Abstract
PHOTO: THREE-SHOTS/PIXABAY The Power of Normal Exploring the Notion of Story Structure by Nii Ayikwei Parkes As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to recognize your normal.” essays A s another year gathers speed it strikes me that I have been teaching creative writing in some form or other for over a decade. In that time, I have encountered numerous theories on story structure and narrative conventions; from Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, to Three-Act structure, to the Hollywoodadored The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler, which was itself derived from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, to Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. In my own practice, I avoid teaching these analyses as guide models. Each time I refer to one of them, I make it a point to stress to my students they are not universally true and should always be challenged. My discomfort with these 3–5–7 models (as I like to call them) is not just from the absurdity of trying to distill the complexity of the world’s eternally evolving heritage of stories into single models, which invariably are littered with caveats and exceptions. No. My bigger concern is that the 3–5–7 models have largely also become foundations for exclusion of certain stories— and the focus on models is somewhat akin to the way in which global economists spend years arguing about which capitalist models work better, without giving any attention to the fact that all successful capitalist nations were built on inhumane exploitation of serfs, women, occupied lands, slaves, children—and in more recent success stories like Singapore and South Korea, WORLDLIT.ORG 35 PHOTO: FRANCESCO GATTONI essay the power of normal underpaid labor and suppression of civil liberties. Just as it is within the world of fiction, focusing on the economic models and not the historic biases and nuances is misleading. What the 3–5–7s share is the notion of the normal; the starting point and, often, the conclusion of stories are deemed as normal—what happens in-between is upheaval, the drama. Strangely, nobody seems to question the normal, but writers and storytellers from the margins will have been affected by it without the word ever being mentioned. They will have been told that their stories aren’t relatable, compelling, structured, of high enough quality, etc. And while these things may be true sometimes, often what gatekeepers, fully schooled in the 3–5–7s but not the prejudices underlying them, are saying is, “I don’t recognize your normal,” or, more authoritatively, “I refuse to recognize your normal.” So, essentially, what much of the world does is to learn the dominant normal and judge stories by that capitalized Normal. That way the focus shifts to Vogler versus Booker, or the relevance of newer perspectives from the likes of John Yorke, a former producer for the cult British soap EastEnders, whose book, Into the Woods, purports to answer the why of storytelling, and Dan Harmon’s story embryo, on which his successful TV series Community is based, that argues for eight stages: (1) a normal world, (2) a desired object, (3) entry into a new world to acquire the desired object, (4) adaptation to the new world, (5) reaching the desired object, (6) paying the price for it, and (7) returning to the normal world having (8) changed. These are all useful perspectives, but the question of What is Normal? remains unasked. It lurks in the background like any other kind of institutionalized prejudice. We all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between I don’t understand your normal and I refuse to recognize your normal. If I count my work from school magazines in Ghana, I have worked as an editor for thirty years, but in every week of those years I have encountered new variations of normal. Particularly memorable was an incident when I was working in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles. I was reading a collection of stories by a Chinese writer, Mu...
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