Structure no.2: The Wavelet
What Alison Says
A Wavelet structure, as might be easily guessed, is similar to the Wave, in that the arc is its primary structural shape. Unlike the Wave, the Wavelet structure is made up of multiple little Waves, not just one big one. In my notes, I wrote down, Narrative energy in oscillation; a ripple pattern, the Wave shrunk down and repeated.
“I’m more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse. The same epiphanies every week…” (96)
Oscillation, ripples, repetition: an up-and-down from tension to discovery, from change to relapse. A “back-and-forth… form” (99), “an ecology of mini-tensions or micro-dramas,” paired with “flares of illumination” (113).
I took three pages of notes on the Wavelet structure, a lot of which were my own thoughts. So it’s safe to say that I like the concept of the Wavelet. It seems, to me, a very human structure – as Alison noted, you almost never have one epiphany that fixes everything, all at once; usually, the epiphany has to beat itself into your head through habit, repetition, time, and familiarity before it changes anything about your real-life context.
In my notes, I wrote that Alison’s examples of a Wavelet-structured story – “Where I’m Calling From” by Raymond Carver is a big one – tend to impress the monotony and drudgery of life. I felt, while reading, that the structure has a potential for warmth and reassurance, too. I’m not sure if there’s a Ghibli movie that is plotted like this, but I think the atmosphere and attitude of a Ghibli movie could suit a Wavelet story very well: something with an appreciation for small moments and harmless, amusing human vacillations.
If the Wavelet is just a multiplied Wave, then that means there are multiple but equivalent ups and downs, troughs and valleys. That could mean straightforward highs and lows, victories and defeats, but that would be an overly simplistic reduction. Those high and low points could mean any matched set of values: the values in “Where I’m Calling From,” according to Alison, are wet/dry. They could be moods or places or words or times or people or concepts or, really, anything. They don’t even have to be opposites. My first idea (it’s been a while since I read the chapter through, so it might have actually been Alison’s suggestion) was making a Wavelet story that alternated between thematically important colors. Any pair that causes an up-and-down or vacillating atmosphere, like a seesaw story.
What I’m Attempting
Earlier Today
As previously mentioned, I thought about doing a matched pair of colors, since I love color symbolism (see the previous Storycraft exercise). And, since it’s almost Christmas, I considered doing blue and red – holiness and humanity. But that’s kind of common, right? I’d rather do something less expected.
I have an idea for the story to structure like this, but we’ll see if it works out.
Experiment
Story:
You think time travel is a fun way to use your professional life until you’re looking at the two years of theoretical maths and physics classes you’re going to have to take just to get your feet on the ground. Line after line of classes, highlighted a bright neon yellow, until your eyes burn for rereading them. But you do it, you take them, because time travel. You have a poster at home with images from the most iconic moments in history, brand new images that chronologically-displaced journalists took to replace missing or inaccurate or blurred ones. You’ve been updating your list of People To See In Person since you were nine. A massive STEMmy workload isn’t going to be the reason you don’t make it.
+
A massive STEMmy workload might be the reason you won’t make it.
This is your third all-nighter in a month, which is actually not too bad. You’re one of the most well-rested in the class. That’s not saying much, though, and it doesn’t escape your sense of irony, losing time for rest over traveling through time.
This is time travel. Just at the same rate everyone else goes. You have to sit at your desk and work through each dark, bruisey midnight hour the same way night-shift guards do, weary parents do, insomniacs do. At least you’re halfway there.
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The sun comes out after a week of rain, just to shine on your graduation. It warms you straight down to your bones, and you sweat a little under the baggy fabric of your gown, identical to the rest of your class, but it can’t melt away the spring in your step as you cross the stage.
There’s already a job waiting for you once the hats are off and the campus is abandoned for the summer and you can laze your way back to having a sleep schedule. You weren’t at the top of the class but you weren’t at the bottom, either, and your guidance professor said you displayed some of the best lateral thinking she’d ever seen.
The sun scorches your vision golden, and you wonder how many versions of yourself are in the crowd, watching.
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It’s not what you expect, correcting accidental anomalies. There is a round purple light over the door of your bunkroom, like a great flattened grape, and when it’s your turn to fix something – a child tripped in the sixteenth century, a scientist who caught a whiff of dog hair and had an allergic reaction, a bit of trash or glitter that distracted a poetess – it works up to a big, bright aubergine glow.
There are a lot of accident-adjustment engineers who work your shift. The assignments come in slow – steady, but slow. You pick up hobbies, come to sit in your 72-hour-shift bunkroom with a duffel bag full of your current obsession, are always researching new podcasts and experimental bands and audio recordings of plays, sometimes forget to keep an eye on that purple light.
Once, in your second month, it’s been so long since you took care of an accident that you forget, briefly, what the light means. It’s just a pretty, slow, quiet, swelling light on the wall, and it might as well have been glowing for a century.
