As I've mentioned, I'm writing what is turning out to be multiple stories - hopefully to appear here someday. The overall story I'm telling (in multiple books) is evolving into a structure where the books are beyond a single protagonist per book. I've been reading some books on story structure, but, mostly they seem to be focused on a single protagonist format. So, I went looking.
I found this post (it begins, and continues for too many words, in my opinion, as more screed than analysis, but, gotta give credit to sources!) which suggests terms like "braid," "tapestry," and "multi-agency" stories. The authors give examples:
Harold Robbins's The Dream Merchants (1949), Alistair Maclean's The Guns of Navarone (1957), Arthur Hailey's Hotel (1965), Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure (1969), Colleen McCulloch's The Thorn Birds (1977), James Michener's Chesapeake (1978), James Clavell's Noble House (1981), Shirley Conran's Lace (1982), and Edward Rutherford's Sarum (1987)? First, they were all bestsellers in their days, books everyone was reading, selling in vast quantities, piled up enticingly in every grocery store and airport bookstall. They had huge readerships. Many became blockbuster movies, reaching millions. And they're all stories of multiple agency, often described on their back covers as "tapestries," to tell us they have lots of threads, that we'll be following lots of characters, whether it's a few days in a luxury hotel, a week in Hong Kong, or millennia in an English village.
They go on to note that such books differ from another kind of multi-agency book, those with a "braid" structure.
These tapestry books were not the kind of multiple third-person point-of-view found today in epic fantasies like George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (1993-present) and Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars (1997-2006), which have clearly marked chapter boundaries, and where each point-of-view character is recurring, with an arc, and the expectation that, by taking up a POV, the author has committed to seeing that character forward to a personal climax of one sort or another. We might call such books a braid structure, with individual strong strands, each thick and significant. Frequently in braid books, one or two characters/strands still have protagonismos (the plot waits for them) while others support, but all of them have arcs, and conventions.
["Protagonismos" is a word coined by one of the authors to means "the kind of person stories happen to," but used in this post with the added meaning of "one special person has the power to save the day, make the difference, solve the problem, and change everything."]
So, an observation and two questions.
Observation: It seems to me that "The Swarm Universe" on SOL has evolved into a tapestry story with multiple characters acting to shape the overall story in some fashion. In contrast, though I haven't read as many of the Naked in School stories, I don't think that one has. Lots of stories of people going through the experience, but not as much of them creating an overall world and story, perhaps because so few hints of the bigger structure were offered in the seminal story, or perhaps because no one took Thinking Horndog's role to guide the "canon."
Two Questions:
1. Are there other examples of "tapestry" or "braid" story structures on SOL?
2. Does anyone know of any good resources on how to think about the structure of such stories?
