Photo by Regina Mansor on Unsplash
This might not work.
I’m borrowing that line from Seth Godin to help set reasonable expectations because I’m writing about a weird idea I’ve had about how story mimics Fair Isle knitting.
Comparing abstract ideas to concrete objects can be a useful tool of explanation. The problem is that comparison usually relies on familiarity with one object to understand the unfamiliar idea. I’m hopeful that the image above and a video from my former knitting teacher will help you make the connection. If you do, you’ll have a new way to think about story. The more angles from which we can examine something as complex as story, the greater our capacity to understand it and craft stories that matter and readers love.
With those thoughts in mind, let’s talk about Fair Isle knitting. This technique, which comes from the Shetland Islands, enables knitters to create complicated patterns, like the one pictured above, using several colors and standard knit stitches. The knitter creates individual stitches using the appropriate color according to the chart. If they faithfully execute the instructions, they’ll produce the pattern. The unused colors are stranded across the back of the work as you can see in the spot highlighted in this instructional video from Staci Perry of VeryPink Knits. The front of the fabric exhibits the pattern, and the back looks like several strands of yarn kind of bunched together.
How is this like a story? In a story we have lots of threads, the main plot and subplots that include lots of places, characters, objects, and events. In any given scene, we won’t see all of them. We see the characters who are necessary for the scene, but all the others exist somewhere else in the story world. The reader might learn about what other characters are doing, and this allows us to sense that the world beyond the scene doesn’t disappear or grind to a halt while we watch the characters onstage. For example, in chapter 7 of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, we learn that while Jim Hawkins waited at Squire Trelawney’s hall, the squire and Dr. Livesey were making preparations for the trip in other parts of the country.
This idea came to me while reading Ann Cleeves’s Shetland series (Raven Black is book 1). These are what I call community or tapestry stories (see day 56) in which the whole community is altered by the crime and its subsequent resolution. There is a subtle cadence to the frequency with which characters, artifacts, and clues arise across time in the story, like the colors appearing in the Fair Isle kitting pattern.
How might this be useful? To craft a story, writers spend a lot of time on the part that is like the front of the knitted fabric. And that is appropriate because that’s what the reader experiences. But we understand our stories better and write more coherent ones when we take the time to figure out what’s happening on the backside of the fabric to create the pattern we want to show the reader.
This is in part what the process I call narrative cartography helps us to do.
This post is part of a 75-day writing challenge and experiment. From September 9 through November 22, I'll be posting daily thoughts on writing, storytelling, and creativity based on recent readings or reflections. While my intention was to keep them very short—250 to 400 words—I've found that this range doesn't give me enough space to cover these topics adequately. I aim to keep them brief enough to be read quickly, but they will often be longer than 400 words.
At the end of the challenge, I will organize and revise the material with intention. For now, the object is to explore and share.