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The trigonometry of setting things right burns in a delicious way. It’s like flipping a light switch inside your brain.
Your current job: set this bird back where it should have been to spring-load a chain of thought in a certain housewife that would lead to teaching her daughter about a certain pattern of knitting, which will in turn lead to the daughter selling a shawl covered in feathery motifs to a certain passing lord, which will in turn inspire the lord’s wife to study a certain sort of bird, which will in turn—
You could follow the trail, rabbit-holes all the way down, until the still sun sets a million years from this un-moment, but right now you are in a frozen, bright world, each object glittering in a long-past world that never knew it was so fragile.
You follow the specs on your papers, keep an eye on the noonday sun which never moves despite your nerves, and caress the bird’s ebony beak, angling it back onto the fence where it should have been if a careless traveler hadn’t tromped down the wrong path and scared it back into a tree. It has taken, by your count, hours just to guide the bird back to the general six-inch area of the fence. Now comes the fidgety work: the bird must be back in position to fly across the path when the housewife walks on.
It is the most tedious task you have ever been assigned, and you are electric with the thrill of it.
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Coming home always means the dark. Your electric mind winds down, more like a heavy wooden clock than a weightless thing of energy, and you put your duffel aside, weary of the needlecrafts and the little wood carvings and the fourth language you’ve attempted to learn and the novels and the comics and the tinkering.
The interior of your home is a wash of cool, dark colors, tucked away on a neighborhood street that might have been meddled with by people like you a hundred million times and would never know it. It is quiet, sedate, and so shaded by thick trees that sometimes you have to leave the street to feel warm again.
+
You are waist-deep in a river in Greece, pushing a large boulder back into place with a partner you’ve never met before this day. Your partner’s skills lie in the gym; she is far more capable of moving this rock, dislodged by a passing tourist, than you would be by yourself. Your skill is in knowing where, exactly, the rock should be to divert the stream to create a slightly new bed which adjusts the course of a future-present-past road which affects where a new town will be laid out which will change the population of the town which will result in the birth of a child which will result in the death of the mother which will result—
“One more inch,” you say, and your partner, splashing up glitters of golden river water as she shifts against the rock and the riverbed, pushes the rock one more inch.
You step back, wipe sweat from the side of your neck, and check your specs. You are electric again, bright and sunny with the job, with the location, with the knowledge you hold and the power you wield, just because of someone else’s careless mistake.
You are the hero today. You are the one singlehandedly ordering the world back into its proper place, your temporary Atlas grinning at your side, taking a share of the kleos.
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The sun sets and leaves the sky a lonely indigo over your house.
You pass through your door and wonder if the clouds have been unshaped and reshaped today by someone a decade into the future.
You pass through your door and wonder if a tree was planted specifically to build this house for a reason you don’t know yet or a reason that has already passed you by.
You pass through your door and wonder if the place your doorknob came from was ever tampered with by a tourist in another country five years ago and required accident adjustment by someone who will be born in three months.
You pass through your door into your house and a purple light continues to glow somewhere, at the place where you will go to work in four days or the place where you will go to work in four minutes or the place where you will go to work yesterday or deep inside your head where it never stops fading in, fading out, fading in, fading out, rising and cresting like a bruised grape, too big and too slow to ever smother with light or kleos or tedium.
I don’t know how this turned out, to be honest. I finished it five minutes ago and have not nearly enough professional or emotional distance from it to be sure. I’m not going to go over how I wrote it, like I did last time, because I was entirely winging it, so, for the most part, I have no idea how I wrote it, besides typing.
While I don’t know if it’s good, I do think I like it. The color symbolism was, again, anything but subtle, and I’m okay with that, though if I beta’d it (which I might do one day) I would be sure to get feedback on it from a reader’s perspective. Building up mood and even a little bit of character through repetition and contrast was challenging – with a little extra time and a few rounds of editing, I think it would be smoother and more natural. It might take a longer piece, too, or at least a more defined character. This is my first time writing in a second-person voice, so that didn’t make things any easier.
I still like it.
As for the nature of the Wavelet structure, I still think it’s a great concept! It’s good to take a break from ramping up tension to an inevitable point and then dropping it without a chance to revisit the same character(s) post-crisis mode. My usual genre is 95% filled with adventure plots and save-the-world stakes, and, while I don’t know how a Wavelet structure would work in a scifi or fantasy setting – I’ve never read a book like that – it’s a tantalizing project to imagine. If anyone knows of a lowkey, slice-of-life book about, I don’t know, a halfling running an inn and experiencing the low-stakes ups-and-downs of normal life, or even some kind of galaxy-crossing quest that is mostly just the life and times of a friendly space crew, hmu. I’m exceedingly interested.
What do you think? Did my story fit the structure prompt or should I have gone in a different direction? If you were to write a story based, not on rising and falling action, but on repeated matched pairs, what would you write it on? Would you want to read a whole book like this?
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
Random Pattern Generator 