up harmful goals like revenge, or moving beyond the role one has been trained in all their life. But this growth and how it happens is the center of the story, with much of the conflict never being fully explained, happening off screen, or taking part on a much wider scale than the character’s story.

Miyazaki Hayao

Miyazaki mostly writes ki-sho-ten-ketsu structured stories. Ki-sho-ten-ketsu can be used for either growth centered or conflict centered stories or center something else entirely. Much of anime is ki-sho-ten-ketsu, but Miyazaki Hayao’s stories stand out as unique among anime. I don’t know what Miyazaki calls his fiction structure, if he calls it anything in particular. But to me, his movies always flowed like water, moving from one place to another, sometimes meandering, sometimes rushing and white with rapids. But his stories often focus on his characters growing and becoming.

I’m thinking especially of Spirited Away because it’s the movie I’ve seen most recently (and I can’t watch video these days, brain stuff). But I remember watching Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa and how different they were from everything I had seen before, how much they focused on characters. There were battles, but they seemed to take place almost in the background, even while they were happening. Secondary to the characters and how they interacted with and affected each other.

And Spirited Away, well, that movie is ALL about growth with almost no on-screen conflict.

Ursula Le Guin

Long before I started writing, LeGuin was calling out the conflict-focused view of fiction as a false and imposed restriction based on an unhealthy view of the world. Her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of fiction is still available online and I highly recommend it.

“I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

“…its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”

It’s stretching things to say that the carrier bag is growth-centered. Le Guin never claimed it as such or talked about growth much that I recall. Certainly not all of her stories were growth centered (Olemas comes to mind, as one that wasn’t). But many of them were. The carrier bag theory certainly has room in it for growth centered stories.

A carrier bag, by definition, has room for many things.

Why Centering Growth?

Ever since I wrote the text for my home page, I’ve been having second (and third, and fourth) thoughts. I see around me every day people causing harm by ‘centering’ certain types of growth. Streaming services expecting unlimited growth in views and viewers, venture capitalists pursuing unlimited growth in profits, empires seeking unlimited growth of power and influence. I also see how the drive for unlimited growth (of converts, of power, of borders) fueled the conflict-centered worldview that I turned to growth to /avoid/.

I considered changing the home page. Maybe talk about the cycles that growth is part of, homeodynamics, that sort of thing. It didn’t work, didn’t fit. Growth, for me, is central. Central to my life and central to my writing.

It is, I think, a different kind of growth. Not a growth that can be measured with metrics, plotted on graphs, or translated to profits. And it is a growth that is necessary.

I spent more than half my life like a bonsai tree: trapped in a too-small space, twisted to grow in the direction and shape others chose. Worse, because an experienced bonsai grower works with the tree, they don’t force growth with no consideration or respect for the tree’s nature and needs.

I spent more than half my life being told that my stories needed more conflict. Conflict for the sake of conflict. Because it’s not a story without conflict.

Why center growth?

Because I am reclaiming it.

I am sinking my roots deep into the earth, spreading my branches wide. I am saying to hell with conflict and their fucked up definition of ‘story’. I am creating my own stories, where conflict isn’t part of the definition and characters grow, like I grow, simply because growth is beautiful. Simply because we deserve the chance to be better. To be us.

That is why I am centering growth.