Forum / Orgasmic story arcs

• 
  W.F. Lantry

  Feb 09, 08:49pm

  Hey, folks,

  So, yesterday, while getting ready to write, I was cruising around some fiction sites, as is my wont, because I always have a deficit of ideas, and it helps charge my batteries. Anyway, I came across this site which gives advice about story structure: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/31/25-things-you-should-know-about-story-structure/

  And I got to number 12, and found it, well, a bit odd. Now, I know we all internalized Freytag years ago, and that his pyramid was mostly built for the Greeks and pretty much collapsed after the Elizabethans, but it does strike me that it's always, always, put in masculinist terms. In other words, it's always introduction, then the rising plot, then super excitement, then ejaculation (whoops, did I say that? I meant climax!), then, um, repose. In other words, men writing about other men's stories see things in these kinds of terms.

  So I began to wonder about feminine equivalents. Is there such a thing? And I don't just mean lines and circles, but is there a feminine equivalent, an feminine orgasmic story arc, and if so, what, exactly, does it look like?

  My interest in this question is entirely prosodic, but keen nonetheless, since many say most readers of contemporary fiction are women, and I think we should always be keeping questions of audience at the forefront.

  Please let me know your thoughts,

  Thanks,

  Bill

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Feb 10, 12:07am

  Bill, interesting question and topic. I had asked (myself) questions about "feminine" linguistics (as patterns in written language) -- whether there is such a thing -- but not about female arc. I feel that structure in "experimental" (so-called, debated term) narratives may relate to it. Experimental structures subvert conventional arc; maybe the subversion is partly related to the feminine.

  A friend who recently joined Fictionaut wrote (years ago) a terrific story that ends in a gorgeous display of female orgasm (shown not told). That addresses your question literally. The plot in the story is minimal, linear, point A to point B, get the characters in the room so they can begin to have sex, typical (and typical, I told her back then, of narrative porn); the finale, though, is not denouement, does not complete or close, but is an opening -- the story ends mid-orgasm in a round sound -- the female character's rump in the air!

• 
  Bill Yarrow

  Feb 10, 02:20am

  Bill,

  This addresses my unfinished dissertation. I was writing (started 35 years ago!) on biological metaphors for creation.

  The two metaphors:

  Plato: writer as vessel or womb: the writer (seen as feminine) is inseminated by an idea (i.e. "kissed" by the Muse)[conception], which grows [gestation] and through hard labor is delivered [birth] of an offspring [child, i.e. "brain child"]

  Examples can be found in hundreds of writers from Shakespeare to Diderot to Boswell to Dickens to Ibsen to Sherwood Anderson to Erica Jong and beyond.

  Aristotle (male): writer as "maker" or phallus: This idea was not popular or developed until the late 19th century when avant-garde writers begin to explore the implication of the metaphor in which the writer's brain (penis) is aroused to a high pitch until the work, often "unfinished," more process than product, is launched (ejaculated) into the world (the reader seen as feminine, receiving the work, the mind as womb). The "child" (that is, the finished work, the product) is not born until the reader works with the process text and "births" it.

  Creation as ejaculation is explicit in the letters of Flaubert, the works of Alfred Jarry, Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Charles Bukowski (he calls his stories "ejaculations") and in the work of many painters and performance artists in the 20th century.

  The orgasmic story arch does exist but is not reserved for women writers but can be seen in male writers like Gogol, Tolstoy, and others.

  See also Stephen-Paul Martin's Open Form and the Feminine Imagination.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Feb 10, 06:27am

  Yarrow, this is so usefully distilled. I imagine the dissertation -- even unfinished -- is gold.

• You must log in to reply to this thread.