“Keep or Kill: Story Structure”

Summary: This article is unique in the way it is giving its information through a comic book style. It starts off with an anecdote about a flight attendant and her story and goes through the steps it took to mold her anecdotes into a real story. As the article goes on, we learn that they are basically putting together storytellers’ perspectives on structure. It then talks about chronological order for narratives and the role of the hook. It discusses the importance of “taste”. It talks about scenes as building blocks and how to develop one with visual imagery. It then shows how sign posting works on radio so that the listener can follow the flow of the story. Some use reflection to help guide the listener to the moral of the story while some say that is up to the listener and would never interfere with this idea of resolution and how that makes the listener feel. It compares structure to arranging flowers to show how improvisation can be a technique. It then talks about the difficulties they go through when doing a story from imagining all the different paths to take to the doubt and focus it takes. The German forest metaphor describes getting lost to all the choices and then discusses why creative work is so tasking but why its “transformative”.

Personal Example: This article reminds me of a graphic memoir I read for a class called “The Best We Could Do” by Thi Bui. It is structured the same comic book way and gives the story of her life. The book is about how immigration made her feel stuck in two places with her family’s past and tradition as well as moving on for a better future. In class we talked a lot about how she structured it to both give visual imagery and the moral of the story just like the article discussed.

Reading Connection: The novel takes little anecdotes from her life and combines them with the visual aspect as well as insight into the characters thoughts to emphasize how it shaped her. In the example of the flight attendant from the article it says that the story was not the 9/11 anecdotes but how she found meaning in her job. This made me think of the main character because it wasn’t all the stories about her fighting with her mom over traditions or the little moments where she found peace that made her feel stuck in the two places, it was the journey of immigration and going through school to support her new family that did it. The author did this through structuring the scenes chronologically to emphasize on how they built up to the end where it shows how she got to that mindset with some reflection here and there to help put the reader in her shoes and guide them to feel sympathy for her.